Walter Mosley : Devil in a Blue Dress 9781847600424

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Humanities-Ebooks

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Genre Fiction Sightlines

Walter Mosley Devil in a Blue Dress by John Lennard

Publication Data Text © John Lennard, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copyright in images and in quotations remains with the sources given. Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright materials. If any have not been traced the author will be glad to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk. Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-042-4

Walter Mosley: Devil in a Blue Dress John Lennard

Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author John Lennard took his B.A. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, and his M.A. at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught in the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame, for the Open University and on-line for Fairleigh Dickinson University; he is now Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2/e, OUP, 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002), and the Literature Insights Hamlet (2007). He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, and has written Sightlines on works by Reginald Hill, Octavia E. Butler, Ian McDonald, and Tamora Pierce. His collection Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (2007), published simultaneously with this e-book, launches the Monographs Series.

Contents 1.1 Walter Mosley 1.2 The Easy Rawlins Novels and Stories 1.2.1 The Series 1.2.2 The Cast 1.2.3 The Setting 1.2.4 The Film Adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress 1.2.5 Socrates Fortlow and Fearless Jones 1.3 Policing in California 1.4 Raymond Chandler and the L.A. tradition/s 1.4.1 Pinkerton Men and Private Eyes 1.4.2 A New Kind of Novel 1.4.3 Hollywood’s Gumshoes 1.5 Chester B. Himes and African-American Crime Fiction 1.6 Historic Los Angeles in Crime Fiction 1.7 The US in World War 2 and the ‘G. I. Bill’ 1.7.1 The European and North African Theatres 1.7.2 The Segregated Army 1.7.3 The Migration to California 1.7.4 The ‘G. I. Bill’ and Easy Rawlins’s Mortgage 2. Annotations 2.1 Chapters 1–5 2.2 Chapters 6–10 2.3 Chapters 11–15 2.4 Chapters 16–20 2.5 Chapters 21–25 2.6 Chapters 26–31 3. Essay. ‘In the mortgage of his skin’: Walter Mosley’s Meaningful Streets 4. Bibliography 4.1 Works by Walter Mosley 4.2 Works about Walter Mosley and Crime Writing 4.3 Useful Reference Works

5

1. Notes 1.1 Walter Mosley Walter Mosley was born in Los Angeles in 1952, to an African-American father, Leroy, born in Louisiana, and a Jewish-American mother, Ella, born in New York. Both his parents had come to Los Angeles as post-war migrants, Leroy after serving in World War 2, and through Photograph © Beth Gwinn the ‘GI Bill’ (see Note 1.7.4) and hard work were able to buy a house. Mosley grew up in Watts, attending the private Victory Baptist Day School, and reading voraciously—everything from Marvel comics (of which he now owns more than 30,000) to Winnie the Pooh. When he was 12 the family moved to Pico-Fairfax, and Mosley then attended Alexander Hamilton High School, from which he graduated in 1970. Though a good student Mosley did not really know what he wanted to do, and after enrolling at Goddard College in Vermont for a few semesters dropped out, preferring to travel and drift. He later enrolled at Johnson State College, also in Vermont, graduating in 1977 with a BA in Political Science. He also tried graduate work, but found it without appeal, and from 1977–82 lived in Boston with his partner, choreographer and dancer Joy Kellman, working as a computer programmer and at various odd jobs. In 1982 the couple moved to New York, and in 1987 married. Mosley continued to work in programming and consultancy but was increasingly bored and frustrated. By most accounts his turning-point came in reading Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1982), which in using language familiar to him as an African American persuaded him he could write. He started taking writing classes at the City University of New York, and after disappointments with his first completed novel, Gone Fishin’, had Devil in a Blue Dress accepted. Since 1990 he has published 21 novels (including nine about Easy Rawlins), two collections of stories, and four works of activist non-fiction. He is now a significant presence in African-American publishing and politics, helping to found a publishing institute at CUNY, promoting the Black Classics Press in Baltimore, and writing on various social topics. 1 1

For fuller biographical data see Charles Wilson Jr., Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion (2003).

6 1.2 The Easy Rawlins Novels and Stories 1.2.1 The Series The Easy Rawlins books, their dates of publication, and the year in which each is set, are:1 Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) A Red Death (1991) White Butterfly (1992) Black Betty (1994) A Little Yellow Dog (1996) Gone Fishin' (1997) Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002) Six Easy Pieces (2003) Little Scarlet (2004) Cinnamon Kiss (2005)

Summer 1948 Summer 1953 Summer–Fall 1956 September 1961 November 1963 Fall 1939 February 1964 August 1965 Fall 1966

Their order of publication is also the chronological order of plot, save that Gone Fishin’—the first novel Mosley wrote and earliest plot, dealing with Easy’s late adolescence in South-West Texas—was published only after the success of subsequent work. The other anomaly so far is Six Easy Pieces, seven short stories that fit in among the first seven novels to amplify and throw sidelights on Easy’s complicated life. Mosley apparently intends to continue the series until Easy is 70, bringing him up to 1990, when Devil in a Blue Dress was published. An obvious literary model is African-American playwright August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel, 1945–2005), who from 1984–2005 wrote ten plays, each dealing with a decade of black US twentieth-century history—but the Rawlins novels are also indebted to Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) and later crime writers including Chester B. Himes (1909– 84), Sue Grafton (b. 1940) and James Ellroy (Lee Earle Ellroy, b. 1948) (Notes 1.4– 6 below). The Rawlins novels have grown progressively more complex and skilled in execution, and (probably for commercial reasons) their sex scenes more explicit, but Mosley’s mode, cast, and high ambitions were there from the first. His narration is almost always laconic, details sparing and explanations minimal, but a wide world is 1

Full details in the Bibliography.

7 implicit in the Los Angeles cityscape with its sprawling neighbourhoods and famous landmarks, and in the vastness of the US that spawned Easy, bringing him to south LA via the notorious 5th Ward in Houston and army service during WW2. It is in this strongly representative sense that Mosley’s project most obviously summons Wilson’s, while his attention to south LA from the inside complements Ellroy’s more brutal and slangy portrayal from the outside. The unifying feature of the titles is colours. Many series authors do something similar: among the best known are the ‘Nursery Tale’ series (Goldilocks, 1977; Rumpelstiltskin, 1981 etc.) by Ed McBain 1 (1926–2005); the Californian ‘Alphabet’ series (A is for Alibi, 1983; B is for Burglar, 1985 etc.) by Sue Grafton; and the ‘Death’ series (Naked in Death, 1995; Glory in Death, 1995 etc.) by J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts, b. 1950). Grafton is a probable influence, but colours specifically summon John D. MacDonald (1916–86), who from 1964–85 published 21 novels featuring ‘salvage consultant’ and amateur Florida PI Travis McGee: The Deep Blue Good-by (1964) Nightmare in Pink (1964) A Purple Place for Dying (1964) The Quick Red Fox (1964) A Deadly Shade of Gold (1965) Bright Orange for the Shroud (1965) Darker than Amber (1966) One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966) Pale Gray for Guilt (1968) The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1968) Dress Her in Indigo (1969) The Long Lavender Look (1970) A Tan and Sandy Silence (1972) The Scarlet Ruse (1973) The Turquoise Lament (1973) The Dreadful Lemon Sky (1975) The Empty Copper Sea (1978) The Green Ripper (1979) Free Fall in Crimson (1981) Cinnamon Skin (1982) The Lonely Silver Rain (1985) 1

The pen-name of Evan Hunter, born Salvatore Lombino.

8 Adding white and black, Mosley’s colours come in order from MacDonald’s: blue, red, yellow, brown, scarlet, cinnamon. Additionally, six of the stories in Six Easy Pieces, published as ‘bonuses’ in a 2002 re-issue of the novels to date, also feature MacDonald’s colours: ‘Crimson Stain’, ‘Silver Lining’, ‘Lavender’, ‘Gator Green’, ‘Gray-Eyed Death’, & ‘Amber Gate’. The colourless ‘Smoke’ accompanied the equally colourless Gone Fishin’. Though very different from Easy, McGee is similarly without professional status yet called in as go-between and fixer, and also has a strong fetish about his home, a houseboat called the Busted Flush moored in Fort Lauderdale. McGee has everchanging female companions, and Rawlins, less promiscuous, is equally marked by a greater persistence of friendships than ‘relationships’. What really matters about the connection, though, is more to do with conceptions of crime writing and modes of narration than with these topoi, for MacDonald’s series was (and is) important for its sociology. Introducing a 1995 reprint of The Deep Blue Good-by, McDonald’s greatest Floridian successor in crime writing, Carl Hiaasen (b. 1953), remarked: For me and many natives (of Florida), some of McGee's finest moments were when he paused, mid-adventure, to inveigh against the runaway exploitation of this rare and dying paradise. If a cypress swamp got plowed to make way for another shopping mall, he took it personally: "This was instant Florida, tacky and stifling and full of ugly and spurious energies." [...] Most readers loved MacDonald's work because he told a rip-roaring yarn. I loved it because he was the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty. He had the same sort of wise, cynical eye that Raymond Chandler cast so stylishly upon the misled mankind of Los Angeles, yet MacDonald’s McGee seems more outraged than Chandler’s Marlowe.1

MacDonald’s stress (to little avail) on ecology is distinctive, but with that allowance one might say something similar of Mosley and south LA, particularly Watts. Real estate development and loss of recreational land is not ignored—the conurbanisation of LA county is a running theme—but greater prominence of race and poverty make it likely to be welcomed as economic opportunity and redress. And if Hiaasen is right to see the force of Chandler’s Marlowe in McGee, it is equally in Easy, and by 1

Carl Hiaasen, ‘Introduction’, in John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good-by (NewYork: Fawcett Crest, 1995), pp. vi–vii. Much of the introduction can be read using ‘Look Inside’ at Amazon.com.

