The Real Cool Killers

The second Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson novel opens in a Harlem bar, where a white man, Ulysses Galen, slumming in the neighborhood, is attacked with a knife; the bartender intervenes with an axe, and Galen flees into the street, where Sonny Pickens, high and aggrieved, chases him firing a pistol. Galen is found shot dead and Pickens is arrested, then spirited away by a teenage street gang in fake beards calling themselves the Real Cool Moslems. The detectives then discover that Pickens's gun fires only blanks, so the real killer, the real weapon, and the motive — bound up with Galen's predatory interest in young girls — are all still at large. The investigation becomes a compressed, violent, darkly comic tour of Harlem's bars, gangs, and police pressure, deepening the partnership of the two detectives.

Author: Chester Himes · Original publisher: Gallimard (Paris), 1958 — in French as Il pleut des coups durs, Série noire no. 446