The Real Cool Killers

The Real Cool Killers
Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2011-05-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141967730

The night's over for Ulysses Galen. It started going bad for the big Greek when a knife was drawn, then there was an axe, then he was being chased and shot at. Now Galen is lying dead in the middle of a Harlem street. But the night's just beginning for detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Because they have a smoking gun but it couldn't have killed Galen, and they had a suspect but a gang called the Real Cool Moslems took him. And as patrol cars and search teams descend on the neighbourhood, their case threatens to take a turn for the personal. The Real Cool Killers is loaded with grizzly comedy and with all the raucous, threatening energy of the streets it's set on.

The Real Cool Killers

The Real Cool Killers
Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2011-07-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307803279

The book that Walter Kirn said was like “Hieronymus Bosch meets Miles Davis" (The New York Times). • Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones get personally involved in a gang dispute in one of the most provocative cases in Chester Himes’s groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. Many people had reasons for killing Ulysses Galen, a big Greek with too much money and too great a liking for young black girls. But there are complications—like Sonny, found standing over the body, high on hash, with a gun in his hand that fires only blanks; a gang called the Moslems; a disappearing suspect; and the fact that Coffin Ed’s daughter is up to her pretty little neck in the whole explosive business.

Yesterday Will Make You Cry

Yesterday Will Make You Cry
Author: Chester B. Himes
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1999
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780393318296

"There could not be a fitter time or place for the publication of this great prison novel than today's United States." --H. Bruce Franklin, The Nation

Cotton Comes to Harlem

Cotton Comes to Harlem
Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2011-08-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307803244

From “the best writer of mayhem yarns since Raymond Chandler” (San Francisco Chronicle) comes a hard-hitting, entertaining entry in the trailblazing Harlem Detectives series about two NYPD detectives who must piece together the clues of the scam of a lifetime. Flim-flam man Deke O’Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta’s state penitentiary than he’s back on the streets working a big scam. 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 “Grave Digger” Jones face the complexity of the scheme, we are treated to Himes’s brand of hard-boiled crime fiction at its very best.

Pinktoes

Pinktoes
Author: Chester B. Himes
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1996
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780878058877

A sex farce deemed to be Himes's most daring work of fiction

A Rage in Harlem

A Rage in Harlem
Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2011-05-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141967714

'The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler' Sunday Times Jackson's woman has found him a foolproof way to make money - a technique for turning ten dollar bills into hundreds. But when the scheme somehow fails, Jackson is left broke, wanted by the police and desperately racing to get back both his money and his loving Imabelle. The first of Chester Himes's novels featuring the hardboiled Harlem detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, A Rage in Harlem has swagger, brutal humour, lurid violence, a hearse loaded with gold and a conman dressed as a Sister of Mercy. With an Introduction by Luc Sante

Run Man Run

Run Man Run
Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2024-10-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593686721

In this knockout standalone crime novel from the acclaimed author of the Harlem Detectives series, a white cop’s murderous outburst leads to a pulse-pounding chase to silence a witness It’s early morning in New York, a few days after Christmas and bitter cold. A white detective named Walker accuses the black workers at a luncheonette on 37th Street and Fifth Avenue of stealing his car. He’s been drinking—a lot. By the time he corners Fat Sam in the refrigeration room, he’s raving mad, and his .32-caliber revolver goes off. But who would believe it was an accident? Two other men work in the luncheonette, and in his fuming, psychotic state, Walker is determined to take out these witnesses. One of them, Luke, he kills in cold blood. But the other, Jimmy, gets away by the skin of his teeth. As Jimmy tries to stay one step ahead and desperately pleads with the authorities that the killer is on the force, Walker closes in until the chase culminates in an explosive conclusion.

The Heat's On

The Heat's On
Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2011-08-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307803252

Detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones are in the hot seat in one of the most chaotic, brutally funny novels in the groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. • "A rattlingly good action melodrama spiced with a maximum of humor and a minimum of self-consciousness." —The New York Times From the start, nothing goes right for Coffin Ed and Grave Digger. They are disciplined for use of excessive force. Grave Digger is shot and his death announced in a hoax radio bulletin. Bodies pile up faster than Coffin Ed and Grave Digger 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.

Blind Man with a Pistol

Blind Man with a Pistol
Author: Chester B. Himes
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1969
Genre: African American police
ISBN:

New York is sweltering in the summer heat, and Harlem is close to the boiling point. To Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger 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 Grave Digger find themselves pursuing two completely different cases through a maze of knifings, beatings, and riots that threaten to tear Harlem apart.