9 Mosley’s own choice of titles the influence must have worked as much via McGee in Florida as directly from Chandler’s own Californian work. Given explicitly African-American identity and concerns as a writer, one might expect Mosley’s colours to relate overtly to race, but even in White Butterfly and Black Betty no simple symbolism is evident. Titles do of course constantly parade the issue of colour before every reader, but interpretation is complex and uncertain. Devil in a Blue Dress appears to be an original phrase, and clearly refers to Daphne Monet, reaching through her (pseudo-)French identity to the European tradition in which a ‘blue gown’ was a dress of ignominy for a woman committed for harlotry, and so a term for prostitutes. Additionally, in the American Civil War a ‘Blue Devil’ was Confederate Army slang for a Federal soldier, as Easy was in World War 2. It is also (i) a term for alcoholic delusions, (ii) a Trinidadian carnival mas (a role defined by mask, props, & behaviours), & (iii) a jazz-band from Texas and Louisiana famous in the late 1920s and early ’30s (see Ch. 4, p. 24). To all these must be added the melancholic, musical, puritan, bruised, and pornographic colour of the LA sky. 1.2.2 The Cast Devil in a Blue Dress was first in the series, and those introduced here form the core cast of later books: Easy, Mouse, EttaMae, and rescued Hispanic boy (Jesus). Easy has various business and sexual partners, but friendship with Mouse and guardianship of Jesus (and later an adopted daughter, Feather) are consistently important. Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins was born in Louisiana c.1920, but grew up in the notorious 5th Ward of Houston, Texas. In 1939 he was a partial witness to two killings by ‘Mouse’, and left for Dallas, where he volunteered in 1941. He served in North Africa and Italy (1942–4), and saw combat during the advance to Berlin after D-Day (1944–5). After demobilisation in 1945, he returned briefly to Houston but then migrated to south LA to work at ‘Champion Aircraft’ (a fictional version of Donald Douglas’s Santa Monica factory), until being fired in 1948—when Devil in a Blue Dress begins. In later novels Easy still acts as an amateur PI but also becomes a landlord and Head Custodian at Sojourner Truth High School. His cases have so far taken the series through the 1950s and into the 1960s. Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander was born in Texas c.1920, and met Easy in Houston. A savage childhood and adolescence produced a man psychopathically ready to kill.

10 In 1939 he went with Easy to ‘Pariah’, deep in West Texas, to see his stepfather and seek repayment of a legacy from his mother he believed he was owed. To get it he killed ‘Daddy’ Reese and another man present through his manipulation, and whom he set up to take the blame. Immediately afterwards he married EttaMae Harris (with whom Easy had once slept), also from Houston. In one sense the contrast between Easy and Mouse is not problematical. Easy does not and cannot kill with the casual intensity of Mouse, and is morally aware in ways Mouse has never begun to imagine. But Easy can and does profit from Mouse’s amorality, and relies on it. They are friends—none deeper—yet Easy’s silence is repeatedly bought with complicit profit, never officially sought but welcomed and used, and he is perfectly capable of violence on his own account (though Mosley is always careful not to force readers into too great an awareness of the bloody details). The obvious generic model for their relationship is white Boston PI Spenser and black mercenary Hawk in a series of (to date) 34 novels by Robert B. Parker (b. 1932). Created in 1974 as male equals across the colour-line, Spenser and Hawk continuously explore a similar divide in morality despite unity of purpose. Spenser, for example, claims to be unable to kill in cold blood, but has done so at least once, while Hawk has no apparent qualms once self-interest and/or loyalty are involved— but Parker constantly warns against supposing them so very different. His series has become a modern epitome of ‘hard-boiled’ or ‘Chandleresque’ crime writing, on which he completed a Ph.D. in 1971, and in the mid-1980s a TV series starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks was briefly a hit on US TV—just the right time to reinforce Parker’s influence on Easy and Mouse. 1.2.3 The Setting Easy Rawlins was not set down anywhere. Even without Mosley’s knowledge of and removal from the West Coast, LA and California constitute a particular context in life and literature, and if everyone knows (or imagines themselves to know) something about them, underlying structures are not often well comprehended. Bordered by Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico, California covers 158,693 square miles (411,015 km2), and is now the third largest state by area (after Alaska and Texas). In the 2000 census the population was 33,871,648, making it the most populous state; the actual figure will be higher. No ethnicity dominates: in 2000, Whites were 47.4% of the state population, Hispanics/Latinos 32.4%, Asians 11%,

11 Blacks 6.5%, and people who self-identified as ‘Biracial’ 1.9%. Geographically, California is shaped by the geologically young Coast Ranges (including around LA the Santa Gabriel, Monica, & Ana Mountains) and the inland barrier of the older Sierra Nevada. Between them Central Valley fuses the fertile Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. California has the highest and lowest points of the Lower 48, and major fault zones. The northern Coast Ranges are temperate and rainy, the southern ones drier; in the SE is the Mojave Desert. Water resources are an issue, and domestic supply remains a serious problem for many communities. California’s economy is the world’s sixth largest, above three G8 members. Besides gold, oil, and other mineral resources, wealth is founded on agriculture: it is the largest dairy- and fruit-producing state, and dominates US wine-making. Water resources are again the limiting factor. In Southern California, the San Diego–LA belt was from the 1930s–80s the largest defence and heavy industrial manufacturing area in the US, but has been in steep decline since the end of the Cold War. Hollywood–Burbank is central to motion pictures, and LA (with New York) headquarters the entertainment industry. Silicon Valley, between Palo Alto and San Jose, is the primary production area for semiconductors and software, and California is a major tourist destination, for DisneyLand, Sea World, surfing, national parks etc.. The name derives from an island paradise, Califia, in an early sixteenth-century Spanish romance, Las sergas de Esplandián (before 1510), added by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (d. 1504) to his edition of the fourteenth-century Amadis de Gaul. It may go back to Arabic caliph, khalif, ‘deputy [of God]’, and caliphate as the territory of such a ruler; French califerne dates to early ninth-century wars between Charlemagne and the Moors. The land comprising California was ceded to the US by Spain in the treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo (1848), and the state joined the union as 31st member in 1850. Population growth has always been steady, but in the 1850s (following the Gold Rush), 1920s (the cinema boom), and 1940s (WW2) it was explosive: 1850—92, 597 1860—379, 994 1870—560, 247 1880—864, 694 1890—1, 213, 398 1900—1, 485, 053 1910—2, 377, 549 1920—3, 426, 861

1930—5, 677, 251 1940—6, 907, 387 1950—10, 586, 223 1960—15, 717, 204 1970—19, 953, 134 1980—23, 667, 902 1990—29, 760, 021 2000—33, 871, 648

12 This scale and rapidity of growth make (with physical size and diversity) for a tremendous patchwork. San Francisco and the Bay Area have a very different feel from LA, San Diego, and the south. Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco became the major US centre of hippy living in the 1960s, associated with the ‘Beat Poets’, and so is partly opposed to the value-systems of Hollywood–Burbank. Southern Westchester, where the international airport LAX is located, has been an air-centre since the 1930s, most famously through the efforts of billionaire pilot, designer, and movie-producer Howard Hughes (1905–76). The H-1 Racer, H-4 Hercules (‘Spruce Goose’), and Lockheed Constellation were all partly or wholly built in Westchester, and the only Spruce Goose that ever flew was moored for many years in Long Beach. In 1947 Hughes was badly injured when an experimental US Army spyplane (XF-11) crashed in Beverley Hills. Watts, a small, largely black neighbourhood around East 105th, developed during WW2, but became famous for a lengthy and violent riot in 1965. Southern LA exploded again in 1992, after the acquittal of four LAPD. officers videoed beating African-American Rodney King. California is divided into 58 counties, including Los Angeles County (with 10m+ residents, the US’s most populous county) and its immediate neighbours, Orange and San Bernardino Counties. Dense urbanisation with incorporated townships and metro areas makes for civic bureaucracy and jurisdictional disputes. Now usually thought a strongly liberal and Democratic state, California was until recently Republican. Presidents Richard M. Nixon (1913–94) and Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) were Californian. Nixon, born there, served as US Representative (12th district, south San Francisco, 1947–50) and Senator (1950–3) before serving as Vice-President (1953–61) and President (1969–74). Reagan moved to California in his 20s, and was President of the Hollywood-based Screen Actors’ Guild 1947–51 & 1959–63, before serving as Governor (1967–75) and President (1981–9). 1.2.4 The Film Adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress In 1995 Devil in a Blue Dress was filmed amid considerable hype about a boom in ‘noir’ writing and films that played well against Mosley’s and Easy’s racial identity. The novel had been well-received from the first, but its real boost came in 1992 when Presidential candidate Bill Clinton (a hero of sorts to many African Americans as the first white politician of his stature to be obviously at ease in black company) named Mosley as his favourite (crime) writer. Producer Jesse Beaton instigated the project, with backing from executive producer (and director of The Silence of the

13 Lambs) Jonathan Demme; adaptation-direction was by African-American Carl Franklin. Easy was played by Denzel Washington, Mouse by Don Cheadle, Albright by Tom Sizemore, Daphne by Jennifer Beales, and Coretta by Lisa Nicole Carson. The plot of the film is significantly different from that of the novel, changing some incidents and identities (including one killing and one killer) for the sake of ‘clarity’, and “reworking [...] the Daphne character, making her older and prompting her actions out of love, rather than greed and revenge”.1 Mosley is credited as associate producer, and gave these changes his blessing—which doesn’t make them any more sensible or desirable. The claimed need for greater clarity of plot is arguable, but disrespects in an impatient modern manner a great lesson of the genre taught by Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939). That novel is infamously complicated by extensive double- and triplecrossing, and during filming of the first adaptation in 1946—screenplay by William Faulkner (1897–1962), Leigh Brackett (1915–78), & Jules Furthman (1888–1966), directed by Howard Hawks (1896–1977), starring Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) and Lauren Bacall (b. 1924)—screenwriters and director asked Chandler ‘Who did kill chauffeur Owen Taylor?’, only to be told he had no idea. The issue was never resolved, and the film is (far more than the book) logically baffling—but audiences don’t much care, and both book and film remain popular classics. Provision of moral and acceptable motives for Daphne Monet also ignores a generic history replete with femmes fatales whose siren-songs must be resisted— most famously Miss Wonderly (Brigid O’Shaugnessey) in The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961). Filmed in 1931, 1936 (as Satan Met a Lady), and 1941, the last film-version—directed by John Huston (1906–87), starring Bogart and Mary Astor (1906–87)—is notorious for Bogart’s closing rejection of Astor’s sexual proffer, and subsequent delivery of her to the police to pay for murdering his partner. The ending is vital to the movie’s continuing reputation as the founding film noir, and seeking to whitewash the Daphne Monet of Mosley’s novel puts political correctness before narrative fidelity and vitality. Heavy on period detail and soundtrack, with a strong African-American identity in script, direction, and cast, the film of Devil was well-received, and is available on DVD, but Washington’s performance is not often listed among his best, and later Rawlins novels have not been filmed. One of Mosley’s Socrates Fortlow books, 1

Insert provided with the commercial DVD of the film, Columbia Tristar Home Video catalogue # CDR 23183 (2000).

