Listen to the podcast on Inkandescent Radio
Meet bestselling noir author Chris Chambers
In “Street Whys,” the newest novel by award-winning noir author Christopher Chambers, we again meet Washington, DC’s notorious detective, former street denizen Dickie Cornish, who faces off with bloodthirsty cops and the justice department.
Read
Meet bestselling noir author Chris Chambers
Christopher Chambers is a Washington, D.C. native, a lecturer at Georgetown University, Chair of the International Conflict Resolution Center, and is General Counsel to a not-for-profit benefiting small colleges and HBCUs: Student Housing of America. He’s currently President of Mystery Writers of America-Middle Atlantic Chapter, a board of directors member for Bouchercon: World Mystery Convention, and Private Eye Writers of America.
Award winners: Chris’ noir hardboiled mystery, Scavenger (2020), won a starred review and profile in Publishers Weekly and nominated for a Shamus and Anthony Awards; the sequel, Standalone, sees the return of the indestructible homeless addict-turned-PI, Dickie Cornish, patrolling the unforgiving city streets ravaged by COVID. The Strand Magazine hailed it as one of the Top Mystery Novels of 2022 and Chris as “the modern heir to Chandler, Woolrich and Cain.”
The third in the trilogy, StreetWhys, was feted by top literary podcasts and bestselling authors Eli Cranor, SJ Rozan, Gary Phillips, I.S. Berry and Tracy Clark. Chris was a finalist in 2008 for the PEN/Malamud Short Story Award for “Leviathan,” and his first hardcover thriller for Random House, Sympathy for the Devil was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.
Bestselling Author: The author of more than 16 books, Chris has written the Angela Bivens thriller series for Random House, The Rocket Crockett pulp noir series, and Black Pulp for Prose-Press, and editor, along with Gary Phillips, of The Darker Mask graphic short story collection, the Bronze Buckaroo Rides Again: Honoring Harlem’s Herb Jeffries. Chris has collaborated or been a story advisor on graphic novel scripts for Dark Horse, Archaia and Monstrous Books.
He also contributed short stories to: The Obama Inheritance: 15 Stories of Conspiracy Noir (Three Rooms Press), which won the Anthony Award; and The Black Panther: Tales Of Wakanda. His latest Marvel contribution is He’s provided stories to The Faking of the President and Midnight Hour, Witnesses for the Dead with Gar Anthony Haywood — all award-winning collections and bestsellers. Chris
Chambers Noir: Coming in July is a new podcast and video show — on Inkandescent Radio, Spotify, Apple, iHeart Radio and ChrisChambers.tv — where he’ll share tips, techniques, and trade secrets about taking a story from an idea to a published piece. And, he’ll be interviewing a few of his favorite writers about the art of being a novelist. Don’t miss it!
StreetWhys: A Dickie Cornish Detective Mystery
Washington, DC’s notorious detective, former street denizen Dickie Cornish, faces off with bloodthirsty cops and the justice department in the latest thrilling release by award-winning noir author Christopher Chambers.
In StreetWhys, underground detective Dickie Cornish faces a vindictive murder rap from his past if he doesn’t agree to help prove that the fentanyl ravaging the streets of DC is bankrolled by shadowy donors of a certain former president. Broke and desperate, Cornish soon finds himself on a collision course with shady public defenders and corrupt police officers, forcing him to use his street connections to flip their plan. Or die.
Chambers’s Dickie Cornish series has met with widespread critical acclaim. Publishers Weekly dubbed the series debut, Scavenger, “[A] no-holds-barred crime novel…a 21st-century twist on traditional hardboiled noir.” The Strand Magazine selected Standalone, the second book in the series, as one of the “Top 25 Mystery Novels of the Year,” adding, “It’s apparent that the modern heir to Chandler, Woolrich, and Cain is Christopher Chambers, enough said.” And renowned crime author George Pelecanos raves that the series “really nails Washington, DC in the current environment.” Click here to buy the book!
Standalone: A Dickie Cornish Mystery
“Top 25 Mystery Novels of 2022” —The Strand Magazine
“Chambers makes the smell and harrowing vibe of the mean streets of the nation’s capital come alive.” —Publishers Weekly
The second book in the Dickie Cornish mystery series, STANDALONE is a must-read for fans of S. A. Cosby, George Pelecanos, and Joe Ide.
It’s been over year since that bleak Christmas when a rich man peeled homeless, drug-addled Dickie Cornish from a steam grate, cleaned him up, and convinced him to use his street connections to track down his missing property. Now, as the summer sun bakes those same mean streets, the air is thick with crime, contagion, corruption. Dickie struggles with sobriety, anti-psychotic meds, and counseling at the VA, but manages to make a meager living as a private investigator with his sidekick, “Stripe”—until an ex-con named Al-Mayadeen Thomas sticks a gun to Dickie’s forehead and kidnaps him to a grim flophouse—a motel filled with squatters more desperate than the poor souls in the shelters.
Thomas demands that Dickie find his daughter, missing for years from the motel in a notorious cold case. The other squatters plead for him to find their vanished children as well. Thomas takes his own life to seal Dickie’s help, Police Chief Linda Figgis hauls Dickie in, gives him a Faustian choice: she directs him to help her close the Thomas cold case, but only if he forgets about the other vanished and abused children. To his horror, Dickie finds himself in the middle of a war within the police, with either side closing in for the kill to keep the truth hidden.
