Chester Himes

Grave Digger Jones And Coffin Ed Johnson Books
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Chester Himes was a serious novelist who happened to write mysteries. His series of books about Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson stand among the greatest accomplishments of mystery and detective fiction. Small wonder he was one of the first authors reprinted in the Vintage Crime series, along with Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain.

Himes first came to national attention while in prison for armed robbery. His short works began appearing in Esquire and other magazines, with only his inmate number as a byline. Later came freedom and relatively mainstream novels like If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade. But eventually his books stopped selling. In 1957 he fled America's racism for Paris, where his work was well known, and wrote a detective novel at the suggestion of his editor. This was the first Grave Digger and Coffin Ed book, and it won France's highest award for crime fiction, the Grand Prix de Litterature Policier.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed patrol a surreal, fun-house-mirror reflection of Harlem for the New York City police department. While the fantasy world of these novel has echoes in other works (notably some sections of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man), Himes went over the top farther than anyone else. The books are bold and violent, full of oddball characters and sudden, bloody ends. Extreme and unrealistic though they were, these books also served as social commentary and criticism, revealing how the residents of Harlem were deformed by the pressures of institutionalized racism. Himes was not just a major crime writer, but a major writer, period.