All Night Menu Vol. 4 by Sam Sweet

“In 1956, he accepted $1000 to write a crime novel for Le Serie Noire, a line of pulp fiction popular with the French. Publisher Marcel Duhamel sent rules: ‘Always action in detail. Make pictures. No stream of consciousness. Don’t worry about it making sense. Give me 220 typed pages.’ Himes sat down with a bottle of rum over the Christmas holiday and churned out A Rage in Harlem, a bleakly comic story of gutter criminals pursued by Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, two sadistic black detectives who became Himes’s signature characters. The book became a bestseller and eight additional Harlem novels followed. In the stories, brutality wasn’t an aberration; it was the shared language of American society. Himes directed readers shocked by the graphic violence to the beginning of the first novel. ‘It has a scene in which acid is thrown into Coffin Ed’s face, which turns him into a psychopath. People should understand about that.’”

-Sam Sweet, 2021