"A Rage in Harlem is broadly comic from the get-go, lulling the reader into a state of mirthful ease that makes Himes s sneaky exposé of white prejudice and Black suffering all the more shocking."
Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Candy House
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