14 Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997), was filmed by HBO in 1998 (Mosley co-producing with Lawrence Fishburne), but there have again not been sequels.1 There is however a body of opinion that thinks the film of Devil seriously underrated, unfairly eclipsed by Christopher McQuarrie’s original screenplay The Usual Suspects (1995) and Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), adapting Ellroy’s novel. 1.2.5 Socrates Fortlow and Fearless Jones Distinct from the Rawlins series, Mosley’s story-cycles about ex-con Socrates Fortlow—Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998) and Walkin’ the Dog (1999)—are also set in Watts and wider LA, but in the 1980s–90s. There are also three novels about the odd couple of ex-G.I. ‘Fearless’ Jones and bookshop-owner Paris Minton that are set in Easy’s L.A. world of the mid-1950s—Fearless Jones (2001), Fear Itself (2003), and Fear of the Dark (2006). The deeply inarticulate ‘Fearless’ has a similar history of army service to Easy, but like Chester Himes came to California from the Mid-West, and worked casually at Douglas Aircraft. Paris, who likes to present himself as a confirmed coward while talking fast, has Easy’s Louisiana background, intellectual smarts, and ambition. Given the period setting these novels share with A Red Death and White Butterfly, overlap in mood and action is unsurprising, and Mosley acknowledges it with passing mentions of ‘Mouse’ and a minor figure from the Rawlins series, Jackson Blue. The first two Jones/Minton novels (2001, 2003) bracket Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002), which resumed the Rawlins series after a six-year hiatus, and were clearly both a way back in to the period and an alternative means of exploring it. Chandleresque plots are adapted for African-American life and communities in L.A. and the relationship of Fearless and Paris is a version of Easy and Mouse, similarly sharing virtues and vices needed to win through. Fearless Jones stands in particular relation to Devil, in that the central catalyst of action is a moody femme fatale. Fear Itself, however, posits a very different catalyst, a slave diary kept over generations and providing—much in the manner of Roots (1976) by Alex Haley (1921–92)—a continuous genealogical record stretching back to pre-enslavement African ancestry. 1

As I write HBO has just announced plans to film the eighth Easy Rawlins novel, Little Scarlet. Mosley is apparently to write the screenplay but casting details have not yet been publicised. Whatever may be further announced will be posted at: Πhttp://www.twbookmark.com/features/waltermosley/news.html

15 Fear of the Dark develop the series in different (and more comic) directions. Socrates Fortlow, released from prison in 1988 after serving 27 years for rape and murder, and trying to stay free in a world often unrecognisable to him, is a far more distinctive voice. Imprisoned in 1961, his references overlap with the worlds of Easy, Fearless, & Paris, but his crime, prison experience, and more contemporary setting make his take on things distinct. Less willing than Mouse or Fearless to take expedient risks (though by no means unwilling to take carefully considered violent action), Fortlow has the same massive presence and threat, but is less easy in himself with it, and as ‘Socrates’ suggests is a troubled, acute philosopher. 1 The story-cycle forms and phrasal, continuous-present titles accord with the philosophy, small incidents and their slight or appalling resolutions accumulating in open sequence. The most suggestive US literary model for this kind of novel-in-linked-stories would not be anything in crime writing as such, but The Unvanquished (1938) and Go Down, Moses (1942) by Nobel Laureate and chronicler of the racial South, William Faulkner (1897–1962)—both, as it happens, written during Faulkner’s period in Hollywood with noir director Howard Hawks, responsible for The Big Sleep. Neither the Jones/Minton novels nor Fortlow story-cycles are essential to understanding Easy, but are strongly recommended (beyond their own merits) for sidelights on him and on Mosley’s practice as a writer.

1.3 Policing in California With scores of competing and interlocking jurisdictions, policing in California can be confusing. It is layered, and each organisation in each layer has a distinct identity—hence the possibility of such astonishing but verisimilar incidents in Ellroy’s work as a police car in hot pursuit crossing a jurisdictional line only to be arrested for speeding while the fleeing criminals are waved on. Any incorporated township may have a police force, empowered to arrest and detain under the California Penal Code but answerable only to their own chief and as township employees. In fiction and reality such forces offer two prime possibilities: corruption through inertia or particular private/corporate advantage; and unexpected, techno-savvy efficiency, usually because a good chief with big-city experience and training has been hired. 1

Mosley had been reading Plato intensely in the year before writing Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.

16 Counties also have forces, usually ‘Sheriff’s Departments’; individual officers are ‘Deputies’, responsible for crimes and issues affecting multiple townships and unincorporated areas, and most often encountered by ordinary citizens on highway patrol. The LA County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) is a very substantial force (in January 2007 it had 13,000+ staff including 8,000+ officers) with resources to match. The LASD runs the jails, and there is a long history of competition, proper, improper, and flat-out corrupt, between the LASD and LA Police Department (LAPD). The major metropolitan areas also have their own forces, most notoriously the LAPD, about the same size as the LASD. These are highly articulated, with area stations and substations, specialist divisions for major kinds of crime—robbery and assault, bunco (fraud etc.), homicide—and their own air, underwater, ‘SWAT’, canine, and equine units. They are also, in fiction as in reality, notoriously entangled with city politics and subject to improper political pressure and corruption. The policemen by whom Easy is for primarily political and partisan reasons maltreated in Devil are plainclothes LAPD men. Entwined through all these levels there may be independent police forces with particular, limited responsibilities in a given district. Various Parks, Schools, and Transport Police are the most important. Next come the agencies of the California State Police, most famously their highway-patrolmen (‘CHiPs’) and State Troopers, but most importantly the state Bureau of Investigation, with major forensic resources. Like the LASD and LAPD, but unlike local forces, these state organisations also have responsibilities to and formal contact with major federal agencies in Washington, DC. Those federal agencies—FBI, CIA, Drugs Enforcement Agency, Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms, Justice Department (controlling US Marshals), Department of Defence (controlling Military Police), and since 2002 Department of Homeland Security (Counter-Terrorism)—form the final layer. In general all have the right within particular remits to override any agency at a lower level, and the dominant literary and cinematic trope, often justified, is for them to be seen and resented by local, city, and state officers as heavy-handed glory-hounds and responsibilityshirkers. There is a counter-trope of enlightened co-operation in explicit service of a victim’s memory and the ethos of crime prevention.

17 1.4 Raymond Chandler and the L.A. Tradition/s 1.4.1 Pinkerton Men and Private Eyes The history of modern policing begins in London in 1829 with foundation of the Metropolitan Police, and the history of private detection in Chicago in 1850 with Glasgow-born Scottish-American Allan Pinkerton (1819–84), founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, whose employees were ‘Pinkerton Men’. Pinkerton had been a sheriff since 1846, and in 1850 became Chicago’s first ‘City Detective’ with explicitly political interests. After success solving railroad robberies and the like, he became famous in 1861 for foiling a plot to assassinate Lincoln. A Chartist as a young man in Britain, Pinkerton identified with the Union, and during the Civil War organised an intelligence network in the Confederacy, but after the war became increasingly identified with the industrial establishment, hiring out Pinkertons as ruthless strike-breakers and enforcers. Their greatest ‘success’ was infiltrating the ‘Molly Maguires’ in Pennsylvania, which inspired the last Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear (1914–15). The most controversial came after Pinkerton’s death (the Agency was run by his sons)—involvement of 300 Pinkertons during the ‘Homestead Strike’ of 1892 (Carnegie Steel Co. vs Amalgamated Union of Iron & Steel Workers) in a bloody fiasco that left nine strikers and seven Pinkertons killed, and hundreds badly injured on both sides. More romantically, Pinkerton Men tracked some of the most notorious outlaws of the West, including Jesse James and the Wild Bunch. The Agency was bought in 2003 by Securitas AB, a multinational conglomerate. Such businesses are probably Pinkerton’s greatest practical legacy, but there is also. more romantically, the ‘gumshoe’, softly following folk, or ‘private eye’—from the Pinkerton logo, an open eye with the words ‘We Never Sleep’. This relates as much, say, to philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s concern with ‘panoptic’ (all-seeing) authority & Tolkien’s choice of a lidless eye as the emblem of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, as to crime fiction. But the Pinkerton example generated competitors and imitators, agencies run by ex-Pinkertons or ex-policemen responding to booming demand from a growing bourgeoisie for services the police could, would, or should not provide. From this industry eventually emerged the Private Investigator (PI, Private Eye), a professional private investigator for hire who became a distinctive, potent literary protagonist or (anti-)hero/ine. In reality, memoirs, research, and common sense suggest that most such people deal almost exclusively with rather humdrum cases involving (suspected) adultery and minor corporate theft.

