If what hooked you in A Rage in Harlem was how Goldy can pass himself off as a nun one minute and a hustler the next—and how Jackson’s frantic search for Imabelle keeps colliding with grisly punchlines—you’ll click with the bleakly funny scams in The Grifters. Thompson’s small-time operators crack mordant jokes while bleeding one another dry, delivering the same uneasy laugh you felt when Himes turned a botched con or a morgue visit into a sick joke with teeth.

Himes’s Harlem—Jackson dodging shakedowns, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger enforcing order with brutal pragmatism, alleys and back rooms pulsing with danger—finds a West Coast echo in Devil in a Blue Dress. Following Easy Rawlins through postwar Los Angeles, you get the same gritty streets, crooked power, and a mesmerizing woman whose disappearance drags a desperate man into blood and lies—very much the vibe of chasing Imabelle through night-black corridors.

If you tore through A Rage in Harlem because Jackson’s scramble—ducking cops, squeezing informants, hunting Imabelle and the cash—never lets up, The Hunter hits that same gear. Parker storms New York with single‑minded fury to recover what’s his; the chases, stickups, and knock‑down confrontations echo the headlong pace of Jackson’s odyssey from tenement to junkyard to back‑room deal.

Part of A Rage in Harlem’s charge is how everyone—Jackson with his panicked lies, Goldy with his sanctified grifts, even Coffin Ed and Gravedigger with their rough justice—operates in a gray zone. The Talented Mr. Ripley puts you inside a mind that rationalizes every step into crime. Like watching Jackson cross lines to bring Imabelle back, you’ll find yourself complicit as Tom Ripley keeps choosing the expedient over the moral—and getting away with it.

If the opening alchemy swindle in A Rage in Harlem—the heat, the chemicals, the promise of instant gold that sends Jackson spinning after Imabelle—stuck with you, Nightmare Alley amplifies that carnival of deception. Stan Carlisle climbs the con‑game ladder from sideshow tricks to séance rackets, each scheme twisting on him with the same sudden reversals and betrayals that keep blindsiding Jackson in Harlem.