Little green An Easy Rawlins mystery

Walter Mosley

Book - 2013

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Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Published
New York : Doubleday c2013.
Language
English
Main Author
Walter Mosley (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
291 p. ; 25 cm
ISBN
9780307949783
9780385535984
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

It's been six years since Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins drove off a cliff in "Blonde Faith." But time is a flexible concept in the mysteries Walter Mosley writes about a black private eye who works irregular cases in his own neighborhood of Watts and throughout Los Angeles. So it's still 1967 when LITTLE GREEN (Doubleday, $25.95) Opens, and only two months since Easy's accident. Death being just another wobbly notion in this series, Mosley's clearly immortal sleuth emerges from his near-fatal coma and is soon off on a new case. At the urging of his best friend, the violence-prone Raymond (Mouse) Alexander, Easy agrees to search for Evander Noon, known as Little Green, a young black man who wandered up to the Sunset Strip "to see what all the hippies looked like" and went off with a white girl named Ruby. Mosley is never better than when he's got a juicy cut of history to chew on, and the hippie counter-culture of the late '60s perfectly feeds his style. His descriptions of the crash pad where Ruby took Evander during an acid trip are as vivid as any true-life memoir. The bloody laundry bag of cash the boy has somehow acquired proves a smart way to take the narrative into criminal territory, introducing unsavory characters who can shoulder the plot's antisocial behavioral burdens, like shooting people. Easy and Mouse originally burst into this series with guns blazing; but while they still talk the talk, they've mellowed since the old days, and Easy has completed his transformation from tough guy to knight errant. While the relative absence of violence doesn't diminish the novel, the surprisingly pallid language does. A lot of social barriers went down after the Watts riots, and things have changed in Easy's life. ("I was just a witness to the new world.") But the younger generation of liberated blacks, whites and have-it-your-way hippies contribute nothing to the local lingo. Better examples of Mosley's dynamic verbal style are still found in the exchanges between Easy and familiars like Mouse ("That woman hates the water I drink and the sun that shine on my back") and Jackson Blue (a smart man who is "forever thinking, and a thinking man is always in trouble") as well as Mama Jo ("There was no arguing metaphysics with her"), a witch who keeps a raven, a near-feral cat and a couple of armadillos in the cottage where she brews Easy a potent batch of "Gator's Blood" to get him in fighting shape. When you find yourself rooting for the killer in a grisly crime novel, you know you're in the hands of a real writer. Every character in Richard Lange's ANGEL BABY (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) feels like flesh and bone, even the ones who show up just to be killed. The story hangs on the entwined fortunes of Rolando, a Tijuana crime boss respectfully known as el Príncipe; his drug-addled wife, Luz; and Kevin Malone, an American drifter who drives illegals across the Mexican border. The plot explodes after Luz kicks her habit, cleans out her husband's safe, shoots her bodyguards and heads for the border "like a woman on fire." Even for a skilled smuggler like Malone, this is a treacherous journey because el Príncipe has put a ruthless killer, Jerónimo Cruz (street name: el Apache), on their trail. As vividly as the others are drawn, I'd throw them all under the bus for Jerónimo, the morally conflicted killer who becomes the beating heart of the story. "I woke, as it seemed, from a nightmare." Surely that gasp of fear and its sober reflection - "or was it simply my overwrought imagination running away with me?" - has escaped the lips of many a heroine in an 18th-century novel, something thrilling by Mrs. Radcliffe, perhaps. Actually, the line comes from THE ASYLUM (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), John Harwood's clever simulation of a sensation novel. The woman who awakens from a long sleep to find herself in a mental asylum in Cornwall knows herself to be Georgina Ferrars, an unmarried woman who lives with her uncle, a bookseller in the Bloomsbury section of London. But the head of the asylum swears she presented herself as Lucy Ashton (after the tragic heroine of Sir Walter Scott's feverish novel, "The Bride of Lammermoor"), and the uncle in London insists that his niece, Georgina, is at that moment under his roof. Working with a plot drawn from Wilkie Collins's "Woman in White," Harwood puts together a deliciously spooky pastiche of the high and low Gothic traditions and the tender heroines who live and die by them. THE BLACK COUNTRY (Putnam, $26.95) isn't as lurid as "The Yard," Alex Grecian's previous novel about Scotland Yard's original Murder Squad. But the overstuffed plot is still ripe with gory details, like the eyeball a little girl finds in a bird's nest and the leeches a doctor uses to treat those suffering from a mysterious plague. A missing family brings Inspector Walter Day to Blackhampton, a bleak coal town in the English Midlands that's steadily sinking into the tunnels and mine shafts beneath it. Grecian may not know how to hold a meandering plot together, but he has a flair for descriptive drama, so there are strong scenes of giant trees being wrenched from the ground, homes disappearing below the earth and superstitious villagers hiding from the monster that waits in the mines to snatch the unwary. "Our customs are important to us," says an innkeeper who seems to be an authority on Blackhampton's bizarre beliefs. Sometimes they're "what binds people together." Or what makes them craaaazy. Walter Mosley is never better than when he's got a juicy cut of history to chew on - this time the late '60s.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 26, 2013]
Review by Library Journal Review

