These are basically novels that include some murders and a protagonist who tries to figure out who dunnit.
The mysteries here are not elaborately clever and the narrative sometimes wanders away from them on lyrical explorations of the black community in Los Angeles or Easy's philosophical musings. That isn't what she wants from him by way of intimacy. His concession to her is to start using her job at the hospital to get information he needs. He refuses to tell his own wife what he does for a living or why. He is a genial narrator who often puts himself down and admits he is being dishonest with himself and with others, but he goes right on being dishonest. I don't read many mysteries, so I don't have a lot to compare these to, but Easy Rawlins is not a particularly likeable protagonist. He seems to relish telling Mouse not to kill someone. Mouse's unthinking violence makes Easy aware of his own violent tendencies and that awareness generally keeps them in check. His best friend is a violent sociopath.Įasy seems to keep Mouse around in part because Mouse is the only person crazier than he is. He drinks a lot, he drinks often, and he drinks for all the wrong reasons. He tends to use all the people he knows as sources of information rather than showing them true friendship. He has a voice in his head that tells him what to do.
He has many of the symptoms of a PTSD sufferer. Easy has no real friends and his attempts at relationships with women do not go well. This may be partly because he doesn't really get a long with most black people either. From the late '40s to the mid '50s though, he has to deal with them more and more often, especially the police. His mother was white and his father was black, so he is sensitive to the effects of racism.Īt this stage of his life Easy Rawlins really does not like white people and the plots of these books give him ample reason not to change his mind. Mosley grew up in Los Angeles after being born there in 1952 he knows this place and these people. Walter Mosley firmly establishes Easy's milieu in Watts, the people, the places, the cultural situation. These first three novels take place in 1948, 1953, and 1955. He does all this while being a black American man born in 1920, which is traumatic enough anyway. Then he goes off to World War II for 4 years, storming the beach at Normandy, going through the Battle of the Bulge with Patton, and liberating concentration camps.
In Gone Fishin', the later novel that tells the story of 19-year-old Easy on a crazy trip with Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, it is obvious that Easy is already a confused and conflicted young man. He had a traumatic childhood, losing his mother at age 8 and losing his father 5 years later, not knowing whether he was killed or simply had to run away. Not enough is made of Easy Rawlins' post-traumatic stress syndrome.
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