Crime Partners Book

The godfather of urban lit, Donald Goines captures the raw, uncensored reality of life on the streets with a voice that has shaped hip hop culture.

Crime Partners

Prison buddies Billy Good and Jackie Walker made time pulling small jobs here and there. Not a bad living if you liked scraping by. The thing to worry about was the next fix. Nothing else mattered. When Billy and Jackie fell in with Kenyatta, a ghetto lord ready to take back the streets, they thought they'd hit the big time. Dealing with drug pushers and crooked cops in the name of justice sure felt good, but in a world where "kindness was the sweetest con of all," every bullet fired echoed with the sound of payback.

"He lived by the code of the streets and his books vividly recreated the street jungle and its predators." --New Jersey Voice

"The voice of the ghetto itself." --The Village Voice

Donald 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.