This book is a synopsis for a novel that Chester Himes never wrote with some extended notes about characters and plot rather than a novel. Its prime interest is in the sarcastic portraits Himes provided of fellow exiled African American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

In addition to satirizing Wright, Baldwin (and less known African American exiles Ollie Harrington and William Gardner Smith), Himes was killing off a white woman Elizabeth Hancock, very like Willa Trierweiler, a married/separated woman with whom Himes had a long and tormented relationship (she is also the basis for Kriss in _The End of the Primitive_). This is the woman for whose rape and murder four African Americans have been found guilty by a French court. There was neither a rape nor a murder, though "[wo]manslaughter" seems a verdict that could be justified.

Those convicted of the crimes have carried to Europe the American lesson that "it is always best for any Negro to deny any charge lodged against him, to deny it totally and continuously, rather than try to explain the degree of his guilt." Himes indicts his own character for elf-defeating (hurt) pride, Wright for naiveté (and failure to appreciate the nobility of his relationship with Willa) and worldly success, and Baldwin for volunteering to be an "Uncle Tom."

As a semi-fictionalized document on the attitudes of one major expatriate African American writer, the book has some value, but don't expect much in the way of plausibility or narrative development.

I had heard of Chester Himes's novel "A Case of Rape" by reading Tyler Stovall's fantastic work on African American life in Paris, "Paris Noir". Himes paints a devastating portrait of racist french officials in this tour de force depiction of hypocritically racist French society. A must-read!

Bore, Bore, and Bored to death read. Lot of digressions, flash-backs, retrospects....blahblahblah. If you could stand this book or even love it, you must be old enough to be a grandpapa. This is a going-nowhere, nothing-in-there novel, a book dreamed up by an old writer, a wannabe of John le Carre. Just couldn't believe who would spend $21.95 plus tax to buy this 183 pages pamphlet? Repeat, a bore-to-death read.

Long on atmosphere and short on plot or action, this slim novel ultimately disappoints. The plot follows a retired government assassin who is called upon to abandon his life as a sculptor to track down a former colleague who has turned freelance. Sallis captures the depressing bleak atmosphere of small-town strip-mall America, but there's not enough a a story to make it all worthwhile.

A retired assassin, now an artist, gets a call he has dreaded for years. His former employers are reactivating him to hunt down a former colleague. But in the shadowy world of covert operatives, even the roles of hunter and hunted can shift without warning, and what ensues is a deadly dance along America's highways and through the psyche of a man whose carefully-constructed present has been shattered by his dangerous past.

Though it sounds like yet-another product of an oft-used premise (a la Le Carre), James Sallis's novel has more in common with the psychologically-complex narratives of Conrad, though this book is written in an understated and sparse prose reminiscent of the hard-boiled best of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op. And as David (as we come to know the artist) grapples with the enigma of his own identity, given his secret past and his fragmented present, we get a dream-filled reworking of Camus' The Stranger, even to the resonant (but no less final) climax in the streets of New Orleans.

Think of it as an espionage thriller without all the geopolitical baggage that (more often than not) dates the hefty tomes of Forsythe, Ludlum, and Le Carre. Think of it as a hard-boiled road-mystery with the P.I. recast as a professional assassin. However you think of it, read Death Will Have Your Eyes.

It's a fast-paced death-trip you'll nonetheless enjoy.