Description

‘The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler’ Sunday Times

Detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones have lost two criminals. Pinky ran off – but it shouldn’t be hard to track down a giant albino in Harlem. Jake the drug dealer, though, isn’t coming back – he died after Grave Digger punched him in the stomach. And his death might cost them both their badges. Unless they can track down the cause of all this mayhem – like the African with his throat slit and the dog the size of a lion with an open head wound.

Chester Himes’s hardboiled tales of Harlem have a barely contained chaos and a visceral, macabre edge all their own.

Publisher Review

The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler * Sunday Times * Outrageous, shocking, wonderful * New York Times Book Review * Himes wrote spectacularly successful entertainments, filled with gems of descriptive writing, plots that barely sidestep chaos, characters surreal, grotesque, comic, hip, Harlem recollected as a place that can make you laugh, cry, shudder. -- John Edgar Wideman Chester Himes is one of the towering figures of the black literary tradition. His command of nuances of character and dynamics of plot is preeminent among writers of crime fiction. He is a master craftsman. -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr. A fine crime writer of Chandlerian subtlety though in a vein of sheer toughness very much his own * The Times * Chester Himes is the great lost crime writer, as well a great American dissident novelist per se, and an essential witness to his times. Every one of his beyond-cool Harlem novels is cherished by every reader who finds it. -- Jonathan Letham Hieronymus Bosch meets Miles Davis * The New York Times * He belongs with those great demented realists ... whose writing pitilessly exposes the ridiculousness of the human condition -- Will Self