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.