Evander "Little Green" Noon has gone missing, and Easy Rawlins is pulled into the mystery by sidekick Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. The African American PI, who knows the Los Angeles streets, is the go-to guy to find Evander, but a violent car accident leaves him incapacitated. Local shaman Mama Jo hands Easy a weird concoction called Gator's Blood that provides miraculous strength. Easy then calls on his acute street smarts and embarks on his mission to find Evander. Following the 1967 Watts riots, the City of Angels is flush with hippies and racial tension, making it a challenge for Easy to get straight answers. He learns that finding a lost person is just the beginning of a complicated puzzle that will challenge his deep sense of loyalty. Verdict Mosley's latest addition to this series (after Blonde Faith) is a must-have for hard-boiled mystery fans as Easy and Mouse give the late Robert B. Parker's Spenser and Hawk a run for their money. Street lit staples of betrayal, drug use, and abusive cops are part of this taught tale that rises above other mysteries through its strong African American protagonist. I want Easy Rawlins watching my back. [An eight-city tour.]-Rollie Welch, Cleveland P.L. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

1 I came half-awake, dead and dreaming. My eyes were open but I couldn't focus on anything because I was still falling, as if the nightmare had followed me from sleep into the waking world. I didn't know where I was or where I'd come from. But the bed under me was turning and falling and I, I was sure, had perished. This sensation was so real, so palpable that I closed my eyes and moaned. The movement of the bed then took on a temporal quality; instead of falling I had become unmoored in time: traveling backward and then forward through a life that was mine and yet, at the same time, foreign to me. I watched my mother dying in the bedroom of our shanty house in New Iberia, Louisiana. She was laid up in a feather bed, a big woman who was trying to catch her breath but couldn't inhale right. It sounded like she was drowning. She was so pretty, I thought. I had once loved her but could no longer raise this feeling in my heart. I might have even smiled as she shuddered under the labor of simple breathing. Then I tumbled into a boxcar peopled by brooding and silent black men. They stared at the boy and he saw from their point of view a scared eight-year-old orphan child looking for companionship in those angry, bloodshot eyes. I was no longer that kid but had become those men who couldn't care about another defenseless child orphaned and destined, probably, to die. I saw myself and wondered, almost idly, if that young son would live to the end of the line. I was surprised to see that he had made it to Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Stealing oranges, skulking in back-alley corners, asking everyone he met if they knew a name--Martin. "My grandfather," he said. He'd learned to speak up and stand straight. He already carried scars that would follow him through life but he found his grandfather: a hard man who allowed him to sleep on the outside front porch at night. Time picked up speed after that. In an instant the boy, Ezekiel, was a young man, a fool who signed up for the army, for the war. He passed through North Africa, then Italy and France. He fought men and killed them out of reflex and fear. He liberated a concentration camp, a killer opening the gates for the dead and the dying and those left with the image of death permanently imprinted on their souls. I was dying, no, had died. Returning to Houston, the man, no longer weak or afraid, found that most of his friends in that part of town were deceased. Renfro had been slaughtered by a jealous woman named Theresa who in turn died from alcohol poisoning. Martin killed a white man and then shot himself in the burning shack where the boy had slept on the porch. Minna Rogers, Delphine Montesque, Michael Michaels, Big Boy Sanders, and dozens of others, all died while the boy-turned-man had survived the