18 1.4.2 A New Kind of Novel In one sense the prime mover of the first English ‘Golden Age’ of crime writing in 1890–1914, Sherlock Holmes, was a PI. Elements of the sub-genre begin with him, including a fetishised personal dwelling, substance abuse, and strained morality regarding women, but Holmes, de facto a professional, is also a ‘genius detective’, close to Golden-Age amateurs in his idiosyncratic knowledge and attitudes. It is the American route from the Pinkertons that defines the figure. The first clear emergence of the PI is in pulp magazines after World War 1. Race Williams, created by Carroll John Daly (1889–1958), appeared in Black Mask from 1923, and the sub-genre evolved rapidly, principally in Dashiell Hammett, a curious, latterly reclusive man who in the 1910s–20s worked for the Pinkerton Agency (which took him to California for the ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle case in 1921) and became one of Mask’s best contributors. His first major fictional creation was the nameless, ruthless ‘Continental Op’, more-or-less a Pinkerton Man, in short stories and the novels Red Harvest (1929) & The Dain Curse (1929, often thought racist). Hammett also created Sam Spade, less violent but also unlikeable: he appears in only The Maltese Falcon (1930) and three short stories, but captured attention—for cynical wisecracks that became a stylistic feature of the sub-genre and as the embodiment of an endangered, intransigent male honour-code that leads him to condemn a woman he loves (desires, admires) out of loyalty to a dead partner he didn’t like. Hammett also created gentle, wealthy amateur PI Nick Charles in The Thin Man (1933), but it is Spade more than anyone who defined the ‘hard-boiled’ PI. Full development of the sub-genre as craft and art belongs primarily to Chandler, who confirmed Hammett’s tendency to look to the West Coast—in Chandler’s case LA. PI Philip Marlowe first appeared in a short story, ‘Finger Man’ (1934), and is the hero of seven novels: The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1954), & Playback (1959). He appears in one other story, ‘The Pencil’ (v.t. ‘Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate’), published posthumously in 1960, and the unfinished Poodle Springs, completed by Robert B. Parker in 1989. (Parker wrote a sequel to The Big Sleep, Perchance to Dream, in 1991.) Chandler was a primary historian-critic of the sub-genre, and in the last three paragraphs of ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944) produced his classic formulation: In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the

19 raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not much care about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honour in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure, He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.1

This final sentence, rethought, was given to Marlowe in Playback: asked “How can a hard man be so gentle?” he says, “If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.”2 And so the tightrope these unmean men must walk drew taught. Collectively, stories, novels, and essay have exerted unrivalled influence; all successors owe Marlowe something and the most important owe most. Chandler is the source of a potent criminal-and-detective current in Californian writing (a major component of US literature), which runs through (among others) Ross MacDonald 1

2

Chandler’s essay in The Atlantic was collected in The Simple Art of Murder (1950), and is much anthologised. I quote from Allen & Chacko, eds, Detective Fiction: Crime and Compromise (New York etc.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 398–9. See also Dorothy Gardner & Kathrine Sorley Walker, eds, Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962; London: Allison & Busby, 1984). Raymond Chandler, Playback (1958), in The Chandler Collection, Vol. 2 (London: Picador, 1983), pp. 624–5 (Ch. 25).

20 (1915–83), Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller (b. 1944), James Ellroy, & T. Jefferson Parker (b. 1953). At the same time much influence is exercised via a devil’s bargain. 1.4.3 Hollywood’s Gumshoes The speed and determination with which Hollywood seized on Sam Spade suggests the cinematic lure of the genre, and versions of The Maltese Falcon (1931, ’36, ’41—see Note 1.2.4) did not stop until with Bogart & Astor they reached classic form. Nick Charles, Hammett’s wealthy amateur, proved easier, and the 1934 film of The Thin Man starring William Powell & Myrna Loy was a huge hit, generating five sequels in as many years. Spade was tougher, despite the best efforts of Bette Davis in the Miss Wonderly role in 1936; not until Bogart played Spade in 1941 was the right combination of cynicism and sentiment found. Bogart’s later performance as Marlowe in the 1946 film of The Big Sleep locked identification with both roles and their animating idea; his period style with cigarettes, hats, guns, dames, and friends are recurring leitmotifs of the sub-genre. The only other actor to have even remotely comparable impact on film noir is Robert Mitchum (1917–97), more for villainous anti-heroes in The Night of the Hunter (1954) and Cape Fear (1962), and quasi-tragic protagonist in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), than for portrayal of an ageing Marlowe in Dick Richards’s 1975 film of Farewell, My Lovely and Michael Winner’s crudely destructive 1978 re-make of The Big Sleep. The classics of film noir have tremendous power, energy, and style, and spawn as many parodies or pastiches as imitations. The scale of Bogart’s domination of the PI imaginary makes such a role a necessary step for an actor, and many have tried it at least once. But Bogart’s Spade and Marlowe are more romantic and romanticised than their originals in the texts of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, not just in inevitable fetishisation on screen of guns, clothing, and cars. Physical appearance, details of location, and aspects of plot are altered, cinematic moods created with music (since Ellroy a marked feature of crime novels) and lighting unspecified in print—hence the powerfully ‘Chandlerian’ dynamics that do not in fact originate with him. In some crime writers (including Robert B. Parker and in a different way Mosley) there is a strong dynamic signifying on the cinematic tradition (perceived as stylishly unreal) and the protagonist-detective’s admiration and contempt for figures, tropes, and topoi of that tradition. A distinct awareness of Chandler’s more specifically literary heritage may also be apparent, to protagonists as to readers.

21 1.5 Chester B. Himes and African-American Crime Fiction Arguments about genre fiction in general and crime in particular are complicated by race. Dominant, ideologised critical distinctions (‘hard-’ & ‘soft-boiled’ etc.) make racial representation or bias secondary. There is also a larger, more important context relating to reading habits, racial or ethnic identity, and mass production and marketing of genre fiction. It is for example commonplace and reasonable to remark the relative scarcity of black writers of genre fiction, and if the genre most often now singled out for racial disparity is science fiction, before about 1990 the more obvious candidate was crime. Even in 2007 there is a clear sense in which Mosley is, because and only because of ethnicity and skin colour, a pioneer in crime writing (and SF), which seems shameful—but should it? Should one, can one, reasonably expect a given genre to have a racially specific readership, and so a corresponding racial disproportion in ownership of means of production? Literary genres including crime are (despite the habit of treating them as pigeon-holes or boxes into which things can be ‘put’) grouped processes of expectation and satisfaction within exchanges between authors, material producers (whether publishers, theatres, or movie studios), and consumers of narrative. It follows, if a racially specific literary market—of whatever race—may exist, that a genre may evolve therein that is racially specific in appeal without being prejudiced. The problem arises with an increasingly global, primarily English-language massmarket whose parameters include substantial groups with variant racial or ethnic identities; the question is whether demonstrable racial disproportion in production or consumption of ‘mainstream’ genres demands remedial action. Underlyingly, the implication is that African Americans (or other minorities) may improperly have been excluded from the general practice of genre fiction, or particular genres. Whether this is true, and if so how what mechanisms function to make it so, remain unclear, but the implication is nevertheless found increasingly widely in criticism. Such issues have become more pressing as part of (i) a trend in literary studies to challenge the low status of genre fiction and received oppositions of high/elite vs low/popular art; and (ii) development of specifically African-American studies. Attention has begun to focus on ‘black crime fiction’ as a category: early authors have been disinterred, and the black contribution to pulp magazines and dime novels reconsidered, but the emergent history is centred on one towering figure. Chester B. Himes (1909–84) was undoubtedly astonishing, but pressures of ideologised construction can already be seen. It is possible, for example, to construct

22 a satisfyingly ‘authentic’ Himes who served more than seven years (1928–36) for armed robbery in Ohio State Penitentiary, learning in boredom and for jail-kudos to write hard-boiled stories for Black Mask. After release he wrote the nine novels of the ‘Harlem Cycle’ (1957–69) featuring ‘Coffin Ed’ Johnson and ‘Grave Digger’ Jones wielding nickel-plated .38s to police the greatest of America’s ghettos. What this leaves out, besides Himes’s middle-class birth and identity, is, for instance, that his first five novels were neither conceived nor received as crime writing, although they feature crimes and criminals, and he did not begin to write explicitly criminal novels until 1957, when he was nearly 50; after 1953 he lived in Paris, and from 1969 Moraira in Spain. One could add Himes wrote the first novel in the ‘Harlem Cycle’ for Marcel Duhamel, editor of Gallimard’s Série Noire crime novels, and that it, like all his subsequent crime fiction, was published in French translation before the English originals appeared in the US. The ‘Harlem Cycle’ is unquestionably important, but the relationship of the often surreal and gothic Harlem of the novels with the historical realities of the part of New York so named is less obvious than it can seem. Similarly, while Himes has a place in the literary fascination with Paris as an important presence among post-1945 expatriates, these considerations make it hard to think him fully representative of the African-American twentieth century in the way often implicitly claimed for his crime fictions. These contexts matter to Devil in a Blue Dress not only in a general sense, but because Mosley signifies on Himes in unexpected ways. Mouse, for example, owes something to Coffin Ed, also capable of extreme behaviour without provocation, but Easy—an amateur, usually unarmed, and almost always understated, conciliatory, low-key—is not derived from the ‘Harlem Cycle’ at all. However, Himes’s first, quite autobiographical novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1946), features AfricanAmerican Bob (or Bo) Jones, who has during World War 2 migrated from Ohio to the naval shipyards of south LA. There he encounters a white Texan woman around whom a plot swirls that is primarily concerned with unremittingly virulent racism, and daily existential struggle to control rage and desire, and just work. Additionally, in Himes’s second novel, Lonely Crusade (1947), Lee Gordon similarly works in an LA aircraft factory, facing racism in union activity and (anti-) Communism rather than erotics. Easy’s experiences in the opening chapters of Devil at ‘Champion’, and the meeting with his racist (ex-) supervisor, allude to Jones and Gordon, perhaps in homage to Himes and anticipating Easy’s involvement in investigating a Jewish union organiser in A Red Death. More widely and specifically, the role of Daphne Monet’s ‘whiteness’ and its signification in Devil reflects Bo Jones’s experiences,

23 and may be informed by Himes’s Pinktoes (1965), volumes of autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1976), and A Case of Rape (1980). Easy is in all important ways independent of Himes and his creations, but he too has been to Paris (if not prison), built aircraft in LA, and lived with sex and death across a race-barrier that is for Mouse, say, as for most African Americans in the south, far more absolute. The challenge is best framed as a need to understand Mosley as an African-American (crime) writer who respects and invokes the preHarlem-Cycle novels, but neither can nor wishes to emulate Himes’s most celebrated and unreal crime fiction.

