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The Big Gold Dream

A novel

Part of Harlem Detectives

Author Chester Himes

Paperback

$17.00 US

Knopf | Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

5.16"W x 7.98"H x 0.55"D | 7 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Feb 13, 2024 | 192 Pages | 9780593686096

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In this page-turning installment of the classic Harlem Detectives series, a woman dies at a con man's religious street revival, and her massive, secret pile of cash vanishes

The charismatic con man Sweet Prophet is delivering an electrifying street sermon when Alberta Wright, a true believer who dreams of pies bursting with hundred-dollar bills, drops dead. Her partner rushes home only to find her apartment looted—and a stash of cash she was trying to keep a secret long gone. But that kind of money can’t be kept secret. It isn’t in the thief’s hands long before he gets knocked off. And then the killer faces lethal competition of his own. As the missing pile of money changes hands, it leaves behind a string of cold-blooded murders that shows no sign of slowing down. Detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones must move fast to stop the killings in this gripping crime thriller from a master of the genre.

Chester (Bomar) Himes began his writing career while serving in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery from 1929 - 1936. His account of the horrific 1930 Penitentiary fire that killed over three hundred men appeared in Esquire in 1932 and from this Himes was able to get other work published. From his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Himes dealt with the social and psychological repercussions of being black in a white-dominated society. Beginning in 1953, Himes moved to Europe, where he lived as an expatriate in France and Spain. There, he met and was strongly influenced by Richard Wright. It was in France that he began his best-known series of crime novels---including Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) and Run Man Run (1966)---featuring two Harlem policemen Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. As with Himes's earlier work, the series is characterized by violence and grisly, sardonic humor. View titles by Chester Himes

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Praise for Chester Himes's Harlem Detectives series

“[Himes wrote] some of the most exciting—and comic— crime novels ever written.” —The Washington Post

“Pungent, violent, and mordantly funny.” —Newsweek

“[Himes’s] dazzling prose, sidesplitting wit, and moral complexity are all his own.” —Hernan Diaz

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