Black Betty (Paperback)

The time is 1961 the era of Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, and the beginning of The Civil rights movement. Easy Rawlings is raising two adopted children on his own, and his secret real-estate empire is sinking. He has no idea how to solve his financial problems until a sleazy private eye Saul Lynx approaches him with a job. Lynx offers Easy $200 to track down a former acquaintance of his, Elizabeth Eady, aka Black Betty. Betty a beautiful and sensual woman has vanished from her wealthy employer's home in Beverly Hills.

Easy's search for Betty will uncover a trail of chaos and murder. To make matters worse, Easy's psychopathic best friend Mouse is also out of prison determined to find and execute the man who betrayed him. However, this book is much more than a murder mystery; it is a journey into the heart of racial bigotry and the paradox that is the human race. The language is vibrant and moving:

On the bus there were mainly old people and young mothers and teenagers coming in late to school. Most of them were black people. Dark-skinned with generous features. Women with eyes so deep that most men can never know them. Women like Betty who'd lost too much to be silly or kind. And there were the children, like Spider and Terry T once were, with futures so bleak it could make you cry just to hear them laugh. Because behind the music of their laughing you knew there was the rattle of chains. Chains we wore for no crime; chains we wore for so long that they melded with our bones. We all carry them but nobody can see it-not even most of us. All the way home I thought about freedom coming for us at last. But what about all those centuries in chains? Where do they go when you get free?

This is not merely a fast paced and gripping mystery but a powerful story of one of the saddest aspects of American life. Mosley does not preach nor condemn, he merely presents us with a historically accurate account of an era in which this mystery story unfolds. I highly recommend this story.

I state this merely as a preamble to my main topic, the novel BLACK BETTY, by Walter Mosley. It is a good mystery. It has intrigue, deception, betrayal, racism, and murder. It is complex enough to demand a second visit. But, more important than the plot, Mosley has created the world of 1950's Los Angeles in such vivid and believable detail that you'd read the novel even if it were a mere travelogue.

BLACK BETTY marks the fourth appearance of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, an unwilling investigator who is more concerned with providing his children with a good home than he is with solving a case. It is to this end that he accepts an offer of two hundred dollars to track down Elizabeth Eady, a sultress from his past who has gone missing. As Easy once again delves into the lives of others, he visits worlds he wishes to escape from, and worlds he wishes to join. He also realizes that there is no real difference between them.

Easy ranks up with Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade as one of the finest literary detectives. He is tough, resourceful, intelligent, and oddly eloquent. It's also good to see the return of Mouse, Easy's childhood friend/nightmare. Mouse is a killer, and is all the more terrifying for his believability. Like all of Mosley's characters, you get the impression that they have lives beyond the page, that they do not exist merely as foils for Easy.

But that is true of Easy's entire world. In a few simple, elegent sentences, Mosley can describe a character more vividly than most authors can do with pages of exposition. Their manners of speech, their beliefs, their dreams. Mosley can size up an individual like almost no one else can. Even minor characters, such as Ortiz and Jackson Blue, linger in the memory far longer than many lead characters of other novels.

Mosley's Easy stories, despite their being lumped into the sometimes simpleminded detective genre, are always more than they appear. Mosley embues his writings with a palpable sense of rage. The common, almost routine racism that Easy encounters every day gives the stories a compelling weight that his literary predecessor's sometimes lacked. It is a viewpoint that could overwhelm the story, but Mosley is far too skilled to let it happen. Even as Easy muses about Martin Luther King and "the young Irish president", he understands the difference between political rhetoric and day-to-day reality. Easy's world may be fictional on the surface, but it exists, and continues to exist all around us.

BLACK BETTY is a tremendous detective novel that works on many levels. It is a fine example of the detective genre. It is a perfectly realized world unto itself. It is an indictment of how little we have advanced in the past fifty years.