In 1957 Chester Himes was so down and out in Paris that he was ready to write almost anything to make a buck--even a detective novel. Himes was at that point a "serious" novelist who had never written what the French called a roman policier. Instead, he had written five post-World War II protest novels in the style of Richard Wright that had earned him a reputation as a talented, alienated, and bitter young man. But these books, which included If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947), had not earned Himes any money. Their commercial failure had increased his bitterness and alienation and was one of the reasons he had left the United States and became an expatriate in 1953. When Marcel Duhamel, the editor of Gallimard's prestigious La Serie Noire (Black Series), told Himes he would buy a thriller in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond...