Cotton Comes to Harlem -- Chester Himes

A classic entry in Chester Himes's trailblazing Harlem Detectives series, Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of his hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers.

Flim-flam man Deke O'Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta's state penitentiary than he's back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement, he's counting on a big Harlem rally to produce a massive collection--for his own private charity. But the take is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. As NYPD detectives "Coffin Ed" Johnson and "Grave Digger" Jones piece together the complexity of the scheme, we are treated to Himes's brand of hard-boiled crime fiction at its very best.

Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Published: 11/28/1988
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.33lbs
Size: 8.06h x 5.30w x 0.44d
ISBN: 9780394759999

Review Citation(s):
Newsweek 07/13/2009 pg. 49

About the Author

Chester Himes was born in Missouri in 1909. He began writing while serving a prison sentence for a jewel theft and published just short of twenty novels before his death in 1984. Among his best-known thrillers are Blind Man with a Pistol, Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Crazy Kill, A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, and The Heat's On, all available from Vintage.