A Red Death by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “You’ve got a big problem, son.” July 1953. World War II veteran Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins is sweeping one of his secretly owned buildings, the Magnolia Street Apartments near Watts, when he does some provocative foreshadowing: “Everything was as beautiful as always … it wasn’t going to last long. Soon Poinsettia would be in the street, and I’d have the morning sun in my jail cell.” Five years ago, the affair of The Devil in the Blue Dress (1990) gained Easy $10,000, under the table money with which he bought some apartments to rent out under an assumed name, and now a disheveled, persistent white IRS agent given to calling Easy “son” starts investigating him for tax evasion. As Mofass, the man who collects rents for Easy (and acts like his boss to hide that Easy is the owner) tells him, “They got you by the nuts, Mr. Rawlins.” Meanwhile, EttaMae Harris, a beautiful, strong, sexy woman Easy still loves fifteen years after she married his murderous best friend Mouse, has just left Mouse and moved from Texas to LA with her cute son LaMarque. Who knows what Mouse would do were he to show up and find EttaMae and Easy together? Then a fervid anti-communist FBI agent named Darryl T. Craxton offers to dismiss Easy’s tax troubles if our man will just get to know Chaim Wenzler, a Jewish union organizer who’s helping the First African Church in charitable activities. Soon murder victims and Easy are turning up together, making the LA police suspect him of being a killer. Like many private eyes in hardboiled detective stories, Easy is an observant and laconic first-person narrator, drinks too much, gets plenty of straight sex but remains single, is observant and thoughtful, is not a sadist but can deal out punishment in self-defense, has a handy gun or two, and has a moral compass more active than most people’s around him. Unlike many typical private eyes, Easy is not actually a detective but a favor exchanger, helping people in his community when they’re in trouble with the law or each other. And he’s telling his story some thirty years after the events occurred. Also unlike many genre private eyes, Easy is African American, and many of the most interesting parts of this second novel in his series, A Red Death (1991), come from Walter Mosley’s depiction of 1950s era Los Angeles as experienced by people of color. This novel says some interesting things about African Americans’ identification with Jesus and the back to Africa movement. I really liked the concise and vivid descriptions of the different shades and kinds of skin color among the African American community: e.g., “His color was dark brown but bright, as if a powerful lamp shone just below his skin,” “Jackson's skin was so black that it glinted blue in the full sun,” and “Mouse's color was a dusty pecan.” As the novel progresses, Easy finds it increasingly difficult to steer clear of the IRS agent, to satisfy his FBI handler (“I'd become a flunky for the FBI”), and to avoid self-loathing while becoming good friends with Chaim and sleeping with Mouse’s wife. He nonetheless has the time (and energy) to engage in some one-night-stand action and to visit his good friends the Penas, who run a Mexican luncheon café and take care of his abused and mute adopted son Jesus, as well as to learn about communism, blacklists, and the like. I liked the first Easy Rawlins novel and was looking forward to this second one. Mosely has an ear for dialogue, writes concise and vivid descriptions, is good at evoking 1950s era LA, and weaves potent themes about race, religion, the Cold War, and human nature into his book. But… despite Michael Boatman’s professional reading of the audiobook, I didn’t enjoy this novel. I got tired of Easy’s (easy) self-recriminations and self-condemnations, didn’t enjoy his ability to have sex with near strangers while supposedly sleeping with the woman of his dreams, and was unimpressed by his detective abilities. And I found the denouement too speedy after the gradual development towards it. I will listen to other Easy Rawlins mysteries but won’t be in a hurry to return to him. View all my reviews
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