greatest war in history. "Easy?" There was a flood rising in the room that was swathed in darkness. My right ankle was shackled to the floor next to the bed, and the water was already up to my ears. I pulled against the chain but all that did was cause me pain. My ankle hurt like a motherfucker and the chain would not give. I tried to rise, hoping that I could float to the extent of the bond, that maybe I could keep my nose above water, but I knew somehow that my luck had run out, that Death had come in on me while I was distracted by the mountains of evil I had lived through. Just the fact that I could survive such terror made me guilty, and now he was coming up through the floorboards like he did for my mother. Death. I had followed him through all the years of my life as he dropped bodies in my path as little reminders to me and others that the end of the road was no bed of roses, no kingdom come. It felt as if my whole life was an obstacle course, a slogging journey trying to catch up with Death, trying to get a good look at his face. . . . "Easy." And then, up ahead, on my journey through a past life that no longer belonged to me, I saw his back; the Reaper was right there in front of me, carelessly firing a pistol into the night. I could reach out and touch his shoulder. When I did this he grunted and turned and I realized that I knew this being, this deadly force that had dogged me from the earliest moments of my life. He was well dressed for any occasion or epoch. Smiling with a gold tooth that had a diamond embedded in it, he was a colored man, not black but light-skinned and light-eyed. A brother who had littered the road I traveled with so many dead that even he had lost count. "Easy." His lips didn't move but I recognized my name, my true name, not the one my dead father gave me. Raymond Alexander, known as Mouse to his victims and friends alike, smiled at me and I shivered in pleasure and fear. "Ray," I said, and his smile slowly diminished. He stared at me and shook his head. I almost cried but then I remembered who I was and what I'd been through. "No, man," I said. "You can't dismiss me like some schoolkid. You can't turn your back on me after all these years." He smiled again, and even though I was dead I felt elation. This emotion was followed by the sense of falling again. There was a broad ocean rippling gently under a partial moon and the execution of a perfect accelerating arc of plummeting downward. A shackle was affixed painfully to my right ankle but, impossibly, Mouse was still standing there in front of me, his expression daring me to do something about the fix I was in. "You expect me to fly, motherfucker?" I yelled. Mouse laughed without sound and nodded at me. "Easy, wake up." The command was feminine, a nuisance that somehow carried weight. The panorama of my hallucinatory journey called to me. I wanted to go off with Mouse, to follow the long line of dead black folks, soldiers, and Jews. I wanted to join the people I killed and the ones I couldn't save. I wanted to shed my scarred and pain-riddled body. One more breath seemed like too much to bear. "Easy, it's time for you to wake up." I tried to open my eyes but I was a child again, a slave to sleep, needing just two more minutes of rest. But a hand shook my shoulder and little aches came awake through my upper torso and down my spine. It was this pain that opened my eyes. I could see after a fashion but my vision wasn't proper yet. I couldn't get a bead on the room I was in, but the beautiful Asian woman sitting beside me on the bed was clear and present as a Catholic priest preparing to give last rites. Instead of incense there was a mild floral scent of perfume. "Lynne?" I said. My voice was hoarse and congested, cracking hard enough that I thought my throat might bleed. "I didn't think you were ever going to wake up, Easy," the Chinese bit-part TV actress claimed. "I died," I said. She almost responded but then moved to a chair next to the head of my bed. Excerpted from Little Green by Walter Mosley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.