The Essential Harlem Detectives

A one-volume selection of four essential installments in the legendary Harlem Detectives series—a blistering, groundbreaking satire of Harlem's criminal underworld—by master crime writer Chester Himes

A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin—and every bit their equal—Chester Himes is the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories, essays, as well as the classic crime fiction series for which he is best known, featuring detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones.

Himes authored nine novels in the Harlem Detectives series, and in these four popular, accomplished installments, his cold, wise-cracking sleuths are thrown into a brutal, murderous world, full of conniving con men, gun-toting gansters, and opium-smoking preachers. Himes's vision of Harlem's criminal underground is both riotous entertainment, enriched by his deflty plotted mysteries and scintillating dialogue, and a penetrating look into the fraught tensions of race in postwar America.

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.