Randolph "Dilda" Carter

If you like your hard boiled with a healthy dose of historical racism, this is the novel for you.  Hardly long enough to be called a novel and tightly plotted.  Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are two black NYC police detectives.  Harlem is their beat.  When a white pedophile sadistic pervert is "murdered" in Harlem all hell breaks loose.  Jones and Johnson have got to find the killer even while the black body count goes unmourned.  There doesn't seem to be any murder weapon however and too many people with a motive.  Oh, and there is a gang known as the Real Cool Moslems to deal with too.

Full of social commentary buried in good ol' hard boiled grit the novel is as much a treatise on race relations and the ghettoization of America in the late '50s as it is about suspense, mystery, and crime.  All packed into 160 tightly written pages.