LOUISE WELSH
COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, CHESTER HIMES
Bizarre, gritty and challenging, the novel is set in the mid-60s and opens at a Back to Africa rally. It stars two cops, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, who are both quick on the trigger. Sex, violence and illegality abound.
The novel documents the poverty and inequalities experienced by black people in America. Himes, whose grandparents on both sides had been enslaved, wrote of his detective fiction: “I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.”