Some
time back I celebrated in this blog that one of my favorite contemporary
authors, Walter Mosley, was
bringing back Easy Rawlins. Easy is the hero of a series of novels Mosley started
in the nineties with
Devil
in a Blue Dress. Through ten or eleven novels, Mosley takes us through life
in south-central Los Angeles, from right after WWII to the late sixties. Easy
is African-American, as are all the major characters, and you get to see this
tumultuous time through the eyes of that community.
In the most recent novel in the series, Blonde Faith, Mosley leads you to believe that Easy died at the end. I had my doubts, though. You never actually see the body, and besides, Mosley had killed of another character early in the series, only to bring him back later.
What I enjoy about Mosley’s novels, however, is that he lifts the curtain into the African American community and gives you a look at what goes on, how the characters think, and how they regard the white world they live in.
It makes for good reading.
Lawrence Block does the same thing in his Matt Scudder series of novels, except that Scudder is an alcoholic, and over the course of the seventeen or so novels in the series, you see Scudder go from a black-out drunk, into AA, then leading a sober life. The character never forgets, though, that he is an alcoholic. It is how he looks at the world.
What’s also interesting is that both Matt Scudder and Easy Rawlins also inhabit in interesting moral landscape. Over the course of the novels, Scudder kills several people, sometimes for reasons that are ambiguous and disturbing. In several other instances he allows a murder, or a suicide, to happen, reasoning that it is justice. A few times I found it disturbing, but not disturbing enough that I didn’t want to read the next novel.
Easy Rawlins is also implicated in a few criminal acts. In Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Easy goes as far as to shoot Brawly Brown from afar with a rifle, wounding him enough that he is unable to participate in a robbery that Easy knows will end badly.
Mosley’s philosophy is best spoken through a character in another series he writes. In a series of three novels (so far) you see the world through the eyes of Socrates Fortlow, an African-American ex-con who did twenty-seven years in an Indiana prison for murder. Socrates is trying hard to make it in the world, but he does have a philosophy he espouses in the Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned: If it comes down to a choice of killing a black man or turning him over to the police, Socrates would rather kill him. He sees it as the more humane choice.
Not a philosophy everyone has, but in the marginal African-American community inhabited by Socrates, it makes sense.
By the way, the other two books in the Socrates Fortlow series are Walkin’ the Dog and The Right Mistake. Also check out another Mosley series starting with Fearless Jones. I recommend them all.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments