Street Fiction: Urban Fiction Author Interviews, Urban Fiction News, and Urban Fiction Book Reviews » Himes, Chester

The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes

Daniel — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 10:52:22 +0000

Outside the apartment where a wake is going on, the manager of the A & P across the street is robbed. Reverend Short, a storefront preacher addicted to opium and brandy, is watching from a bedroom window in the flat. He leans too far and falls out; a bread basket, sitting outside the bakery below, saves him. Back inside, he says he sees a vision of a dead man. Outside, in the very basket Short landed in, lies the body of Valentine Haines. Who murdered Val? It is up to Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to find out.

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RUN MAN RUN by Chester Himes

Daniel — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 04:44:20 +0000

The author of Cotton Comes to Harlem offers here his most dramatic and thrilling novel. A white undercover cop vents his rage and starts a cycle of violence from which there is no escape.

Walker, one of New York’s embittered policemen, is vicious when drunk. Staggering into a restaurant on a freezing day, he kills two black workers “because they were there,” and pursues a third who witnessed the murders in one of the most suspenseful chases ever put on paper.

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COTTON COMES TO HARLEM by Chester Himes

Daniel — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:58:11 +0000

Black 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 the big Harlem rally to produce a big collection – for his own private charity. But the take – $87,000 is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everybody wants to get his hands on. With Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones on everyone’s trail and piercing together the complexity of the scheme, Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of Hime’s hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers.

Check out all of the classic street lit by Chester Himes

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CAST THE FIRST STONE by Chester Himes

Daniel — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:26:18 +0000

James Monroe was young and educated. He stood before the judge and tried to look humble and heard himself sentenced to twenty years in prison….

Here is Chester Himes’s great novel of prison life. It is a story both of brutal debasement and of the slow growth of maturity and compassion. It is a vivid re-creation of a perverse society with its own rules, its own taboos, its own virtues and grotesque vices. And strangely enough, it is also a love story – a love between two men…

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“Old School” October: The Pioneers of Urban Fiction and Street Lit

Daniel — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 23:07:06 +0000

A few weeks ago, I decided I was going to devote all of October to reading the Godfathers (or Grandfathers) of Street Fiction. Authors like Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim, and Chester Himes. Street fiction might not exist if these three authors, and a few others, hadn’t paved the way for the street lit explosion today. In the late 90′s, Norton reprinted a number of urban fiction classics and called them Old School Books:

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