Undeterred by a sea of rejection letters, Jefferson went it alone, publishing on a vanity press, which should have sealed his book's fate. But a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion - the first run sold out. Eventually, the title was picked up by Holloway House, then Norton, as part of its Old School Books imprint celebrating lost black classics, before being published in translation. In between, the film rights were sold.

Since then, Jefferson has published two more novels - The Road to Damascus and A Card for Players (both on the now-defunct New Bedford Press) - along with some campy film scripts, so he doesn't exactly have to go it alone anymore. But that's exactly what he's done with Damaged Goods, a hardboiled urban-crime story built around an inter-racial love triangle.

Freedom comes with a price-tag for Alonzo Crane when he's suddenly sprung by a corrupt prison warden from a life sentence for bank robbery.

Building complicated heist plans based on Steve McQueen capers is the unofficial condition of release. Crane - known in the press as "The Motion Picture Bank Robber" - creates a diversion at a hotel while his former partner, Duffy, and his white-trash girlfriend, Trixie, loot one of the suites. The hook of it is, Crane's not telling his partners what he’s really after. Just as importantly, he didn't expect to find himself falling for a white girl with her nose wide open, while at the same time fighting off the Mexican Mafia.

Although The School... could be criticized as something of a protest novel (much like Chester Himes' If he Hollers Let Him Go), it's still Jefferson's finest work: THE lost classic of all lost classics. But Jefferson finesses this one a whole lot more, meaning you don't really know it's a political thriller until you're almost done, a true sign of a veteran novelist. Crane has fooled just about everybody by then, including himself, and that's what makes Damaged Goods such a good read on any level.

While racial conflict is a big part of the story, Jefferson blurs the lines to make the case that poor, old white trash aren't any better off than inner-city blacks, Hispanics, or anyone else that's doing The Man's dirty work. All of which brings us back to the point that Jefferson is going it alone all over again.

Whether or not that's another injustice, you'll be hard-pressed to find many better contemporary crime novel, and certainly not a more obscure one. Aside from the frustrating copy-editing problems that tend to come with most Do-It-Yourself Publishing canvasses, the real sin of it all is that your bookseller has probably never heard of Jefferson, who's book-for-book coverage of the black American experience ranks right up there with the likes of Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim. On a contemporary level, there's Solomon Jones (Pipe Dream) and Y. Blak More (Triple Take), both Villard products. But none ever accomplished what Jefferson managed to do all by himself.