The Big Gold Dream
A Grave Digger & Coffin Ed Novel
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Narrated by:
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Dion Graham
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By:
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Chester Himes
About this listen
After arriving on the American literary scene with novels of scathing social protest like If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Lonely Crusade, Chester Himes created a pioneering pair of dangerously effective African-American sleuths: Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, Harlem's toughest detective duo, who must carry the day against an absurdist world of racism and class warfare.
The Big Gold Dream is the explosive and shocking hardboiled classic that explores the shadowy underbelly of New York as a urban civil war erupts on the side streets of Harlem, pitting murderers and prostitutes against corrupt politicians and racist white detectives. Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson attempt to maintain some kind of order - in the neighborhood they have sworn to protect - in a world gone mad around them.
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Married Eva Griffin has been caught with a prominent congressman, and is ready to pay the editor of a sleazy tabloid hush money to protect the politician. But first Perry Mason tracks down the publisher of the blackmailing tabloid and discovers a shocking secret, which eventually leads to Mason being accused of murder. This is the first Perry Mason mystery and our introduction to secretary Della Street, detective Paul Drake, and the great lawyer himself.
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Enter Perry Mason
- By David S. Mathew on 04-10-17
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Wise Blood
- By: Flannery O’Connor
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.
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Grotesque Southern Gothic Masterpiece
- By Darwin8u on 10-18-12
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The Brass Cupcake: A Novel
- By: John D. MacDonald
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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A classic novel by John D. MacDonald with an exclusive introduction written and read by Dean Koontz. Ex-cop Cliff Bartells might be the last honest man in Florence City, Florida. After quitting the force over a crisis of conscience, he takes a job at an insurance company buying back stolen jewelry. Cliff is focused on keeping the bottom line down and staying out of the spotlight.But when an affluent tourist from Boston is murdered over a hefty collection of jewelry, Cliff finds himself wrapped up in a case that’s making national headlines.
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Good Social History ...
- By Montana on 05-14-17
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The Glass Key
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness. A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett invented the noir crime novel.
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Pacing Quick & Plot was Goldilocks
- By Darwin8u on 05-16-12
By: Dashiell Hammett
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The Street
- By: Ann Petry, Tayari Jones - introduction
- Narrated by: Danielle Deadwyler
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The classic urban tale of a young Black woman's struggle to raise her son alone amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of 1940s Harlem.
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The ending
- By KASH on 11-04-24
By: Ann Petry, and others
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Killing Critics
- By: Carol O'Connell
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory - computer genius, street fighter, provocative waif, peerless investigator, manipulative beauty - is the gorgeous, near-sociopathic heroine of this knife-edged suspense novel. Along with old pals, Ricker, Coffey, and faithful admirer Charles Butler, Mallory is determined to solve the brutal "art as death" murder of an untalented but highly touted artist-critic.
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2 Stars is generous
- By P. Chavez on 10-14-12
By: Carol O'Connell
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Miss Lonelyhearts
- By: Nathanael West
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser, Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 2 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Miss Lonelyhearts is an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column, which is viewed by the newspaper as a joke. As "Miss Lonelyhearts" reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional barfights. The novel is essentially a black comedy and is characterized by an extremely dark but clever sense of humor and irony.
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Charged with Meaning, and Far Leftist Leaning
- By W Perry Hall on 01-27-16
By: Nathanael West
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Death Wish
- By: Brian Garfield
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 5 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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What do you do when murderers have killed your wife and destroyed your daughter? Until that awful moment Paul Benjamin was an ordinary man - but the unspeakable violence that shattered his life turned him into someone quite different. Someone destiny was shaping into a bizarre instrument of vengeance. This is the novel that spawned the classic movie starring Charles Bronson.
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alonzo
- By lloyd on 10-19-11
By: Brian Garfield
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Flood
- A Novel (Burke, Book 1)
- By: Andrew Vachss
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her - so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade private eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements.
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Noir!
- By Snoodely on 03-06-14
By: Andrew Vachss
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
- A Novel
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Peter Riegert
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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For 60 years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the federal district of Sitka, a temporary safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the district is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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Didn't finish...
- By Ann E O'Connor on 10-16-17
By: Michael Chabon
What listeners say about The Big Gold Dream
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jefferson
- 09-26-12
"Faith Is Like a Gold Dream" in Hard Boiled Harlem
In the comically grotesque opening to Chester Himes' The Big Gold Dream (1960), Alberta Wright, a buxom, simple-minded, stubborn "kitchen slave" for white folks, has just got religion. With her lay-about lover Sugar Stonewall, she attends a Harlem revival meeting presided over by Sweet Prophet Brown (who possesses "the nimble wits of a confidence man and the nerve of a bank robber"). There she is baptized by the fire hoses of Sweet Prophet's deacons and testifies about her wonderful dream in which three apple pies burst open to fill the kitchen with 100 dollar bills. When Sugar tells her to get a bottle of drinking water blessed by Sweet Prophet and she drinks the liquid, she collapses, to all appearances dead. Sugar takes off running on "his flat feet like beef filets over the streets as if they were paved with broken glass." Has he poisoned her? Or are they working some scam? Or has God put her in a trance?
From that grabbing opening, Himes introduces a sordid panoply of Harlem denizens, among them, a deaf and dumb ex-fighter pimp, a pair of weary detectives, assorted stool pigeons, a gullible janitor, a ruthless racketeer, and his blind addict lover, who get involved in a quest for an elusive fortune. But how much money is there? Where did it come from? Who has murdered two men for it? And where is the money now?
Himes writes vivid descriptions ("his acid-scarred face, the memento of an acid-throwing rumpus one night in a shanty on the Harlem River further uptown, looked like the mask of an African witch doctor"), cool lines ("People will recrucify Jesus Christ for thirty-six grand"), and memorable set pieces (as in the opening revival meeting).
Reader Dion Graham brings Himes' characters to life in all their varied, self-serving, scheming, and greedy glory, and he reads the base narration of the novel with a catchy staccato hardboiled delivery.
At the same time that Himes is writing a page turning and darkly humorous mystery, he's vividly depicting circa 1950s Harlem and the black experience there. People are people, subject to all the human weaknesses (greed, prevarication, gullibility, violence, etc.), but black people in that era in that place were especially vulnerable to poverty and lack of legal economic opportunities and fulfilling jobs: "Born like a fool, and worked like a mule," as Sweet Prophet sums up Alberta to detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed.
If you like the Easy Rawlins stories of Walter Mosely (like Devil in a Blue Dress) and are interested in mid-20th century Harlem and enjoy unpredictable mysteries with plenty of black humor, flawed humanity, and ineffective police, you should give The Big Gold Dream a listen.
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- Disisil Rickety
- 01-30-15
Big Gold Dreams come often in Harlem
Chester Hines captures the essence of a struggling people, the good, the bad, the trusting, those unworthy of trust. Coffin Ed & Gravedigger play a part but are not the main thrust of the story. Dion Graham's narration is excellent as always.
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