Harlem Detective Series - Chester Himes

Chester Bomar Himes was born July 29, 1909, into a middle class, well-educated family in Jefferson City, Missouri. He died Nov. 12, 1984 in Moraira, Spain. In general, Himes could be called an African-American writer whose novels reflect encounters with racism while describing truths his readers were unready to hear. Himes' literary genius went relatively unnoticed within the U.S. As an expatriate in Paris, he published a series of black detective novels. A contemporary of Richard Wright - the Negro writer of the times - and of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes was known for more angry fire than his celebrated colleagues, and he wrote about black protagonists doomed by white racism and self-hate.

A Rage in Harlem: (#1)
For love of fine, wily Imabelle, hapless Jackson loses his life savings to a con man who knows the secret of turning ten-dollar bills into hundreds and steals from his boss, only to lose the stolen money at a crap table. Luckily for him, Jackson has a savvy twin brother, Goldy, who, disguised as a Sister of Mercy, earns a living by selling tickets to Heaven in Harlem. Now for the big payback...

The Crazy Kill: (#2)
Love and jealousy erupt into violence in The Crazy Kill, a classic thriller in Chester Himes's trailblazing Harlem Detectives series. One early morning, Reverend Short is watching from his bedroom window as the A&P across the street is robbed. As he tries to see the thief get away, the opium-addicted preacher leans too far and falls out--but he is unscathed, thanks to an enormous bread basket outside the bakery downstairs. As the crowd gathers to see what happened, a shocking discovery is made. There is another body in the bread basket, and Valentine Haines is dead, really dead. It's up to Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to find out who murdered Val.

The Real Cool Killers: (#3)
When Harlemites set about each other with knives, it's an everyday kind of happening. But when a white man is shot dead in a Harlem street one steamy evening it means trouble, big trouble. Plenty of people had motives for killing Galen, a big Greek with too much money and too great a liking for young black girls. But there are complications - like Sonny, high on hash, found standing over the body with a gun in his hand that fires only blanks, a street gang called the Moslems, a disappearing suspect, and the fact that Coffin Ed's own daughter is up to her pretty neck in the whole explosive situation.

All Shot Up: (#4)
The shocking and explosive hardboiled classic. From murderers to prostitutes, corrupt politicians and racist white detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, Harlem's toughest detective duo, must carry the day against an absurdist world of racism and class warfare.

The Big Gold Dream: (#5)
An explosive and shocking hardboiled classic that explores the shadowy underbelly of New York as a urban civil war erupts on the side streets of Harlem, pitting murderers and prostitutes against corrupt politicians and racist white detectives. Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson attempt to maintain some kind of order in the neighborhood they have sworn to protect and in a world gone mad around them.

The Heat's On: (#6)
Detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones are in the hot seat in one of the most chaotic, brutally funny novels in Chester Himes’s groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. From the start, nothing goes right for Coffin Ed and Gravedigger. They are disciplined for use of excessive force. Gravedigger is shot and his death announced in a hoax radio bulletin. Bodies pile up faster than Coffin Ed and Gravedigger can run. Yet, try as they might, they always seem to be one hot step behind the cause of all the mayhem -- three million dollars’ worth of heroin and a giant albino called Pinky.

Cotton Comes to Harlem: (#7)
Flim-flam man Deke O’Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta’s state penitentiary than he’s back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement, he’s counting on a big Harlem rally to produce a massive collection -- for his own private charity. But the take is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. As NYPD detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, piece together the complexity of the scheme, we are treated to Himes’s brand of hard-boiled crime fiction at its very best.

Blind Man With A Pistol: (#8)
New York is sweltering in the summer heat, and Harlem is close to the boiling point. To Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, at times it seems as if the whole world has gone mad. Trying, as always, to keep some kind of peace -- their legendary nickel-plated Colts very much in evidence -- Coffin Ed and Gravedigger find themselves pursuing two completely different cases through a maze of knifings, beatings, and riots that threaten to tear Harlem apart.