A little yellow dog Book

"It was a regular family scene. All we had to do was clean up a few murders and a matter of international dope smuggling, then we could move next door to Donna Reed."

Easy Rawlins is back. 1963, two years on from the disastrous end to Black Betty he is out of the doing favours for people business; living the straight life, working hard, keeping his head down and watching his two adopted children grow. But all that changes when a beautiful woman (aren't they always) pays him some attention, on her schoolroom desk, early one morning. From that moment nothing can ever return, the line has been crossed and before the hunt for a killer can be completed and his name cleared bodies will litter the less respectable areas of L.A., heroin will be imported from France, Easy will fall off of the wagon, a president will be dead, woman will throw themselves at the hero and a little yellow dog will have his vengeance.

There's something about Walter Mosley's prose that keeps me coming back for more. The first Easy Rawlins mystery was a superb piece of noir fiction that introduced one of the great protagonists of the genre but the following three books never really reached those same heights and still I come back for more. They mysteries might not be at the same standard but the manner in which Mosley evokes the time and place, the complex characters that litter Easy's life and especially the complex nature of Easy himself plus the relaxed nature of the first person past tense narration are what make these books worth coming back to.

A Little Yellow Dog however is the first time since Devil in a Blue Dress that I've had a great time with the plot and mystery as well as being a fly on the wall in the life of Easy Rawlins. At one point it seems to rely a little too heavily on a deus ex machina type device to stop the plot getting bogged down in its own setup but that aside it's a story of a good man doing what he needs to do to survive in a place and time when an innocent black man was guilty until proven otherwise. There's a fair amount of socio-political statement running through the story but it's done in such a subtle way that even if you're a racist, redneck, honky, cracker, peckerwood you probably won't be offended by it. Anyway, if you haven't heard, Bill Clinton loves these books.

You feel like this book marks the end of an era for Rawlins, a lot is left hanging open but it's made clear that they can't return to the way they were, you're made to see that a lot of the trouble Rawlins has is of his own doing and until the man can learn to contain his anger, control his darkness, he will never find lasting happiness.

I highly recommend the work of Walter Mosley, the Rawlins series is very good but if you ever stumble upon his Socrates Fortlow books that start with the highly impressive Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned do read them despite the lack of hard-boiled and noir content.