good looking"; he also saw her courage and resilience, Chester said to Lesley: "You're the only true color-blind person I've ever met in my life." After he suffered a stroke, in 1959, Lesley quit her job and nursed him back to health. She cared for him for the rest of his life, and worked with him as his informal editor, proofreader, confidante and, as the director Melvin Van Peebles dubbed her, "his watchdog". After a long engagement, they were married in 1978, as Chester Himes was still legally married to his first wife, Jean, and only able to gain a divorce that year. Lesley and Chester faced adversities as a mixed-race couple but they prevailed. Their circle of political colleagues and creative friends included not only such towering figures as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright; it also included figures such as Malcolm X, Carl Van Vechten, Picasso, Jean Miotte, Ollie Harrington, Nikki Giovanni and Ishmael Reed. Bohemian life in Paris would in turn lead them to the South of France and finally on to Spain, where they lived until Chester's death in 1984. Later life and death In 1969, Himes moved to Moraira, Spain, where he died in 1984 from Parkinson's disease, at the age of 75. He is buried at Benissa cemetery. Critical reception and biography Some regard Chester Himes as the literary equal of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Ishmael Reed says: "[Himes] taught me the difference between a black detective and Sherlock Holmes" and it would be more than 30 years until another black mystery writer, Walter Mosley and his Easy Rawlins and Mouse series, had even a similar effect. In 1996, his widow Lesley Himes went to New York to work with Ed Margolies on the first biographical treatment of Himes's life, entitled The Several Lives of Chester Himes, by long-time Himes scholars Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, published in 1997 by University Press of Mississippi. Later, novelist and Himes scholar James Sallis published a more deeply detailed biography of Himes called Chester Himes: A Life (2000). A detailed examination of Himes's writing and writings about him can be found in Chester Himes: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography compiled by Michel Fabre, Robert E. Skinner, and Lester Sullivan (Greenwood Press, 1992). In 2017, Lawrence P. Jackson published a significant, 600+ page biography of Himes titled Chester B. Himes: A Biography. Works Himes's novels encompassed many