I can not believe I have never reviewed any of Walter Mosley (or if I have, I can not find it). In either case, it is an error in judgment. Mosley is a prodigious author, 11 Easy Rawlins novels, 13 or so other fiction novels and a number of non-fiction works.
I have read a number of the Easy Rawlins novels, including the latest, Blonde Faith and I recommend them all for a variety of reasons. Mosley writes mystery fiction very well. His plots, while not complex, are interesting and intriquing. His characters (developed over many years and many novels) are even more interesting and intriguing. However, Mosley's towering accomplishment is to invite the reader, particularly the white, middle-class (or better) reader, into a world we rarely see and often work hard to avoid. Want to know why black men are angry? Want to know what it is like to be suspected, scrutinized, scorned, and excoriated simply because of the color of your skin? Want to know what it is like to operate in a world where almost every member of the "establishment", from governmental official to policeman to doorman makes an immediate (and typically negative) assessment of who you are and your purpose with one look at you? Read the Easy Rawlins books and you will know....and once you know, it will eat at you and make you feel ashamed of your own, even unconscious behavior. Because, as they say on Avenue Q, "we are all a little bit racist, you know".
Easy Rawlins is an unoffical private investigator who lives a sometimes hardscrabble and sometimes not-so-hardscrabble life in the Los Angeles of the 50's and 60's. He is a WWII vet who saw all of man's inhumanity to man in the European theatre and returns to a different, but unfortunately similar, world in the post-war LA. He grew up in Houston's famously dangerous Fifth Ward, and his best friend as a child (and as a man) is a cold-blooded killer and expert thief with the antithetical nickname of "Mouse". Within all of this, and with all his work, he assembles a relatively non-traditional family and becomes a caring and dedicated father.
In Blonde Faith, Mouse's wife tells him that Mouse is wanted for murder (another friend of Easy's) and is missing. Knowing the LAPD's obsession with Mouse, Easy is convinced that they will shoot first and ask questions later - regardless of the truth. To complicate the feeling of loss, Easy has lost the woman he truly loves - she is about to marry another man. Easy's typically difficult search for dignity and lack of pain in the world is very much multiplied by his personal life.
Mosley writes about what it is to be a man as much as he writes about what it is to be a black man. Sometimes they are the same thing, often they are not. Being a black man in 1960's LA is more complicated than being a white man -- and Mosley demonstrates this with amazing fluidity without turning to polemic. The truth is so apparent that all he has to do is show it to you -- and that is an art form in and of itself.
Blonde Faith's plot plays out nicely but it is the characters - Easy, Mouse, the bartender, Easy's friends, including a restaurant manager, a black technology whiz and the supposed murder victim (a special forces vet by the name of Christmas Black) and the cops who make Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels work so well.
Mosley also has range. He has written everything from good non-fiction to good and inventive science fiction (try Futureland). Be entertained and learn something. That's a pretty good one-two punch. Walter Mosley delivers in style.
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