The End of a Primitive (Old School Books)

Chester Himes aficionados who've followed detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones from one grisly Harlem crime scene to the next will find a meaner, harsher reality in The End of a Primitive. In this early work, Himes paints an angry, doomed sexual relationship between a tough-guy black writer down on his luck and a wayward white party girl on a slippery slide toward addiction and abuse. Tough stuff, especially for 1955, when the novel first appeared in a bowdlerized version, and it still carries a tragic punch today, down to its classic pulp diction. Himes, a black writer who did crimes and hard time in his youth, and whose personal quest for a measure of peace finally led him to leave the United States altogether, gives the sure sense of knowing the rough turf and hopeless lives he describes.