1.6 Historic Los Angeles in Crime Fiction Whatever his other affiliations and means of signifying, Mosley’s Californian birth and historiographical ambitions for the Rawlins series place him in one particular context. Crime writing in general is notably concerned with place, as a legacy of the nineteenth-century novel and in response to twentieth-century erasure of community by standardisation and fetishised economies of scale. It has also repeatedly generated historical projects like the recent fads for historical detection—mediaeval, with the Cadfael books by Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter, 1913–95); Elizabethan, with the Bracewell books by Edward Marston (Keith Miles, b. 1940); and Roman, with the Falco books by Lindsey Davis (b. 1949). There have also been outstanding individual works—The Name of the Rose (1980) by Umberto Eco (b. 1932), imagining a decisive fourteenth-century moment; The Alienist (1994) by military historian Caleb Carr (b.1955), set in New York, 1896; and River of Darkness (1999) by Rennie Airth (b. 1935), adducing from the World War 1 trenches a serial killer to blight the 1920s. Within both place and history, California looms very large. In some ways both begin as usual with Chandler, but Marlowe’s Californian cases are close to contemporary. Written in 1939–59, they are set in the 1930s–40s, a strategy of slight time-lag from the present that is followed, for example, in the Bosch and Decker series by Californians Michael Connelly (b. 1956) and Faye Kellerman (b. 1952). More important as historiographical exemplars are Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels, overlapping with Chandler’s series and signifying on them. In providing Archer with an increasingly detailed past and evolving present MacDonald made him an historicised rather than romanticised figure, and so a lens through which recent history could be reviewed. MacDonald also mixed real,

24 disguised, and imaginary places, including a coastal ‘Santa Teresa’, and Sue Grafton’s ‘Alphabet Series’ of Kinsey Millhone novels are similarly set in ‘Santa Teresa’, thinly fictionalising Grafton’s hometown, Santa Barbara, north of LA, primarily in the 1980s though older history is implicit and sometimes visible. There is also T. Jefferson Parker, born in Laguna Beach, south Orange County, who began with a sequence of impressive freestanding novels anatomising social issues, notably Laguna Heat (1985), Little Saigon (1988), about California’s Vietnamese community, & Pacific Beat (1991), but in the 1990s produced lesser work. He returned to form after 2000, winning Best Novel Edgars for Silent Joe (2001) & California Girl (2004), a saga of Laguna Beach since 1954. The great force in tackling LA history, however, is self-confessed ‘devil dog of American literature’ James Ellroy, who in the four blistering novels of his LA Quartet (1987– 92) anatomised the city from 1946–60, generating the single greatest stylistic influence on American noir since Chandler and staking a claim for crime writing as a primary means of understanding recent conurban history. Like Himes, but more so, Ellroy had a chequered youth, pivoting on the murder of his mother in 1958. He began publishing crime fiction in 1980, but his first six novels of contemporary LA brought no special success. The next four won international attention. The Black Dahlia (1987, filmed 2006) took its title from a newspaper nickname (based on Chandler’s 1946 screenplay The Blue Dahlia) for murder victim Elizabeth Short, found bisected in a Hollywood lot in 1947. The Big Nowhere (1988), on the cusp of the 1950s, is the best literary work about McCarthyism since Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1952). L.A. Confidential (1990, filmed 1997), moves into the mid–1950s, and White Jazz (1992) traces a peripheral character to the edge of the ’60s. Ellroy subsequently tried to extend his method in the Underworld USA trilogy, dealing with the US as a whole in the 1960s: American Tabloid (1995) ran an extraordinary riff on the Kennedy assassination of 1963, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), attempting the mid-decade, proved too disjointed for a mass readership, and the third volume, Police Gazette, has yet to appear. This falling-off notwithstanding, Ellroy’s is by any standards a remarkable literary achievement, and his influence has been tremendous. Ian Rankin (b. 1960), Scotland’s premier crime novelist, is explicitly indebted to Ellroy for the style and motifs of his breakthrough work, Black and Blue (1997), and the Red Riding Quartet 1 by Yorkshireman David Peace (b. 1967) could not imagined without its LA 1

The Quartet comprises Nineteen Seventy Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001), and Nineteen Eighty Three (2002).

25 model. The broad claim Ellroy made for a new understanding of the historical responsibilities of crime writing make him a key potentiator for all who focus their writing in any specified recent period of urban history—including Mosley. In many ways Mosley writes against Ellroy, showing neither affection nor any need for Ellroy’s jazz-influenced narrative style and ferocious deployment of period racist slang. Easy’s Watts is clearly conceived as much in complementary opposition to Ellroy’s historical LA of the same period, as in contiguity with it. Mosley’s other novels dealing with the Californian 1950s were also obliged to interact with Ellroy’s treatment of major motifs, but as Easy has grown the pressure of Ellroy’s model has decreased, both because the series has grown more substantial in itself, and because Ellroy’s less commercially successful and influential treatment of the 1960s has been a national project with less to say or imply about LA.

1.7 The US in World War 2 and the ‘GI Bill’ 1.7.1 The European and North African Theatres The US provided financial and material aid to Britain & the Commonwealth from 1939, and the USSR from mid-1941, but did not enter World War 2 as a belligerent until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Thereafter it fought on two fronts, against the Japanese in the Pacific, from Midway (1942) to Okinawa (1945), and against German, Italian, and partisan forces in Europe & North Africa. Germany had before 1939 seized Czechoslovakia, merged with Austria, and become allied to Italy. In 1939 it invaded Poland, and in 1940 Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, & France, leaving in western continental Europe only neutrals Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, & Portugal free. From 1941 German effort was absorbed by the (disastrous) invasion of the USSR, and by 1942 Germany had occupied most of the eastern continent, Balkan Peninsula, and Greece—but with the US and USSR both in the war, Axis defeat in Europe became the Allied priority. While assembling an Allied invasion force in southern England, a smaller army began liberating North Africa, which the Germans tried to seize through the AngloFrench colonial presence because they needed the Suez Canal and wanted the oilwealthy Middle East. The British defended Egypt and pushed east, and in November 1942 the US invaded Algeria, pushing west. This is the campaign in which Easy was involved in non-combatant roles; it ended with expulsion of Axis forces from North Africa by May 1943. The Allies then invaded Sicily and Italy, gaining a foothold in

26 the south and forcing Italy out of the war by November 1943, but German troops put up strong resistance at Monte Cassino and Anzio, and Rome wasn’t liberated until June 1944. Sitting safely behind the lines during this fierce campaign led Easy to volunteer for combat duty, and from June 1944 he saw action in the northern campaign that began with invasion of Normandy (June 6, 1944; D-Day), liberated Paris (August 25), and eventually invaded Germany. Berlin fell to Russian forces in May 1945, and on the 8th Germany unconditionally surrendered—after which Easy was demobbed. (The Pacific theatre continued until August 15th, when Japan surrendered after the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) The other datum given about Easy’s service career is that he was ‘with Patton’— George S. Patton, Jr (‘Old Blood and Guts’, 1885–1945), Californian commander of the US 3rd Army 1944–5—an iconic figure intensely admired for a manoeuvre during the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ (Dec. 1944–Jan. 1945) that proved a masterstroke. 1.7.2 The Segregated Army US forces remained segregated by Congressional edict until July 1948, when Truman ended the practice with Executive Order 9981. The decision came in response to outstanding service provided during World War 2 by such famous black units as the Tuskegee Airmen (99th Fighter Squadron & 332nd Fighter Group) and Black Panthers (761st Tank Battalion). Mosley never specifies a unit for Easy, but the outline of his service in Ch. 14 of Devil is of membership in a service unit in North Africa and Italy, and transfer to combat units attached to the 3rd Army in France and Germany. The transformative aspect of Easy’s experience Mouse most pointedly remarks is access to white women, without the Southern atmosphere of taboo and lynching— and not only Southern, as witness the scene in Devil when white boys brace Easy on Santa Monica pier. What Easy himself mentions is killing white men, seeing white dead in incomprehensible numbers, and above all seeing but barely comprehending emaciated ‘Holocaust’ or Sho’ah survivors. Indians (and proto-Pakistanis) who fought both with and against British troops in South-East Asia remark on wartime experiences in general as politically radicalising, and the same thing happened to African-Americans, making black military service 1941–5 a major slow-burning catalyst of Civil Rights. In Easy’s case one has also to remember Mosley’s white Jewish mother and first wife, who lost family in the Nazi genocide, and for black readers—especially those sensitised to Rastafarian thinking—a Jewish connection

27 may be resonant because of common histories of slavery and deliverance. Given Easy’s presence as at the Battle of the Bulge, it is worth noting it had a particular racial dimension. The American Military History says: Faced with a shortage of infantry replacements during the enemy's counteroffensive General Eisenhower offered Negro soldiers in service units an opportunity to volunteer for duty with the infantry. More than 4,500 responded, many taking reductions in grade in order to meet specified requirements. The 6th Army Group formed these men into provisional companies, while the 12th Army Group employed them as an additional platoon in existing rifle companies. The excellent record established by these volunteers, particularly those serving as platoons, presaged major postwar changes in the traditional approach to employing Negro troops. 1

The lack of detail in Devil makes for uncertainty, but Mosley seems to suggest that in this as in other ways Easy is a pioneer. 1.7.3 The Home Front and the Migration to California The ‘Home Front’ in the US was industrial, California being at the forefront of production for both Pacific and European theatres. San Diego was a major naval base, and aircraft-production became a vast industry in southern California, drawing massive internal migration of labour from Texas and the South. The census shows a jump in state-population from 6.9m in 1940 to 10.6m in 1950—including Easy late in 1945 and most of the population of Watts and south LA. Easy thereby exemplifies every major aspect of the war’s consequence for African-Americans, at home and overseas, except combat-experiences peculiar to the Pacific. Those unfamiliar with Black American History may not realise how much of it is not only ‘diasporic’, originating in the forced migrations of enslavement and sale between plantations, but is framed by internal US migrations. Continuing racism and oppression in the post-Civil-War South, ‘Jim Crow’, made for local migrations in search of freer space, and as news of Northern or Western booms trickled through the South much larger movements across the US. Some westerns register Black presence (though rarely as normative), and histories of Black movement can be glimpsed in various books and films, but the Rawlins series is notable for its hard 1

Quoted at Πhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Soldier.

