Machiavelli was my tutor, Donald Goines my father figure.Īre you the author profiled here? Email us your official website or Let us host your primary web presence.In the early 1970s, when Donald Goines was churning out his stark novels about life among Detroit gangsters, drug addicts and sex workers, the books had amateurish graphics, were printed on cheap paper and wound up for sale at bus stations and party stores because many bookstores wouldn’t carry them.Īlmost a half-century after Goines’ death - in grim circumstances like a scene from one of his books - a New York publishing house is reissuing the novels with bold graphics, and readers can find them at Barnes & Noble and local libraries. The identity of the killer or killers is unknown, as is the reason behind the murders. The police had received an anonymous phone call and responded, discovering Goines in the living room of the apartment and his common-law wife Shirley Sailor’s body in the kitchen.
On October 21, 1974, Goines and his common-law wife were discovered dead in their Detroit apartment. The publisher, Holloway House, requested that Goines publish the book under a pseudonym in order to avoid having the sales of Goines’s work suffer due to too many books releasing at once. In 1974 Goines published Crime Partners, the first book in the Kenyatta series under the name Al C. Goines continued to write novels at an accelerated pace in order to support his drug addictions, sixteen books in five years, with some books taking only a month to complete. Goines initially attempted to write westerns but decided to write urban fiction after reading Iceberg Slim’s autobiography Pimp: The Story of My Life. He began writing while serving a sentence in Michigan’s Jackson Penitentiary. In order to support his addiction, Goines turned to crime, this included pimping, and theft.
During his stint in the armed forces, Goines developed an addiction to heroin that continued after his discharge from the military in the mid-1950s. At 15 Goines lied about his age to join the Air Force, where he fought in the Korean War. His parents were a middle-class African-American couple that ran a laundry business.
Donald Goines is a Top 100 Bestselling Author Making Our List 18 Timesĭonald Goines (Decem– October 21, 1974) was a writer of urban fiction.
0 kommentar(er)
