His works, some of which have been filmed, include If He Hollers Let Him Go, published in 1945, and the Harlem Detective series of novels for which he is best known, set in the 1950s and early 1960s and featuring two black policemen called Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson.

He had misbehaved and his mother made him sit out a gunpowder demonstration that he and his brother, Joseph Jr., were supposed to conduct during a school assembly.

[3] In 1925, Himes's family left Pine Bluff and relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended East High School.

His story "To What Red Hell" (published in Esquire in 1934) as well as to his novel Cast the First Stone – only much later republished unabridged as Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998) – dealt with the catastrophic prison fire Himes witnessed at Ohio Penitentiary in 1930.

[5] In the 1940s, Himes spent time in Los Angeles, working as a screenwriter but also producing two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947), which charted the experiences of the great migration, drawn by the city's defense industries, and their dealings with the established black community, fellow workers, unions and management.

But under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I became bitter and saturated with hate.Back on the East Coast Himes received a scholarship at the Yaddo artists' community, where he stayed and worked in May and June 1948, in a room just across from where Patricia Highsmith resided.

In Paris, Himes was friends with his contemporaries; the political cartoonist Oliver Harrington and fellow expatriate writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin and William Gardner Smith.

He described her as "Irish-English with blue-gray eyes and very good looking"; he also saw her courage and resilience, Chester said to Lesley: "You're the only true color-blind person I've ever met in my life.

She cared for him for the rest of his life, and worked with him as his informal editor, proofreader, confidante and, as the director Melvin Van Peebles dubbed her, "his watchdog".

[9] Their circle of political colleagues and creative friends included towering figures Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Carl Van Vechten, Picasso, Jean Miotte, Ollie Harrington, Nikki Giovanni, Ishmael Reed and John A. Williams.

[12] S. A. Cosby in The New York Times also positively compared Himes to Chandler and Hammett, enjoying his writing of the "Black experience" and skepticism regarding the American Dream.

[15] Reviewing the biography for Johns Hopkins Magazine, Bret McCabe noted it makes the case that while "[Himes's] debut, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), is as admired today as it was in its time[...] its follow-up, Lonely Crusade (1947), is overlooked and underappreciated, and positions it as a key text in reckoning both Himes's subsequent career and later works.

"[16] Himes's novels encompassed many genres including the crime novel/mystery and political polemics, exploring racism in the United States.

Chester Himes wrote about African Americans in general, especially in two books that are concerned with labor relations and African-American workplace issues.

In the 1980s, British publisher Allison and Busby reprinted several of the Harlem detective novels in editions that featured paintings by Edward Burra on the covers.

A useful companion to the two volumes of autobiography is Conversations with Chester Himes, edited by Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, published by University Press of Mississippi in 1995.

[27] At the time of his death in Moraira, he was married to Lesley Himes (née Packard), his partner, confidant, and informal editor, since 1959.