LITERATURE-USA: Mosley Broadens Horizon of ‘Easy’ Rawlins

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 25 1997 (IPS) - It isn’t often that a writer of “whodunnits” winds up addressing larger questions of history or race but Walter Mosley has graduated from being an author of mystery stories, to an incisve observer of life for African Americans.

Mosley, the author of six mysteries featuring black detective Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins, tries to balance serious racial issues with tangled murder mysteries – an approach which led to best-selling novels such as as ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ and ‘Black Betty’.

His success, however, has pushed Mosley outside the confines of the mystery genre. President Bill Clinton cites Mosley as his favourite novelist and ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ was made into a hit movie in 1995 movie – starring Denzel Washington as Rawlins.

Now that Mosley is in the top ranks of U.S. black writers has, in turn, helped him bring more mythic dimensions to his latest novel, ‘Gone Fishin’ (published by Black Classics Press, price 22 dollars). It may may share the same characters as Mosley’s earlier books, but shows a marked difference.

Mosley’s shift away from stories that focus on who killed whom has been in the works for some time, with each Rawlins novel progressively more interested in character and history than in solving puzzles.

Last year, he dropped Easy Rawlins altogether to write a novel, ‘RL’s Dream’ (now in paperback from New American Library for 12 dollars) which focused on the relationship between an aging blues musician and a young white woman recovering from a racial attack.

Gone Fishin’ is a further change of pace from the other Rawlins novels, which follow the Texas-born protagonist’s career in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. For one thing, it focuses on the teenage Easy, who has yet to become a private detective or to leave the impoverished environs of Houston.

For another, the novel is less a murder mystery than a picaresque showing the bizarre – almost Gothic “fishing trip” – that Easy takes with and his sinister childhood friend Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander, before Mouse is to marry his sweetheart, EttaMae.

Mouse, a recurring character in the Rawlins novel whose violent inclinations go hand in hand with his bursts of good humour, persuades Easy to accompany him to the small Texas town of Pariah, where he intends to retrieve his family’s wealth from his stepfather, ‘daddyReese.’

daddyReese refuses to help Mouse, sparking an Oedipal struggle that ends violently. That slender plot is augmented by a cast of Southern grotesques that seem straight out of Willian Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: an aging witch who preserves her late husband’s severed head; her son, a retarded hunchback who mutilates dolls; and a white teacher who is friendly with blacks, but refuses to eat with them.

Such weird characters would be out of place in the other Easy Rawlins stories, which are more in the style of the macho detective stories written by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Yet Gone Fishin’, for all its Gothic touches, is really a meditation on violence in black America, which uses its mythic elements to depict a world overshadowed by often meaningless brutality.

Mouse, for example, is both Easy’s best friend and his nightmare, saving his life one moment – likely to kill him at another. A memorable creation, in the tradition of Richard Wright’s hero Bigger Thomas or the ‘gangstas’ of modern-day rap, Mouse is pragmatic about realising his ambitions, but almost innocent in his ability to inflict violence to achieve his goals.

Like Faulkner’s combination of realistic and mythic elements, Mosley also uses his more bizarre characters to show the absurdity of African American life: the spinsterish white schoolteacher, for example, lives in a home crowded by the furniture of all her deceased relatives, and yet she owns almost all of black Pariah as well.

Killing her, Easy realises, would be “worse than killing their own children” for the black residents of Pariah.

The book, which ends up exploring Easy’s coming of age and his musings about the troubled relationships between black fathers and sons, is sparsely-plotted and may seem a bit slim to readers acquainted with the other Rawlins mysteries. But Gone Fisin’ reconfirms Mosley’s serious intent. It enhances his use of the detective genre to study black life in the United States, from the South to cities like New York and Los Angeles, and from the 1930s to the modern era.

Devout fans , such as Bill Clinton, couldn’t ask for more – even if the murders this time around are a little predictable.