Cotton Comes To Harlem by Himes Chester

Cotton Comes to Harlem is the sixth and best known of Chester Himes’ Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson Mysteries. It was later adapted into a film starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, and Redd Foxx, that touted Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed as “Two Detectives Only a Mother Could Love.” When a con-man rigs the collection of a Back-To-Africa rally, money is hi-jacked by white gunman and hidden in a cotton bale. That bale becomes the center of the investigation, set against the backdrop of 1960s Harlem.

Chester Himes was born in Missouri in 1909. He began writing while serving a prison sentence for a jewel theft and published just short of twenty novels before his death in 1984. Among his best-known thrillers are Blind Man with a Pistol, Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Crazy Kill, A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, and The Heat's On.

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Collecting Cotton Comes To Harlem

Cotton Comes to Harlem is the sixth and best known of Chester Himes’ Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson Mysteries. It was later adapted into a film starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, and Redd Foxx, that touted Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed as “Two Detectives Only a Mother Could Love.” When a con-man rigs the collection of a Back-To-Africa rally, money is hi-jacked by white gunman and hidden in a cotton bale. That bale becomes the center of the investigation, set against the backdrop of 1960s Harlem.

Chester Himes was born in Missouri in 1909. He began writing while serving a prison sentence for a jewel theft and published just short of twenty novels before his death in 1984. Among his best-known thrillers are Blind Man with a Pistol, Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Crazy Kill, A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, and The Heat's On.

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First Edition Identification

Cotton Comes to Harlem was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1965, with ‘First American edition 1965’ on copyright page. The original US dust jacket has a $4.50 price point. This novel was originally published in France under the title Retour in Afrique (Back to Africa) in 1964 by Librairie Plon. -