The Heat's On
  • Published: 2 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241521106
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

The Heat's On

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

Detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones have lost two criminals. Pinky ran off - but it shouldn't be hard to track down a giant albino in Harlem. Jake the drug dealer, though, isn't coming back - he died after Grave Digger punched him in the stomach. And his death might cost them both their badges. Unless they can track down the cause of all this mayhem - like the African with his throat slit and the dog the size of a lion with an open head wound.

Chester Himes's hardboiled tales of Harlem have a barely contained chaos and a visceral, macabre edge all their own.
  • Published: 2 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241521106
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99
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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)
Cotton Comes to Harlem
A Rage in Harlem
The Real Cool Killers
All Shot Up
See all

Praise for The Heat's On

The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler

Sunday Times

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 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 Letham

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