28 grounding in a specific recent migration out of the South, probably the largest mass exodus of African Americans before the dampening effect on such migrations of the Civil Rights Movement. The consequences of Hurricane Katrina also suggest mass exodus rather than temporary displacement—on a smaller scale than during the early 1940s, and with far less acceptable a cause, but a sharp reminder of a social AfricanAmerican reality that Devil accurately and unusually reports. 1.7.4 The ‘GI Bill’ and Easy Rawlins’s Mortgage The other great consequence of Easy’s wartime military service was eligibility for benefits under the ‘GI Bill’, or Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, 1944. This sought to prevent repetition of the depression caused in the US and Europe in 1918–19 by demobilisation and consequent unemployment, and succeeded magnificently. Under the terms of the bill military veterans were eligible for significant grants towards tuition and educational costs, limited unemployment benefits, and— critically for Easy—mortgage subsidies. For African-American veterans especially, this guarantee, and respect generally owed by a grateful nation to its distinguished veterans, made the middle-class world of educated property-ownership a possibility it had never been, the old Emancipation promise of ‘40 acres and a mule’ finally made good. About 20% of the millions of new one-family homes built 1945–65 were financed partly or wholly through the bill, many African-American owned— the inception of the modern, propertied African-American bourgeoisie. Easy’s obsession with his house and need to pay the mortgage are thus strongly historical, as well as clear exemplars of crime writing’s fundamental concern with dwelling and place. Beyond this, though, is his discovery that he is able, within the Black communities of LA and without having to lose the (supposed) anonymity he values, to make a living “doing favours for friends”. The Texas–Louisiana migrants with whom Easy came to Watts were, like him, looking for economic prosperity, and enough found it to become a paying clientele. Much as real PIs could not come into existence save through a social and deeply economic process involving the creation of police forces and evolution of private agencies in competitive or complementary business, so real and fictional Black PIs have only been able to develop as Black economic circumstances have made Black employment of PIs, and the writing and reading of crime writing, realities. While in no way the only force involved, the wartime service of African Americans and the socio-economic rewards they earned through the ‘GI Bill’ are forces to reckon with, that no recent fictional character embodies more cogently than Easy Rawlins.

29

2. Annotations As pagination varies between editions, the annotations are primarily keyed to chapter divisions, but page-numbers from the UK edition are given in parenthesis to indicate relative position within a chapter. Dedicatees Joy Kellman Mosley’s partner 1977–87 and wife 1987–2001; they separated in 1997. Kellman is a dancer and choreographer, and, like Mosley’s mother, white and Jewish. Frederic Tuten Cult American novelist and Mosley’s tutor-mentor in writing at New York City College (where Mosley has subsequently served as writer-inresidence). LeRoy Mosley Mosley’s father (d. 1993), born in New Iberia, Louisiana, and a conscripted soldier during World War 2, who moved to southern LA via Texas pretty much as Easy did. Mosley has written of his father’s storytelling and experiences in What Next (2003).

2.1 Chapters 1–5 CHAPTER ONE Joppy (3) A not uncommon African-American nickname and surname, also close to a variant Jewish form of Jacob, ‘Jopke’. Given the boxing connections it is odd that African-American William Joppy (b. 1970) became WBA middleweight champion in 1996. Panama straw hat (3) A traditional design, actually from Ecuador, using leaves of the jipijapa or toquilla palm (Carludovica palmata), as worn by US President Harry Truman in the 1940s. bone shoes (3) A fashionable and expensive pair made from ‘bone leather’, sometimes with leather soles and so good for dancing. strawberry-blond (3) Reddish-blond—and Strawberry Blonde was a hit 1941 movie starring James Cagney (1899–1986) and Rita Hayworth (1918–87).

30 Africa ... the Fatherland itself (3) See Note 1.7. Easy’s wartime career is largely based on that of Mosley’s father LeRoy. DeWitt Albright (4) The name invokes (i) Lt.-General John L. DeWitt (1880– 1962), who commanded the US Western Defences during World War 2 and was notoriously responsible for conceiving and enforcing Japanese–American internment (see Ch. 8 (41) below); and (ii) Hardie Albright (1903–75), a Hollywood actor famous for a fixed, insincere grin, best-known as the double-crossing ‘Smiley’ in Angel on my Shoulder (1946). Probably coincidentally, Gerald Albright (b. 1957) is a notable black jazz-saxophonist from south-central L.A. who found mass-popularity in 1987. Houston (4) Founded in 1836, and an important centre for black life and labour from shortly after the Civil War, the city had in 1940 a population of 384, 514 (as against more than 2m today). There were particular wartime connections with LA because Houston–Galveston was also an area of ship and aircraft production—but not, before the post-war oil-boom, an industrial centre on the same scale. robins’ eggs (4) That is, the American Robin (Turdus migratorius), whose eggs are greyish-blue; the shade has been defined for net-use and by Crayola. The European or Old World Robin (Erithacus rubecula), which the American Robin resembles and for which it is named, is unrelated, and lays yellowish eggs blotched with red. Champion Aircraft (4) Most obviously a version of Donald Douglas’s Santa Monica plant; see Ch. 9 (41) below. Went in with Patton. Volunteered! (5) See note 1.7. 103rd Street (5) That is, East 103rd—an important cross-street in Watts. another fella who does favors for friends (6) This is exactly how Easy will describe his own unofficial PI role—just as he takes Albright’s advice about being in trouble ‘to the top of it’. Mouse (6) The first mention of ‘Mouse’ Raymond in Devil in a Blue Dress—but Mosley had already written Gone Fishin’, published only in 1997, and Easy’s memories of the events it relates repeatedly intrude as parts of a back-story that was unclear until the earlier novel came out. white enameled fountain pen (6) Fountain pens require filling from bottles of ink, and are stylish; the enamelling makes it an expensive marque. As in his clothing, Albright is given signs of taste and wealth. downtown ... Watts (7) ‘Up-’ and ‘down-town’ originated in Manhattan but are applied in many places with confusing results. In LA, ‘downtown’ strictly refers

31 to an area 2+ miles in diameter including 1st–16th Streets and bounded by the Santa Monica, Harbor, and Santa Ana Freeways, and the Los Angeles river. Easy is using the term more loosely: the address (on Alvarado) is about a mile north of this zone; using the Harbor Freeway it is now about 13 miles from Watts, centred on East 105th. CHAPTER TWO dude (8) Now specifically associated with ‘Bill and Ted’ in a very general sense (‘man, bloke’), dude (of unknown origin) was originally a specifically MidWestern term for “a usu. over-refined or effete man or boy who is pretentiously concerned with his clothes, grooming, manners”, particularly “a city person, esp. if new to the West” (Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang). Easy is using the word precisely. in the ring (8) That is, involved in boxing, and still fighting professionally. catcher’s mitts (8) In baseball, mitts are the outsized, padded gloves worn by fielders; catchers, behind the plate, have larger, more heavily padded mitts than outfielders. ranked number seven in 1932 (8) Boxing became an important American sport from the later nineteenth century, and important as a way out of the ghetto for athletic black men from the 1910s. In the 1920s purses became enlarged through live radio-broadcasting of title-fights, and when the Great Depression struck in 1929, dramatically shrinking purses, the sport was thrown into turmoil. Matters changed with the ascension as undisputed heavyweight champion from 1937–49 of the ‘Brown Bomber’, Joe Louis (1914–81). Looking back from 1948, 1932 was an undistinguished year in boxing. Mr. Shag (9) Joppy’s surname is also a dance popular in the 1930s–40s, a form of swing related to the lindyhop that might be associated with Joppy’s “com[ing] out swinging wildly”. He married EttaMae Harris (10) The marriage is the framing event of Gone Fishin’. CHAPTER THREE a share-cropper’s farm (12) Share-cropping was the system of farm tenancy that arose after the Civil War from the plantation-system for cotton. Nominally a mutual solution (landowners without money, farm-workers without land), systemic abuse by owners, slipshod accounting, and chronic irresponsibility on all

