Lesley Himes, who has died aged 82, was a journalist and the widow of Chester Himes, the father of black American crime writing. The couple met in Paris in the 1950s when she went to interview him. He described her as very good-looking, but he also saw her courage and resilience. "You're the only true colour-blind person I've ever met in my life," Chester told her.

After he suffered a stroke, in 1959, she left her job to nurse him back to health and cared for him for the rest of his life, as his informal editor, proofreader and confidante. After a long engagement, they married in 1978. Lesley and Chester faced adversities as a mixed-race couple, particularly in the US, but they lived life with unparalleled passion and great humour. Bohemian life in Paris was followed by a move to the south of France and finally Spain, where their house was always filled with creative people, good food and lots of laughter.

Lesley and my mother, Christina, were friends for more than 50 years. "We met in 1946. I was 21 and Lesley was 19, and the war was finally over," my mother told me. They moved into a small flat on Gower Street, central London, and made the best of low wages, rationing and the rebuilding of the city. "We were living on fourpence a week and lots of fresh air." In the early days they shared shoes, hats and one evening dress, in which they would take turns to go out to dinner.

After three years, fed up with rationing, they headed for France. In Paris, Mum landed a job with the Marshall Plan (the programme to reconstruct Europe) and Lesley at the Herald Tribune, where she eventually wrote a fashion column.

After Chester's death in 1984, Lesley's spirit of adventure and support of his memory took her to New York to work with Ed Margolies on a biography, The Several Lives of Chester Himes (2000). Next May, Penguin Classics will republish five of his novels. Lesley had been working on this to honour his last request, to "keep my books alive". She is survived by her sister, Anne.