As a chronological unit, Himes's eight detective novels trace the development of Himes as an artist and offer an imaginative social history of black America during a twelve-year period of racial upheaval. The series begins with For Love of Imabelle (1957), set in a relatively "normal" world and then increasingly emphasizes meaningless and absurd elements until in Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), Himes carries the detective novel to its outer limits by concluding on an apocalyptic note of complete social collapse. Within the series Grave Digger and Coffin Ed undergo a related transformation. They begin as decent men forced to become brutal, then turn into coldly efficient killers, and finally end up as completely inefficient spectators.

The first novel in the series is not so much a "detective" novel as it is a naturalistic study of the Harlem underworld. The two detectives are secondary characters, far from...