32 sides (as well as the fundamental problem of reliance on a single cash-crop) made share-cropping a byword for racist ‘Jim Crow’ agricultural practice. apple tree ... avocado ... thick St Augustine grass (12) The apple-tree could be the common apple, Malus silvestris, or the American Sweet (Garland) Crab Apple, M. coronaria. Avocados (or alligator pears), Persea americana, are a major Californian crop. St Augustine grass is a popular warm-season grass for lawns—it goes dormant below about 70°F, so its thickness indicates heat. a pomegranate tree ... a banana tree (12) The pomegranate (Punica granatum) is semi-tropical (hence a specific locator in the US) and often heavy-bearing, but also richly symbolic, in Greek mythology of death and in Christian painting of hope. ‘Banana’ covers several species, most commonly Musa acuminata, but in any case each pseudostem bears only once before dying; only the root rhizome (or corm) is perennial. Bananas are not widely or commercially cultivated in the US, and Easy seems ignorant of why his tree “never produced a thing”. Whether Mosley knew in constructing the opposition of fruiting pomegranate and sterile banana is moot, but symbolic use of fruit trees in domestic gardens was famously identified by novelist-critic Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) in Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen (1775–1817), where the unloving Mrs Norris has an apricot tree as unable to fruit as her (soon-to-be-late) husband. on Alvarado (13) Alvarado is about a mile north of downtown L.A.. Mr. Rawlins (15) The first mention of Easy’s surname. No single source is compellingly obvious, but John Rawlins (1902–97) was a California-born writerdirector, who worked in crime fiction all his life and in the late 1940s directed several ‘Dick Tracy’ films for RKO. Wild Turkey (17) Also known as ‘The Kickin’ Chicken’, a brand of Kentucky bourbon whisky that is the most popular of those with 101° proof alcohol (as against the usual 80° proof). Jersey City (17) An industrial port-city on the lower Hudson River, opposite Manhattan, and a common port of entry to the US, so also a dumping-ground for immigrant orphans. Daphne Monet (18) A richly suggestive name. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Daphne is a nymph in two stories—she was loved by the mortal Leucippus, who disguised himself as a nymph to be near her but betrayed his sex while bathing and was torn apart by the other nymphs; and she was chased by the god Apollo, to escape whom she metamorphosed into a laurel tree, subsequently used to make garlands for victors. Monet, distinctively French, most obviously invokes the great

33 Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840–1926), famous for capturing colour, light, and atmosphere. secretary-type wallet (20) The slim oblong kind intended for an inner breastpocket rather than a trouser-pocket (the ordinary kind are disparaged by some fashion-conscious men for breaking the line of trousers’ tailoring). corpses of German soldiers ... stacked up (21) This is no exaggeration—of more than 5m Germans killed in World War 2, more than 2m died in the last year of the war while the Allies closed in on Berlin; both burial-details and record-keeping broke down completely. Even now a high percentage of German military fatalities from the battles of 1944–5 are listed as missing in action. Eighty-ninth and Central (22) That is, East 89th & South Central, on the northern edge of Watts. CHAPTER FOUR speakeasy ... Prohibition (23) In US history Prohibition refers to the period 1920–33, during which the 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages nationwide. Though well-intentioned, the consequences were predictably devastating—tens of millions became criminals and the profits of crime soared. Major growth of organised crime and profound corruption of law enforcement were clear results, and there are obvious parallels with the current criminalisation of ‘drugs’. Despite the narrative ‘we’, ‘John’ has implicitly been in LA at least 13–15 years longer than Easy. Illegal bars have been ‘speakeasies’ since at least the 1880s, supposedly from bartenders telling customers to ‘speak easy’, quietly or confidentially, but since 1920 the term has been specifically associated with Prohibition. Lips and his trio (24) A common nickname for jazz brass-musicians: there may be an allusion to Dallas-born jazz and blues trumpeter ‘Hot Lips’ Page (Oran Thaddeus Page, 1908–54), who played with legendary ‘Mother of the Blues’ Ma Rainey (Gertrude Pridgett, 1886–1939), ‘Empress of the Blues’ Bessie Smith (1894–1937), & Ida Cox (Ida Prather, 1896–1967) in the 1920s, then with the Blue Devils under bassist Walter Page (1900–57) in 1928–31, and with the great ‘Count’ Basie (William Basie, 1904–84), before starting a less successful solo career from 1936. He was again briefly prominent in 1941–2 playing with clarinettist Artie Shaw (Arthur Arshawsky, 1910–2004), but by 1948 could easily have been found in a club like John’s with strong Texan connections. Holiday (24) Billie Holiday (Eleanora Fagan, 1915–59) was one of the greatest

34 voices of the twentieth century. ‘Discovered’ in Harlem in 1932 (at a club called Monette’s), she became (inter)nationally famous by the later 1930s, working with many greats, but her solo career from 1940 was dogged by heroin addiction. Though strongly associated with Harlem and the clubs on 52nd Street in Manhattan, Holiday was legally unable to work in New York after serving 8 months for heroin possession in 1947–8, so her presence in a small club in LA later that year is plausible. Lady Day (25) A reverential name for Billie Holiday. five years older ... maybe thirty-three (26) This implies Easy is now 28, and so was born in c.1920. Zapatas (26) An imaginary brand, named for the former share-cropper and great hero of the Mexican Revolution Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919). Italy ain’t even been around that long (27) The name, designating the lands and peoples of the Italian peninsula, is old, but the modern state of Italy dates only from the unification of the peninsula in 1870 under King Victor Emmanuel II (reigned 1861–78). While technically still a monarchy Italy was a Fascist dictatorship from 1922–43, and became a republic on 1st January 1948. The point is Easy’s articulation of Europe, knowing that two primary belligerent European states of the Axis (Germany and Italy) were also by some way the newest ‘major’ nation-states, and distinguishing cultural from political identity in a way neither Junior nor the Champion supervisor could follow. pompadour hairdo (28) A style for both men and women in which hair is swept straight up from the forehead, after the Marquise de Pompadour (Jeanne Antoinette Poisson Le Normant d’Étioles, 1721–64). Alphonso Jenkins is ahead of the fashion curve, for the male pompadour became truly hot only in the 1950s, when it was adopted by actors James Dean (1931–55) and Ronald Reagan—the most famous recent pompadour. hijacked liquor and cigarettes (28) Large-scale theft of liquor trucks began during Prohibition, when victims had no legal recourse, but as the tax-regime was re-imposed after 1933 became a major branch of organised and semi-organised crime—the point being to avoid both federal and state taxes and cut out payment to corporate suppliers. Increased taxation of tobacco created a parallel trade. all over California, and Nevada too (28) Nevada is sparsely populated, but since 1931, when gambling was legalised, has been a premier resort-state economically dominated by Las Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe. Since the later 1930s it has attracted investment by Eastern and Mid-Western crime syndicates, as shown in

35 The Godfather (1969, filmed 1972) by Mario Puzo (1920–99). Southern California and Nevada are often articulated against northern California, so Frank Green’s “all ... and” indicates his intimidating status. mayor’s race (29) There was no mayoralty election in LA in 1948. Reformist Democrat Fletcher Bowron (1887–1968) was elected Mayor in 1938 and reelected in 1942, 1946, and 1950, serving until 1953. Given the behaviour of his candidates in this 1948 election, Mosley’s move is legally sensible in forestalling any possible claim of libelling a real candidate. Huey Long (29) Not great jazz-guitarist Huey C. Long (b. 1904), but Louisiana’s ‘Kingfish’, Huey P. Long (1893–1935), state governor 1928–32 and US Senator 1930–5—dynamic, in many ways efficient but in more ways corrupt, and the most notorious elected official of the interwar years even before his assassination. The character of Willie Stark in the Pulitzer-winning novel All the King’s Men (1946, filmed 1949) by Robert Penn Warren (1905–89) was openly based on (and understood to represent) Long. in four years (30) That is, 1941–5, while Easy wore uniform in Africa & Europe. Houston’s Fifth Ward (30) Predominantly African American, initially a dormitory for low-paid manual labourers in the Houston-Galveston port-system, and subsequently a notorious ghetto, this famous district is also notable for six churches founded before 1900 and still going strong. shit wit’ my stepdaddy (30) A reference to the events of Gone Fishin’. CHAPTER FIVE Delia or Dahlia or something (34) Easy may intend these as random variants but Mosley didn’t. Delia Lovell was the villainess of The Old Maid (1939), and Dahlia summons (i) Chandler’s only original screenplay, The Blue Dahlia (1946), centred on the murder of the unfaithful wife of a returning war veteran; (ii) 22-year-old white aspiring actress and murder victim Elizabeth Short, whose bisected body was found on 15th January 1947 in a vacant lot in Leimert Park, south of Hollywood— ‘the Black Dahlia case’ (Short always wore black), then the biggest LAPD-led multi-agency investigation since the murder of Marian Parker in 1927; and (iii) James Ellroy’s fictional account of that case, The Black Dahlia (1987, filmed 2006). Both names bode ill for Daphne Monet and the compound allusion invokes the dark underside of LA that Easy will partly discover as he is sucked into it.

36 2.2 Chapters 6–10 CHAPTER SIX the Playroom (38) A perennial name for nightclubs; several in LA now use it, and no specific reference for 1948 is evident. CHAPTER SEVEN my house, on 116th Street (40) That is, East 116th, between South Main and the East Imperial Highway in lower south-east Watts. Easy would now be living more or less underneath the Century Freeway. San Bernadino mountain range (40) This coastal range is 80+ miles from Watts, but has the highest peaks in southern California, San Bernardino Mountain (10,864 ft, 3,311m) and Mount San Gorgonio (11,390 ft, 3,502m), often snowcapped even in summer. a chain letter (40) Easy isn’t necessarily right about the ‘white gang’ or any specific victimisation of ‘superstitious southern Negroes’, but the combination of a bad-luck death-threat, two dimes, and a specific POB (rather than a rolling address-list) do suggest a scam. Modern chain-letters date from c.1900 and have specifically American connections: the ‘Send-a-Dime’ variant became a national obsession in 1935–6, but was not always predatory. See: Œ http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/evolution.html Mr Ezekiel Rawlins (41) The first mention of Easy’s full name: Ezekiel summons the Old Testament book and prophet, a priest who preached to the Jews of the Babylonian Captivity in 593–63 BCE—a time of great sorrow and recrimination, as Jerusalem fell in 586, but also of oracles of renewal. Easy’s parents presumably had the bible in mind, but Mosley would have somewhat different reasons, as his mother was Jewish. Claxton Street Lodge (41) A fictional building: there is no Claxton Street in Houston. LaMarque (41) Mouse’s and EttaMae’s son, who figures in later novels, is presumably named for the city of LaMarque, in Galveston County, TX, just south of Houston. beat her butt down Avenue B (41) There is no ‘Avenue B’ in Houston, nor has the phrase any special slang meaning I can find. ‘Avenue B’ is famously part of ‘Alphabet City’ on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and in the late nineteenth and

37 early twentieth centuries was a Jewish and Red Light area. More recently it has been mixed African-American and Puerto Rican, and from 1993 often featured in NYPD Blue. Pariah (42) A fictional Texas town where Mouse’s ‘stepdaddy’ lived, presumably named for the word’s meaning (a social outcast). It is the primary setting of Gone Fishin’. The poorest man has a car in Los Angeles (43–4) As Hurricane Katrina showed, this is not true throughout the US, but it is a general truth of American life that poorer people may invest disproportionately (by non-US standards) in a car. .

