The Detective Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson Harlem crime novels are originals with few precedents. Chester Himes published many of them as paperback originals in this country.

FROM THE PUBLISHER - 'A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on a subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today's news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol. ' Chester Himes speaking. Chester Himes, perhaps the most widely read Negro novelist in the world today and certainly the most original and visionary commentator on America's racial turbulence. BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL, his latest novel, is considered by Chester Himes and by his publisher to be his most important work to date. In it, he tells the incredible story of a night and day (Nat Turner's Day) in Harlem, while at the same time he fashions of the Negro plight in the United States a parable so timely as to be prophetic. His world-famous detectives, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, find themselves looking for the elusive murderer of a white homosexual film producer, and in the process they move through a mad world of Brotherhood marches, Black Muslims, a family slaughter, Black Power riots, and terrible violence everywhere. Chester Himes has not only seen things-he has also seen into them, and he has come out not blind, as would most people, but with a vision. BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL, written with great wit and honesty, crowns a distinguished body of work. CHESTER HIMES was born in 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri. He attended Ohio State University, served seven years in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery, during which time he began to write, and published his first novel, IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO, in 1948. His other novels include PINKTOES, COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, THE HEAT'S ON, THE PRIMITIVE, THE THIRD GENERATION, and LONELY CRUSADE.

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