Review of Black Betty by Walter Mosley (1994, Pan)

Black Betty is the fifth book in the Easy Rawlins series and it’s a doozey. It’s now 1961. Easy has fallen on hard times; his property business has been hustled out from under him and he’s living in rented accommodation with his mute son and young daughter. To add to his woes his murderous friend, Mouse, has just been released from prison and wants revenge on the man who put him there, and he’s been asked by a white PI to find Black Betty, famed for twisting men’s necks and wrapping them around her fingers. Easy was in awe of Betty back in Houston when he was a kid, now she’s disappeared from a Beverley Hills mansion shortly after the owner died. Easy agrees to find the aging siren, but it quickly leads him into deadly trouble. Between trying to unravel mystery and stay alive, he also works to stop Mouse from murdering innocent men, and turn the tables on the woman who hustled him. It’s inevitable that some folk are going to die, but he’s determined it’s not going to be him. As well as a compelling mystery, with a couple of nice sub-plots, Mosley does an excellent job at charting the social relations and geography of being black in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. Kennedy might have been elected, but racism and the race divide is as deep as ever. Easy is smart and canny, he’s managed to build a property business, but he’s still struggling to get by and is often the victim of institutionalised abuse. Mosley nicely portrays these tensions and injustices through a hardboiled style with a tender underbelly, populating the book with a nice mix of conflicted characters. The subplots were perhaps wrapped up a little too quickly, but Black Betty is a wonderful, noir read.

Review of White Butterfly by Walter Mosley (Pocket Books, 1992)

Los Angeles, 1956. A man is torturing and murdering black women. The police turn to Easy Rawlins for help; a man used to digging around for answers and who knows the city and its dark underbelly. However, Easy, recently married and with a young baby and school-aged child, is trying to keep on the straight and narrow. When a fourth victim dies, this time a white woman, the police won’t take no for an answer, threatening to jail his best friend and make his life hell. Reluctantly he starts to piece together the last days of each victim. Easy was always a man with secrets and those, his investigation, and his drinking is placing a strain on his marriage. Whether he helps catch the killer or not, it seems he might lose something precious in the process.

White Butterfly is the third book in the Easy Rawlins series set in post-war Los Angeles. In this outing Easy is hustled by the police into helping to track down a serial killer preying on women in the city. It’s the most personal of the books so far in the series, as much about his private home life and him as a person as it is about the case (the first focused more on his history and social circle, the second on his business interests). Easy is a conflicted, flawed, complex character, with secrets that he guards from everyone, including his new wife; an ability to lie, cajole and hustle; a weakness to stray; and a questionable loyalty to a psychopathic friend; yet he also is loving and has his own moral compass he uses to navigate a fraught social world and everyday racism. He exposes all these characteristics as his marriage disintegrates as he searches for the killer. The case isn’t overly complicated, though it has a nice twist, but Mosley tells the tale through an engaging, affective voice and sparse prose that has the cadence of classic hardboiled noir. As with the other books in the series, there is nice historical and social contextualisation and sense of place. The result is a dark, somewhat bleak, but evocative story.

Review of A Red Death by Walter Mosley (W.W. Norton, 1991)

1953, Los Angeles. Easy Rawlins has invested his ill-gotten gains from a murderous adventure a few years previously into real estate. Working as a janitor at the buildings he owns, he hides his assets behind a paperwork screen, leaving his associate, Mofass, to front managing the properties. Now the IRS are chasing him for undisclosed income, seeking to press federal charges. Adding to his woes is the suspicious death of one of his tenants and the arrival of EttaMae and her child, on-the-run from Easy’s villainous best friend, Mouse. Salvation seems to arrive in the form of the FBI, who offer Easy a chance to skip the tax charges if he helps them investigate a group of communists connected to a local church with activities linked to Champion Aircraft. The IRS are not happy and continue to make threats, the cops have him in the frame for the tenant’s death, and he’s in love with EttaMae but knows Mouse will kill him if he tries to steal her away.  And that’s just the start of his problems.

A Red Death is the second book in the Easy Rawlins series set in post-war Los Angeles. Easy has a habit of finding trouble and acting detective. In this outing he’s infiltrating a communist cell for the FBI in order to avoid a federal charge for tax evasion. When people connected to both his IRS charge and his FBI case start dying, it seems he’s swapped going to jail for non-payment of tax to going for murder. To add to his woes his personal life is a mess, starting an affair with EttaMae, the love of his life and partner of his best friend. The strength of the tale is its portrayal of the African-American experience in post-war America (both the seamier, darker underbelly and respectable business and church communities) and every-day and institutional racism, the sense of place, and the character of Easy Rawlins. Easy is a complex man in which good and evil battle internally and he’s often the sinner using casual lies, deception, robbery and violence to make headway; while he has a moral compass of sorts helping people where he can, ultimately he prioritises protecting himself. Which is perhaps no surprise given the social circumstances of the poor, working class community he’s operating in, which is a dog-eat-dog world. Where the tale struggles a little is with regards to the plot, which felt a little to tangled with a number of subplots and dozens of characters being threaded together – a death in one of the apartments Easy owns; a IRS case against Easy; a FBI case into a communist cell; an extortion racket in a church; EttaMae and Mouse arriving in the city – each with its own sub-plots and twists. There’s plenty going on – scheming, violence, extortion, murder, sex - leaving Easy dazed and confused throughout much of the story. And so, to a degree, is the reader. Eventually it all comes together with a well disguised twist. Overall, an interesting and entertaining story that might have benefitted from less is more.

Review of The Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (Serpent’s Tail, 1990)

Born and raised in Texas and having served in the army, Easy Rawlins knows all about how black men are expected to act in white institutions.  Despite this, after a long shift working in an aircraft plant in Los Angeles he has a falling out with his boss and is laid off.  It’s the summer of 1948 and he doesn’t have a lot of options, but he’s determined meet the mortgage payments and to keep his newly bought house.  When he’s offered a $100 by a white lawyer to find Daphne Monet, despite reservations, he accepts the job.  It seems that Daphne likes the company of black men and Easy works his way round the bars trying to pick up a lead.  What he finds is a trail of bodies and a complicated knot of people either looking for, or seeking to protect, the devil in a blue dress.  Worse, the police have him pegged as the person leaving the trail of bodies.  He needs to find Daphne fast, hand her over and find a safe exit, assuming he can resist her deadly charms once he locates her.

The Devil in the Blue Dress is a noir tale full of racial and sexual tensions set in the post-war Los Angeles.  The strengths of the novel are the characterisation, contextualisation, and sense of place and time.  Easy Rawlins is an interesting lead character: a man who wants to pull himself up into the middle class but finds himself scrabbling around in the underworld to keep that dream from slipping by; he’s familiar with death from his time fighting across Europe, but he has little appetite for the murderous situation he finds himself in.  As such, his moral compass is generally pointed in the right direction, but he’s prepared to let it waver, especially as he lives in a community where right and wrong are various shades of grey and he has to negotiate the racist attentions of powerful white men.  To complement him, Mosley fills the story with a set of colourful, dangerous characters.  The tale is particularly good at portraying the racial geography of the city, its seedy nightlife and petty crime, and dropping in small historical references.  The plot was interesting, but felt a little opaque at times given the number of characters and their shifting allegiances, and some elements didn’t seem to quite sit right.  Nonetheless, it was an entertaining read, told in a style that is all tell and no show, and is full of noirish atmosphere.