Chester Himes

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Best known for his hardboiled Harlem Detective series, Chester Himes was also a superb literary writer, beginning his creative life by writing short stories in the 1930s while serving jail time for armed robbery. Selected here are some of his best stories - from a satirical tale about a student bet that purportedly disproves the existence of racism in Los Angeles to a chilling drama in which a snake invades a family home.

'A stark depiction of the “alligator pond” of prison life … Rage tempered with compassion … [its] emotional core continues to smoulder’ The New York Times Book ReviewThrill-seeking teenager Jimmy Monroe is serving a twenty-year sentence for robbery in the state penitentiary, where terror and chaos reign, corrupt guards inflict casual violence, and men try to preserve their dignity amid isolation and inhumanity. When a fire breaks out, setting hell and mayhem loose, it seems Jimmy’s entire world is unravelling. But as he develops a tender relationship with fellow convict Rico, hope begins to glimmer, and, through his eventual foray into writing, something resembling redemption. Originally published in 1952, in an expurgated version, as Cast the First Stone, Yesterday Will Make You Cry draws on Chester Himes’s own youthful experiences of imprisonment to face down the scouring truths of harm and love. ‘Himes at the top of his game … what an amazing book it is’ Melvin Van Peebles

A classic thriller from the Harlem Detective series, where love, jealousy and many-peopled mayhem abound Big Joe Pullen is dead and his wake is getting boozy. When the opium-addicted Reverend Short falls out of a window trying to see a thief fleeing the robbed store opposite, his life is saved when he lands in a bread basket, cushioned by the corpse of Valentine Haines. It’s up to detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to find out who stabbed Valentine – though no one at the wake is keen to say much to the police. Shot through with dry, dark humour, this is Chester Himes at his hardboiled noir best.

The final novel in the trailblazing Harlem Detective series, set in a New York City at boiling point Bawdy and tough-talking, wickedly funny and wantonly sensual, Blind Man With a Pistol is a surreal joyride through Harlem in a heatwave. Detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are side-tracked from investigating a series of organised race riots when a white man with a cut throat and no trousers falls dead at their feet. Told in a thrilling chaos of impressions over the course of one day and one night, this case will take Jones and Johnson into the pounding heart of Harlem.

A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin - and every bit their equal - Chester Himes was the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories and essays, as well as the classic crime fiction series for which he is best known, featuring detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones. Himes wrote nine novels in the Harlem Detectives series, and in these four popular, accomplished instalments, his cold, wise-cracking sleuths are thrown into a brutal, murderous world peopled with conniving con men, gut-toting gangsters and opium-smoking preachers. Himes's vision of Harlem's criminal underground, enriched by deft plotting and scintillating dialogue, is both riotous entertainment and penetrating enquiry into the fraught tensions of race in postwar America.