A Rage in Harlem
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  • Published: 15 April 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241524855
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

A Rage in Harlem

Formats & editions
Paperback
2 Jul 2021
EBook
1 Aug 2011
Audiobook
15 Apr 2021
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'The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler' Sunday Times

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 featuring 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.

With a new Introduction by Luc Sante.
  • Published: 15 April 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241524855
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
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About the author

Chester Himes

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 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 Série Noire to write the first of his Harlem detective novels, La reine des pommes/A Rage in Harlem, which won the 1957 Grand Prix du Roman Policier. In 1969 Himes moved to Spain, where he died in 1984.

portrait photo of Chester Himes

Also by Chester Himes

The Essential Harlem Detectives
Crime Novels: Four Classic Thrillers 1964-1969 (LOA #371)
The Real Cool Killers
Cotton Comes to Harlem
The Heat's On
All Shot Up
See all

Praise for A Rage in Harlem

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.

John Edgar Wideman

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 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.

Jonathan Lethem

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

Will Self

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.

Noel "Razor" Smith