'The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler' Sunday Times
Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri in 1909 and grew up in Cleveland. Aged 19 he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to 25 years in jail. In jail he began to write short stories, some of which were published in Esquire magazine. Upon release he took a variety of jobs, from working in a California shipyard to journalism to script-writing, while continuing to write fiction. He later moved to Paris where he was commissioned to write the first of his Harlem detective novels, A Rage in Harlem, which won the 1957 Grand Prix du Roman Policier. In 1969 Himes moved to Spain, where he died in 1984.
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.
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.
A fantasia with a hard brilliant core
*Evening Standard*
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.
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
That he could channel this pain and misery into some of the
greatest crime novels ever written is a testament to his skill as a
writer and his spirit as a man. If this is the first Chester Himes
novel you will read then, believe me, you are in for a treat.
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