moon_custafer | Book Review: Walter Mosley, Black Betty

While the home connection was down, I read the copy of Walter Mosley's Black Betty that I'd bought last month at BMV. If you've never heard of Mosley's character Easy Rawlins (and you might not have, as he only got one movie adaptation back in the 'nineties), he's an African-American private eye in 1950s-60s LA; he's a lot more complicated than Philip Marlowe; he's raising two kids on his own; and he's not so much a formal, licensed detective as a guy with a reputation for being good at finding out stuff, who is sometimes desperate enough (see: raising two kids) to do so for money. Or to stop his friend Mouse from killing the wrong guy.

Still thinking about this one -- it's an intricately plotted story -- apart from the main mystery (Rawlins is hired to look for the missing ex-housekeeper of a wealthy white family, and untangles a web of murder, racism, police corruption, blackmail, a contested will, etc.) there are three or four other plots going on -- in many other books they'd turn out to be connected with the case, but here they're cases of their own, even if Rawlins is his own client. Like Chandler, Mosley creates a host of characters who only get one or two scenes, but are memorably intriguing (the woman who works as a bookie to subsidize her real dream job, running a daycare; the crazy Texan burglar; the sleazy con man and his adoring, violent sidekick).

Rawlins knows a lot of people, with wildly varying moral compasses; his own is pretty flexible, but this allows him to resolve two of his friends' problems on the last page with a weirdly satisfying example of killing two bird with one stone. Along the way he also muses on society; worries about his son's voluntary mutism; and waxes poetic about the desert landscape. He also gets stabbed and beaten up; has sex with a prostitute; digs a grave in a bomb shelter; dabbles in real estate; and arranges someone's death. Like I said, he's way more complicated than Marlowe.