What I've been reading lately

I've been a fan of detective/mystery fiction for a long time. I love the classic authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and the current writers like Robert Crais and James Lee Burke. So it was a pleasant surprise to come across a "new" author--Chester Himes, an African-American expatriate writer. The thing is, Himes was writing in the 1950s and 60s, so he isn't exactly a new author, but he is to me. And he's great. I read his book, "Cotton Comes to Harlem" (1965). It's very urban and African-American centric, successfully capturing the times and the attitudes. The two protagonists are Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, two police detectives that work the Harlem beat. In the book, they are up against con-men, Southern white racists, murder, racial politics, and a missing bale of cotton. There aren't many, if any, hardboiled detectives that can match this pair. Tough as forged steel, deadly as a hair-trigger .45--they are more than a match for all the bad guys they go up against. The characters were vivid, the dialog was colorful, the plotting was tight, and action was unsparingly realistic. After reading this book, it now comes to the top of my list of great detective novels, right up there with "Farewell, My Lovely" and "The Maltese Falcon." It really is that good.

As a side note, "Cotton Comes to Harlem" was made into a film in 1970, starring Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques, and directed by Ossie Davis. It was one of the first so-called blaxpoitation films, and is actually a very entertaining movie. If you can find it, watch it, but also try to find a copy of the book. The book is better.