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Cotton Comes to Harlem

A Grave Digger & Coffin Ed Novel

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Cotton Comes to Harlem

By: Chester Himes
Narrated by: Dion Graham
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About this listen

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 everyone wants to get his hands on.

With Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones on everyone's trail and piecing together the complexity of the scheme, Cotton Comes to Harlem (made into a film in 1970) is one of Himes's hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers.

More mayhem? Listen to another Grave Digger & Coffin Ed Novel.©1965 Chester Himes; copyright renewed 1993 by Lesley Himes (P)2011 Audible, Inc. African American Modern Detectives Mystery Private Investigators Suspense Thriller & Suspense Detective Fiction

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Critic reviews

"The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler.... These books have lasting value - as thrillers, as streetwise documentaries, as chapters of black writing at its ribald and unaffected best. On every level they are simply - or rather not so simply, terrific." ( The Sunday Times, London)
All stars
Most relevant
While not strictly a "noir" era novel, set as it is in the sixties, the novel has the dark, murky, gritty, and almost dirty, feel of the classic "noir" novels of the forties. It is closer to a black version of the Dashiell Hammett novels than it is the Raymond Chandler novels, and l always had a slight preference for Chandler. That is merely an observation, not a criticism. The book is wonderfully written and beautifully read. Chester Himes is wildly descriptive in his language, often producing laugh-out-loud moments even as he describes quite brutal scenarios. Dion Graham is more than a match for the sometimes foul language he is reading, where his quietly seductive voice sometimes inures you to the violence he is describing which makes the impact of the story even greater. I've already bought more novels on the strength of this book.

Homes and Graham - a match made in heaven.

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