Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. dj. Hardcover first edition - Pharr's first and best known novel, basis for the 1973 film of the same name. The story of two men who create a numbers racket in the Black community of Richmond, Virginia in the 1930s - the two waiters, Blueboy Harris and Dave Greene, briefly achieved almost unimaginable success before seeing it all end in tragedy. When this was published, Pharr was 57 and he had spent many years working as a waiter himself, and was still doing so when the manuscript got to a publisher. His books are as relevant now as when they were published: he depicted policing as an unreformable system built to brutalize and oppress Black bodies and others of color. As one writer said "The very things that keep Pharr obscure - his unwillingness to pander to white readers, his focus on writing about Black life at all levels of American society in a plain-spoken way, his anger at the way Black people have been abused and murdered in different ways by this society -are the reasons we need him right now." (Christopher Smith)