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Plan B

A novel

Part of Harlem Detectives

Author Chester Himes

Paperback

$17.00 US

Knopf | Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

5.16"W x 8"H x 0.57"D | 7 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Feb 13, 2024 | 192 Pages | 9780593686133

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The final, posthumous installment of the ground-breaking Harlem Detectives series: a novel of explosive, apocalyptic violence, and a startling vision of the effects of racism in America

Tomsson Black is a revolutionary planning to overthrow white society. Generation after generation of Tomsson’s family have faced insidious, racist persecution, and Tomsson’s own experience has been no exception. But he was born a fighter, and he’s taking matters into his own hands with a final, cataclysmic act of vengeance.

Around the time that acclaimed author Chester Himes died in 1984, it was rumored that another Harlem Detectives novel existed, one that remained unfinished. When the manuscript was found, edited, and published first in France, it was widely regarded as a masterwork. Completed from the author’s notes by two editors, Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, who also introduce this edition, Plan B is an excoriating statement about the deep, corrosive effects of racism and an apocalyptic vision of Black rebellion that thrusts Himes’s cherished detectives directly into the fray.

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

“One of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. . . . A quirky American genius.” —Walter Mosley

“His implacable drive to examine the Black experience, the disingenuous nature of the American Dream, the reality of pain and sorrow and what it does to the soul, that is what makes [Himes] the bard of the existential African American psyche.” —S. A. Cosby

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