Himes in [his detective fiction] sees Harlem as the intensification, the logical absurdity, the comic horror of the black experience in America. And not naturally, Himes draws on his own violent American years as being symptomatic of that experience. (p. 1)

What Himes seems to draw mainly from his American background—middle class, working class, lumpen lower class and criminal years—is that the one central fact of the black man's life in America is violence…. Himes, despite the slapstick and sometimes surreal quality of his work … speaks from the "inside". (p. 2)

[Himes' two black police detective heroes,] Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, tread their way through arabesques of venality, sin and corruption, official and otherwise, before they can get to the bottom of things. In the course of their investigations, they appear to take violence, cupidity, betrayals and brutality as norms of human behavior and they rarely delude...