Crime Partners

Donald Goines's powerful first novel in the Kenyatta series lays bare the bloody, brutal world of crime in the black ghetto—where, as Goines puts it, "kindness is the sweetest con of all." Here is the gutsy and often shocking world of Billy and Jackie, prison buddies on the streets and hot on the trigger.

“All those [other black] writers, no matter how well they dealt with black experience, appealed largely to an educated, middle-class, largely white readership. They brought news of one place to the residents of another. Goines’s novels, on the other hand, are written from ground zero. They are almost unbearable. It is not the educated voice of a writer who has, so to speak, risen above his background, it is the voice of the ghetto itself.” —Michael Covino, The Village VoiceDonald Goines was born in Detroit, Michigan. He joined the U.S. Air Force instead of going into his family’s dry cleaning business. Following his service, he entered into a life of drug addiction and crime. He received seven prison sentences, serving a total of over six years. While he was in prison, Goines wrote his first two novels, Dopefiend: The Story of a Black Junkie and Whoreson: The Story of a Ghetto Pimp. Goines was shot to death in 1974.