The Essential Harlem Detectives: A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, The Crazy Kill, Cotton Comes To Harlem [Hardcover]

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 lã3