Chester Himes (1909-1984) was nearly fifty when he began writing detective stories and novels. But what a fifty years it was. He had served seven years in the Ohio State Penitentiary, where he had discovered Black Mask magazine. " When I could see the end of my time inside, I bought myself a typewriter and taught myself touch typing. I'd been reading stories by Dashiell Hammett in Black Mask and I thought I could do them just as well. When my stories finally appeared, the other convicts thought the same thing. There was nothing to it. All you had to do was tell it like it is." And tell it he did. His stories about Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson were not throwaway violent pulp stories, but angry tales about growing up in a bleak city with an even bleaker future. As the timeline in the novels progresses, the characters grow more disillusioned and cynical about their jobs, their own people, and the world they live in. A longtime staple in France, his first crime novel, A Rage in Harlem, which was written at the request of Marcel Duhamel, editor of the famous Serie Noire line of Gallimard, was awarded the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere in 1958.

Con man Deak O'Hara is out of the state penitentiary and back on the street working the scam of a lifetime. The $87,000 he has schemed to get has been hijacked and hidden in a bale of cotton. Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones are on everyone's trail in one of their most entertaining thrillers.