Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley's greatest skill continues to be his observations of human beings: how they speak, what they look like, how they interact. The Easy Rawlins books are full of interactions where characters circle each other, size each other up, and what they don't say is just as important as what they do. (In general, Mosley's use of language is very powerful without ever seeming anything but conversational - he has a gift in that arena.) There's a sort of easy (forgive me) flow to the books that makes them very, very readable, and Bad Boy Brawly Brown is no exception. However, they do tend to blend into each other a bit, and the "mysteries" are never the most interesting part. The solutions are sometimes completely anti-climactic, in fact.

That doesn't quite happen with Brawly Brown. It's one of the more memorable ones, I think because the plot foregrounds the socio-political aspect - again, something Mosley depicts really well, but usually without quite so big a scope. Here, the generational divide between Easy and the young, more politically motivated Black people he has to investigate drives a lot of the tension, and anyone with a mild sense of mid-century history can kind of see where this is heading. That sense of history-in-the-making benefits the book, because once again Mosley introduces slightly too many characters to keep in your head (albeit one or two, like Sam Houston, being standouts). It's almost better to let it wash over you and notice the almost relentless march toward a famous tipping point instead.

On a sidenote, it's also pleasant to see Easy Rawlins, in middle age, having curbed his slightly less savory personal aspects without sacrificing his hard-boiled weariness. It would be easier for me to put this book in the hands of a new reader than the first two or three in the series, where Easy is, himself, a somewhat more seedy individual. I don't know about the continued reliance on memories of Mouse, though. I hope Mosley is going somewhere with that - there are hints that he is - because he can't keep the trick he employs in this book up for very long before it will become stale.… (mer)