Cotton Comes to Harlem Synopsis
A preacher called Deke O'Malley's been selling false hope: the promise of a glorious new life in Africa for just $1,000 a family. But when thieves with machine guns steal the proceeds - and send one man's brain matter flying - the con is up. Now Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed mean to bring the good people of Harlem back their $87,000, however many corpses they have to climb over to get it.
Cotton Comes to Harlem is a non-stop ride, with violence, sex, double-crosses, and the two baddest detectives ever to wear a badge in Harlem.
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Chester Himes Press Reviews
The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler. - Sunday Times
A bawdy, brazen rollercoaster of a novel . . . the wildest. - New York Times Book Review
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. -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr. A fantasia with a hard brilliant core. - Evening Standard
A fine crime writer ... in a vein of sheer toughness very much his own. - The Times
The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler - Sunday Times
A bawdy, brazen rollercoaster of a novel . . . the wildest - 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
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. He belongs with those great demented realists ... whose writing pitilessly exposes the ridiculousness of the human condition Hieronymus Bosch meets Miles Davis - The New York 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. -
