"Himes undertook to do for Harlem what Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles."
–
Newsweek "One of the most important American writers of the 20th century. . . . A quirky American genius."
–Walter Mosley
"Himes wrote spectacularly successful entertainments, filled with gems of descriptive writing, plots that barely sidestep chaos, characters surreal, grotesque, comic, hip, Harlem recollected as a place that can make you laugh, cry, shudder."
–John Edgar Wideman
"Himes's Harlem saga vies with the novels of David Goodis and Jim Thompson as the inescapable achievement of postwar American crime fiction."
–
The New York Times
