The Essential Harlem Detectives

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The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A one-volume selection of four novels in the legendary detective series—blistering, groundbreaking capers set in Harlem’s criminal underworld—by master crime writer Chester Himes. With an introduction by New York Times bestselling author S.A. Cosby.

“[Himes] put a spin on crime fiction—emphasizing urban atmosphere, street smarts, and uptown carryings-on—unlike anything the genre had previously seen.” —The Boston Globe

“Himes’s Harlem saga vies with the novels of David Goodis and Jim Thompson as the inescapable achievement of postwar American crime fiction.” —The New York Times

“His implacable drive to examine the Black experience, the disingenuous nature of the American Dream, the reality of pain and sorrow and what it does to the soul, that is what makes [Himes] the bard of the existential African American psyche.” —S.A. Cosby, from his Introduction

Here in one volume is an exceptional selection from Chester Himes’s acclaimed Harlem Detectives series. Winner of France’s prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and lauded by Jean Cocteau as a “prodigious masterpiece,” A Rage in Harlem introduces detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson in a searing escapade. In The Real Cool Killers, the duo investigates a shooting and discovers an unsettling personal connection. In The Crazy Kill, a man is found in a breadbasket, stabbed to death, leaving Himes’s detectives to find out who among the many suspects did it. And in Cotton Comes to Harlem, the brazen robbery of a notorious con man running a back-to-Africa scam sets off a hunt for a bale of Southern cotton. These masterful novels exhibit Himes’s evocative, baroque descriptions of Black life in Harlem and his famously blistering social commentary. 

Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author’s life and times.

“The best writer of mayhem yarns since Raymond Chandler.” —San Francisco Chronicle

CHESTER HIMES began his writing career in 1932 while serving in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery. In 1953, Himes moved to Europe, and it was in France that he began his popular series of crime novels featuring two Harlem policemen. In 1958, he won France’s prestigious Grand Priz de Littérature Policère. He died in Spain in 1984.

S. A. COSBY is the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of All the Sinners Bleed, Razorblade Tears, and Blacktop Wasteland, the last of which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was named a best book of the year by NPR, The Guardian, and Library Journal, among others.DE

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