Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The dollar is my master, but I ain’t no slave" Joe King Oliver, the black narrator of Down the River Unto the Sea (2018), the first novel in Walter Mosley’s new hardboiled detective fiction series, begins his story by telling us how he came to be exiled from the police department eleven years ago: he was sent out on a routine auto theft arrest mission wherein he was induced to have sex with a young white lady who then accused him of rape. Vile powerful people orchestrated the scheme to prevent Joe from making what would otherwise have been the biggest heroin bust in NYC history. The charges against Joe were mysteriously dropped, but not until he’d spent about 90 days in Rikers Island Prison (most in solitary confinement), leaving him permanently scarred in body and spirit and costing him his marriage. Luckily, his best friend from the police force, Sergeant Gladstone Palmer, helped Joe start the King Detective Service, which he is now running with the help of his beloved seventeen-year-old daughter Aja-Denise. (Mosley is not writing a black Veronica Mars, as AD is only his secretary and Joe is too protective of her to ever let her actually work any cases.) After musing on his past to bring us up to speed on his character and situation, Joe goes out on his present case (trailing a popular Republican politician to find dirt on him) and then is presented with two new cases: the first would involve investigating whoever set him up eleven years ago, while the second would involve trying to prove that an African American political journalist and social knight errant called A Free Man didn’t murder two on-duty white policemen. Joe must think carefully before taking either case, for investigating them would antagonize dangerous powerful people who’d rather bury the past and or the truth, putting at risk his business and life and forcing him to become a new person. Needless to say, soon Joe is running around NYC (Brooklyn, the Bronx, the Village, Coney Island, Staten Island, Central Park, Wall Street, Brooklyn Bridge, Port Authority Bus Station, etc.), following leads in a variety of settings ranging from the wealthy and exclusive to the dirty and dangerous, questioning a variety of people ranging from the corpulent and grotesque to the young and beautiful, from the white to the black, and from the pleasant to the antagonistic. Joe also encounters a fair amount of racism, from the relatively benign (a white receptionist at his grandmother’s retirement home not believing that his grandmother could be a resident and not a worker there) to the positively bellicose (a white thug calling him the n word and trying to get him to fight for supposedly stealing his girlfriend). Instead of his spunky daughter, assisting Joe in his investigations is his “satanic sidekick” Melquarth Frost, a white ex-super con genius sociopath with seemingly unlimited financial and mental resources. Joe is a fine private investigator first-person narrator for a hardboiled detective story. He has many of the traditional traits, being a single ex-cop with a weakness for women, a sturdy moral code, the ability to bend the rules for a good cause, a proficiency for violence without sadism, the capacity to drink large quantities of hard liquor, a brainy brain (good at playing chess and go), and a wide range of literary experience (regularly referring to authors like Hesse and works like All Quiet on the Western Front). I suppose the main fresh thing about him is that he’s African American, hardboiled black PIs still being rare. And that he’s been traumatized by his stint in prison. And that he has a surrogate big brother slash father relationship with Melquarth Frost. Unfortunately, Mosley also overuses the seemingly omnipotent Melquarth Frost, making things a bit too easy for Joe. Mosley also writes some cliché hardboiled lines, like “You’re twelve miles of bad road” and “Let me see that other paw and it better be empty.” Some lines are a little coy, like “Sometimes I liked to pretend that I was a detective out of a book.” And he maybe overuses the writerly trick of having first person narrators not let us know what they’re planning till after their plan gets set in motion. But he does do plenty of fine writing, whether neat similes (e.g., “Willa departed, and for a while I was alone and at peace the way a soldier during World War I was at peace in the trenches waiting for the next attack, the final flu, or maybe mustard gas seeping over the edge of a trench that might be his grave”), cool life wisdom (“The magnetism between young lovers, even when they’re old, is the gravity of the soul, undeniable, unquestionable, and, sooner or later, unwanted”), cynical American culture (“I secretly cheered for my country, where over and over again the almighty dollar proved its superiority”), and racial insights (“America was changing at a snail’s pace in a high wind, but until that gastropod mollusk reached its destination I had a .45 in my pocket and eyes on all four corners at once”). Dion Graham is a solid reader of the audiobook, dexterously shifting between Joe’s narration and the voices of the various characters he meets (as young as AD’s 17-year-old voice and as old as Joe’s grandmother, as white as Gladstone Palmer and as black as Joe). But perhaps his reading of Joe’s narration often falls into an up and down repetitive rhythm that is not as dynamic as it might be. I found this story (set today and so featuring iPads, email, cloud storage, and disposable non-traceable phones etc.) a little too contemporary and prefer Mosley’s post-World War II Los Angeles Devil in a Blue Dress Easy Rawlings novel. When I read Mosley again, it will probably be a Rawlings story. People who like well-written contemporary hardboiled detective stories, especially those set in NYC and or featuring race (it’s “Dedicated to Malcolm, Medgar, and Martin”), should like Mosley’s novel. View all my reviews
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