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  • A Rage in Harlem See large image

    A Rage in Harlem (Vintage Crime) (Paperback) By (author) Chester Himes

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    Short Description for A Rage in HarlemFor the love of Imabelle, Jackson loses his life savings to a con man, steals from his boss, and loses the stolen money at the crap table. A Chester Himes' classic.
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    A Rage in Harlem3

    Mark Thwaite Chester Himes' first book If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) was written when he was in jail for armed robbery. Several books later, and still not receiving the recognition he rightfully deserved, Himes moved to France where he met the editor of Gallimard's famous Serie Noire, Marcel Duhamel. La Reine des Pommes, later A Rage in Harlem, went on to win the prestigious Grand Prix de la Litterature Policiere (the first time it was won by a non-French author) and Himes began winning the acclaim and bestseller status he lacked back home in the US. He went on to write eighteen novels, eight in The Harlem Cycle all containing the wonderful detective duo of Coffin Ed and Grave Digger. A Rage in Harlem keeps Ed and Grave Digger very much in the background and focuses instead on Jackson. An ingenue and a square, Jackson can't see through a scam purporting to turn ten dollar bills into one hundred dollar bills, and he can't see through Isabelle - his impossibly attractive but far from innocent girlfriend. Losing all his savings Jackson is forced to steal from the safe at the undertakers where he works and forced to gamble this 'borrowed' money playing on the crap tables. An ineluctable cycle of chaos and crime ensues. Himes' writing is, with the help of James Sallis' excellent biography, rightly being reassessed. A massively important voice, he justifies Sallis' assertion that within edge literature the huge talent and formidable intellect of a skilled craftsman can work with and against the limitations of the genre to produce something that supercedes its normally safe content without exploding its form. Himes shows Jackson, a resolutely Christian man forced, after a stupid error of judgement, into dangerous criminality, and he shows the paradoxical position of Ed and Grave Digger attempting to seek justice for their people from within the very system that forces them into criminality. by Mark Thwaite

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