Mosley was born four years after the year when his novel takes place, but apparently he listened closely to the stories his father told when he was growing up in Watts. He moved his shoulder ever so slightly and DeWitt cocked back the hammer. “The large boy, who was wearing red swimming trunks, made a sound like he had swallowed his tongue. He leveled the barrel at the large boy’s right eye and said: ‘I want to see your brains scattered all over your friends’ clothes, son. “DeWitt just smiled and then he pulled the pistol, which looked somewhat like a rifle, from his coat. “ ‘What do you want?’ the footballer asked.

As experienced mystery readers might predict, this simple assignment plunges Easy into a complicated series of intrigues involving other rich white men, other women, more money, and a remarkable number of dead bodies. Most of his friends are black and poor, but DeWitt Albright, a white man wearing a linen suit with a Panama straw hat, pays him generously to find Daphne. Easy is a World War II vet who just lost his job at a defense plant and has to make some quick money to meet the mortgage. Life was still hard in L.A., and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom.”Įzekiel (Easy) Rawlins goes into John’s speak-easy to find out if anyone has seen Daphne Monet, a white woman who likes to hang out in black jazz clubs. The stories were true for the most part, but the truth wasn’t like the dream. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day.

California was like heaven for the Southern Negro.

All of them and John and half the people in that crowded room had migrated from Houston after the war, and some before that. I had been hearing Lips and Willie and Flattop since I was a boy in Houston. “When I opened the door I was slapped in the face by the force of Lips’ alto horn. Within the first 50 pages, Walter Mosley takes us through the back door of a little market at the corner of Central Avenue and 89th Place in Los Angeles and into an illegal black nightclub: Reflexively you blink from the sting of the dark, smoky surroundings and lick your lips to wipe away the taste of the cheap Scotch, as the sweet sounds of an alto saxophone whine up out of the pages of this richly atmospheric detective novel of the ‘40s.

Easy rawlins devil in a blue dress