Book review: Easy does it - Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley

Published on Friday 7 March 2008 20:13

Blonde Faith By Walter Mosley Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288pp, £12.99

"EARLY MORNING IS THE BEST time," says Walter Mosley's long-suffering private eye, Easy Rawlins. "You're fully rested but not awake enough to remember how hard it all is."

By 1967, when this book opens, rosy-fingered dawn no longer provides transcendence. Battered and middle-aged, Easy sits up nights wondering if whisky would dull his pain.

More than ten books into the series, though, it's clear by now that no form of trouble is potent enough to stop Easy in his tracks. It's equally clear that women have a knack for finding his weak spots. And it's a woman – or absence thereof – that finally threatens to do him in. Easy has just learned that Bonnie Shay, the girlfriend he ditched at the end of Cinnamon Kiss, plans to marry a wealthy rival. This plunges him into a bout of soul-searching and self-loathing.

A man named Pericles Tarr is missing, and the police are prepared to pin his presumed murder on Easy's dangerous sidekick, Raymond (Mouse) Alexander. But Mouse is missing too, so his longtime love, EttaMae, asks Easy to find him and "make sure he's OK". Little time passes before that simple-sounding mission is morphed into a multi-layered puzzle involving sinister ex-military types, a sexy former nun and a smuggling operation that ferries drugs from the jungles of Vietnam to the streets of Los Angeles.

Grumpy but grateful for the distraction, Easy determines to get to the bottom of things. He knows his kind of sleuthing requires bedding a babe or two along the way, but that doesn't mean he's going to be happy about it.

As our escort through the nine circles of Los Angeles, Easy also functions as a volunteer explainer of the black condition – from 1967 to today's multicultural mix – supplementing every encounter with colour commentary, as if he assumes his audience contains few people who look like him. Not many African-American readers would need to be told that black folk of Easy's generation "had to be able to see around the corner to ensure their safety" or that Easy "lived in a world where many people believed that laws dealt with all citizens equally, but that belief wasn't held by my people".

Mosley has been accused of writing purple prose, a charge his sex scenes are unlikely to dispel. Outside the bedroom, though, his compact dialogue continues to sparkle, and his scene-setting is as skilful as ever. It could be that critics fail to appreciate fully Mosley's talents because his Rawlins mysteries appear to come off so effortlessly. But if it looks easy, it's probably not.