The Real Cool Killers
  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141967738
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192

The Real Cool Killers

Formats & editions
Paperback
2 Jul 2021
EBook
1 Aug 2011
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'One of the towering figures of the black literary tradition.' Henry Louis Gates, Jr

The night's over for Ulysses Galen. It started going bad for the big Greek when a knife was drawn, then there was an axe, then he was being chased and shot at. Now Galen is lying dead in the middle of a Harlem street. But the night's just beginning for detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Because they have a smoking gun but it couldn't have killed Galen, and they had a suspect but a gang called the Real Cool Moslems took him. And as patrol cars and search teams descend on the neighbourhood, their case threatens to take a turn for the personal.

The Real Cool Killers is loaded with grizzly comedy and with all the raucous, threatening energy of the streets it's set on.
  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141967738
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192
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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

All God's Chillun Got Pride
Yesterday Will Make You Cry
If He Hollers, Let Him Go
The Crazy Kill
The Big Gold Dream
Blind Man with a Pistol
The Essential Harlem Detectives
See all

Praise for The Real Cool Killers

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

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

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

Hieronymus Bosch meets Miles Davis

The New York 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
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