Scavenger: A Mystery
Christopher Chambers, author of A Prayer for Deliverance and Sympathy for the Devil (NAACP Image Award nominee) brings a 21st-century take on hardboiled noir tales in SCAVENGER, a gripping thriller underscored by themes of race, homelessness, hustling, and the savagery—and salvation—of the human psyche. The novel centers on Dickie Cornish, a Black streetwise survivor living in a homeless camp near D.C.’s Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Framed for the murder of two of his closest friends and facing life in prison, Dickie crosses paths with wealthy ex-Homeland Security Secretary, Jamie Bracht. Bracht offers him a chance at a new life if Dickie can navigate an underground world to uncover a prize Bracht will stop at nothing to acquire.
As Dickie searches, SCAVENGER tracks its way through an underground population of Washington, D.C., where hustlers, drug addicts, homeless, and undocumented immigrants jostle for crumbs while trying to survive. Chambers paints a portrait of D.C. from the ground up, with back-alley streetscapes, gentrification clashes, and unexpected encounters between politicians and bottom-rung natives—all set against a soundscape of patois, street Spanish, and D.C. slang. A hopeless amateur detective at first, Dickie quickly learns the ropes of being a sleuth in a cat-and-mouse game of greed, deceit, double-crossing, and murder. As Washington City Paper notes: “Like Hammett with San Francisco or Chandler with Los Angeles, Chambers’ mystery is as much about Washington as it is about the amoral monsters who prey on ordinary people and the lone gumshoe who takes them on.”
Sympathy for the Devil: An Angela Bivens Thriller
Be careful what you wish for. FBI Special Agent Angela Bivens has just won a hard-fought racial and sex discrimination lawsuit against the Bureau. She should be euphoric — all she ever wanted to be was a field agent. But the women she filed the suit with have fled the Bureau, leaving Angela alone to deal with her cynical, ultrapolitical superiors. They throw her a bone by sending her to help the befuddled and apathetic D.C. police solve two seemingly unrelated cases — the brutal murder of two teenage girls and the macabre, ritualized executions of rival drug dealers.
The cops see the victims as routine casualties of a drug war, but Angela begins to uncover a far more extensive network of horrors. The threads seem to lead right from the case files into her personal life and her hot, burgeoning love affair with Trey Williams, a well-connected D.C. lawyer, scion of an elite family, or, as her girlfriends call him, the “black JFK Jr.” Although Trey is everything a woman could want, he is also shackled with a heroin-addicted twin brother nicknamed Pluto who is obsessed with myths and the occult and is fast becoming Angela’s prime suspect in this wave of shocking murders.
After she saves the life of a fellow officer in a shoot-out, Angela becomes the FBI’s golden girl, a media-anointed local hero. But is the FBI setting her up for an even bigger fall? She can’t trust her superiors. She can’t trust her boyfriend. Faced with the hard facts and following her gut instincts, Angela feels that she has no choice but to solve these cases and avenge the innocent victims on her own.
Played out against a vivid and realistic portrait of Washington, from the halls of Congress and swank gathering places of the city’s African American elite to the gritty, mournful streets where gang warfare remains a fact of life.
Sympathy for the Devil introduces a remarkable new crime-fighting heroine whose struggle to reconcile the pulls of love and duty, ambition and self-doubt makes this an utterly compelling thriller. Fans of Grace Edwards and Valerie Wilson Wesley, whose stories feature strong African American women, and all readers looking for a riveting page-turner in the style of Patricia Cornwell or Thomas Harris will welcome this impressive debut novel from Christopher Chambers.
A Prayer for Deliverance: An Angela Bivens Thriller
Never try to outrun your past.
Tough-minded FBI special agent Angela Bivens is just beginning to put her life back together. Still reeling from the bloody showdown where she took the lives of two serial killers, one of whom was her lover, Angela is hell-bent on facing the future. She’s enjoying the perks of a well-deserved promotion, as well as getting to know her new boyfriend on a romantic camping trip. All that changes when the FBI interrupts her relaxing getaway and puts her on a complicated high-profile case.
Inside a secluded Chesapeake bed-and-breakfast, Dr. Leslie Collins, a prominent African-American obstetrician, has been found dead and mutilated. His white mistress, a Clinton White House advisor, was also dead in their bed, apparently from a poisonous snakebite. And no one at the inn heard or saw a thing. Angela can’t help but be shaken to the core—Dr. Collins was a family friend, and now it’s up to her to apprehend the killer.
Angela’s superiors at the Bureau suspect a shadowy white supremacy group that has been terrorizing abortion clinics and liberal leaders, but such tidy motives are soon discredited as other influential Black men from the worlds of business, politics, and religion start to share the doctor’s gruesome fate. Angela’s quest for justice deepens when she discovers the unlikely connections that link the men to one another, and to Antoine Jones, a convicted murderer on death row. Angela’s investigation also uncovers disturbing evidence that these murders are bound to a world of spells and ancient prophecies rooted in South African witchcraft, and of age-old vendettas being played out in a very modern D.C.
In this compelling, action-packed sequel to the riveting debut Sympathy for the Devil, Christopher Chambers captivates his readers with an unpredictable plot that pits this strong and savvy female protagonist against a cast of formidable foes—both human and supernatural. His innovative blend of images from traditional African mysticism and the vivid landscape of our nation’s capital breathes new life into the suspense thriller genre. Fans of Walter Mosley, Thomas Harris, and Patricia Cornwell will all love this remarkably spellbinding page-turner.
