The Real Cool Killers
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group · Print & ebook · November 28, 1988
A Mystery pick for readers exploring The Real Cool Killers.
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- Who it’s for
- A volatile Harlem case makes hard-boiled detection feel provocative, tangled, and unpredictable.
- Themes
- Murder and suspicion, Gang conflict, Family entanglement
- Genres
- Black Mystery, Hard-Boiled Mystery, Black Urban Fiction
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Start with this bookAbout this book
The book that Walter Kirn said was like “Hieronymus Bosch meets Miles Davis" (The New York Times). • Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones get personally involved in a gang dispute in one of the most provocative cases in Chester Himes’s groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. Many people had reasons for killing Ulysses Galen, a big Greek with too much money and too great a liking for young black girls.
Continue reading
But there are complications—like Sonny, found standing over the body, high on hash, with a gun in his hand that fires only blanks; a gang called the Moslems; a disappearing suspect; and the fact that Coffin Ed’s daughter is up to her pretty little neck in the whole explosive business.
Harlem's Hard Edge
A volatile Harlem case makes hard-boiled detection feel provocative, tangled, and unpredictable.
Come here for
- Hard-boiled sleuthing tangled with gang conflict and personal stakes
- A provocative case with complications at every turn
Expect
- Coffin Ed and Grave Digger drawn into a gang dispute
- A suspect with a blank-firing gun, a disappearing lead, and family entanglements
Where it sits
| Hard-Boiled Mystery | 87% |
|---|---|
| Black Mystery | 54% |
| Black Urban Fiction | 30% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Hard-Boiled Mystery
- Private Eye Fiction
- Black Mystery
- Authors
- Chester Himes
- Publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Published
- November 28, 1988
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Murder and suspicion · Gang conflict · Family entanglement
- Reading lane
- Hard-Boiled Mystery