A dark and witty work of hardboiled detective fiction set in the mean
streets of New York, Chester Himes's A Rage in Harlem includes an
introduction by Luc Sante in Penguin Modern Classics. 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 to feature 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. Chester Himes (1909-1984) was born
in Jefferson City, Missouri and grew up in Cleveland. Aged 19 he was
arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to 20 to 25 years in jail.
In jail he began to write short stories, some of which were published
in Esquire. 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 by La
Serie Noire to write the first of his Harlem detective novels, A Rage in
Harlem, which won the 1957 Grand Prix du Roman Policier, and was
adapted into a 1991 film starring Forest Whitaker and Danny Glover.
A Rage in Harlem - Chester Himes
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