CHAPTER EIGHT a large stretch of farmland ... in those days (46) Santa Monica is a coastal town 10 miles west of downtown LA that features in Chandler’s novels as ‘Bay City’. In 1940 it had a population of 53,500. The area between LA and Santa Monica is now solidly urbanised, and Easy’s comment begs the question of when the book is being narrated. No date before c.1970 would fit, but while the actual time of writing by Mosley (late 1980s) is possible, nothing internal to the text confirms it. Phrases like ‘in those days’ always serve, however, to reinforce the double-time of narrative past and narrating present. The Japanese farmers (46) There is a large Californian Japanese-American community, whose internment during World War 2 at the behest of General DeWitt (see under Ch. 1 (4) above) is the worst blot on the domestic US wartime record. Of 112–120,000 internees, c.62% were US citizens; for lucid detail see: Œ http://www.answers.com/topic/japanese-american-internment?method=22. The shamefulness of anti-Japanese prejudice was the subject of the powerful, Oscar-nominated western Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), directed by John Sturges (1910–92), and the legal issues arising from the internment have become sharply relevant again after 9–11. Des Moines, in Iowa (47) The largest city and state-capital, and proverbially dull. Iowa, in the heart of the Farm Belt, is the kind of state from which naïve farmgirls and aspiring actresses come to Hollywood only to find themselves in LA. long-barreled .44-caliber pistol (50) The ‘.44 Magnum’ was made notorious by Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films amid much confusion. It is not a gun but a cartridge, developed in the mid-1950s and usable in many weapons. Albright must use the less powerful .44 Special cartridges introduced by Smith & Wesson in 1907. The long barrel increases accuracy at distance, but may also be preferred

38 (as probably by Albright and Mouse) for its appearance and notional kudos. a big-band station (51) Though found in all periods, ‘Big Bands’ are in jazz synonymous with the major ensembles of the Swing Era, in the 1930s–40s. “Two Lonely People,” by Fats Waller (51) Thomas Wright ‘Fats’ Waller (1904– 43) was a great jazz pianist and entertainer, but the song title is an error for ‘Two Sleepy People’ (an ironic soundtrack for this moment), made famous in Waller’s superb cover but written by Frank Loesser & Hoagy Carmichael for the Bob Hope film Thanks for the Memory (1938). Whether Mosley or Easy errs is moot. Skyler and Eighty-Third (52) East 83rd is just north of Watts. Skyler is a fictional street. Benny Goodman (53) A clarinettist and band-leader, the ‘King of Swing’ (1909– 86). CHAPTER NINE the Santa Monica plant (54) Presumably alluding to the Clover Field plant built by Donald W. Douglas (1892–1981) and Douglas Aircraft Co. in 1922, which expanded dramatically from 1941. The company later became part of McDonnell Douglas. Benny, Benito Giacomo (54) The name is suggestive: Benito Mussolini (Il Duce, 1883–1945) was the Italian Fascist dictator 1922–43, while Giacomo (or Iacomo) is the equivalent of ‘James’, but has some associations with treachery, as in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. I had a notion of freedom ... (59) Easy’s closing remark underlines the parallel Mosley draws between wage slavery and chattel slavery: the latter is the form normally meant by ‘slavery’, a system in which one person owns another; ‘wage slavery’, however, is a primarily anti-capitalist concept indicting precisely such working conditions as Easy’s (though not necessarily with the racial inflection), wherein de jure freedom is used to render acceptable de facto dependence and lack of rights. CHAPTER TEN “Are you arresting me?” (60) In the US formal arrest usually requires a warrant, or reasonable suspicion of involvement in a felony. There are also laws under which the police may oblige someone to answer questions and detain them meanwhile, without making a formal arrest. Easy’s seizure by these LAPD plainclothes-men is very obviously carried out in a way that would now be wholly

39 illegal, but he could properly have been required to answer questions. Easy is correct about his rights, but the famous ‘Miranda’ warning now required before any suspect can be questioned was mandated by the US Supreme Court only in 1966. Seventy-seventh Street station (61) With its HQ at West 77th and South Broadway, the ‘77th Street area’, including Watts, was and is a subdivision of LAPD organisation, gathered with the Southwest, Harbor, Southeast, and South Traffic Divisions into the South Bureau. thirty-two bright green oleander leaves (62) Nerium oleander, or ‘Rose Bay’, is a beautiful, small white-, pink-, or yellow-flowering tree, sometimes sweetly scented, and highly toxic, with strikingly green leaves, narrow and lanceolate (1– 2 cm broad, 10–20 cm long) in pairs or whorls of three. It is associated with dry stream beds where it flourishes, but has no special mythological significance. the tiny corpse of a mouse (62) The obvious association with ‘Mouse’ Raymond, uses a variety of reverse symbolism—this desiccated mouse indicating what could happen to Easy without Mouse’s help—to lead in to Easy’s summons. But there are other associations, as with Robert Burns’s poem ‘To a Mouse’ (1785), an apology for its destruction that contains the famous quotation “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley [often go wrong] / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain / For promis’d joy!”—whence, for example, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), about the Great Depression and southern California. a section eight (64) Literally a discharge from US military service under Section VIII of the Army Code for reason of ‘mental unfitness’, covering both genuine mental disorder and (especially in the 1950s) suspected or confessed homosexuality. Those so discharged were ineligible for military benefits. The term is no longer current, but was greatly popularised by the novel Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller (1923–99), and M*A*S*H—a 1968 novel by Richard Hooker (H. Richard Hornberger, 1924–97), hit 1970 film, and important, long-running TV series (1972–83). In an LAPD officer’s mouth in 1948 the phrase both suggests the strong military-police connections created during World War 2 (a theme explored in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet) and in the process either prejudicially or spitefully belittles Easy’s honourable military service. the dead mouse again (65) It is associated this time with a Mouse-like fantasy of vengeance. a complaint form (66) I have been unable to establish whether the LAPD did have complaint forms in 1948—probably so, but there was no particular public or

40 media pressure for reform of police brutality until the ‘Bloody Christmas’ scandal in 1951 (the initial event in Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential). The racial issue of course makes the offer ironic: the LAPD remained overwhelmingly white until well into the 1980s, and the Christopher Commission Report (1991) in the wake of the Rodney King videotape was plainspoken about the continuing inability of minorities to complain of police misconduct or assault.

2.3 Chapters 11–15 CHAPTER ELEVEN fifteen blocks to John’s speak (68) That is, from West 77th & South Broadway to East 89th & South Central. Mr Teran (70) This encounter with Matthew Teran is the oddest scene in the novel. The name is without obvious significance, but may derive from a Northern Italian red wine famous for high lactic acid content. The surreal presentation of Teran’s wealthy immunity from prosecution for paedophilia is the most Ellroy-ish facet of Devil in a Blue Dress, and speaks to a perennial truth, but the present strong concern with child abuse dates only from the late 1980s. This scene and its thematic concern might therefore be seen as an (un)conscious back-projection by Mosley, but it is typical of Mosley (and Easy) that the character introduced in this scene who really matters is the mute child-victim. Houston ... Galveston (73) Both cities are in Texas, so Odell suggests Easy reverse his migration to California. CHAPTER TWELVE still young enough (74) Easy is 28 in the narrated time, 1948. Implicitly, in the narrating time, he does ‘now’ understand the permanent absence of dead peers. casting for catfish ... Gatlin River (75) ‘Catfish’ covers all freshwater fish of the suborder Nematognathi. Most of the 30 US species are relatively small, and Easy’s dream-catch has to be a Blue or Mississippi catfish, species that can reach 150 lbs (70 kg). The Gatlin River is fictional, but the Gatlin Brothers were an important Texan close-harmony country group in the 1970s–80s. Dinker Street. Thirty-four fifty-one and a ’alf (78) Another fictional address. There is no Dinker Street in LA, but the 3451 number puts the address

41 somewhere just south of Jefferson Boulevard, 5–6 miles north of Watts. In the US, as elsewhere, the ½ designation is used when buildings are added within an already numbered street, and sometimes to deal with multiple occupancy. CHAPTER THIRTEEN duplex (79) The standard US term for a semi-detached house, a building vertically divided into two dwellings. GI (80) Though often taken to mean ‘General Infantry’, ‘GI’ derives from an abbreviation for galvanised iron that became transferred in army parlance to a kind of iron can and thence to the source of such cans, ‘Government Issue’. During World War 1 it replaced ‘doughboy’ as common army slang for an ordinary enlisted soldier, and thence became a standard adjective for any army connection, as in ‘GI Bill’, ‘GI Joe’ etc.. the soap she used, Ivory (80) Ivory soap was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1879, advertised on TV from 1939, and is still produced, though now marketed only in North America. As a ‘pure’ product, it has strong (and here ironic) associations with wholesome simplicity. above Hollywood, Laurel Canyon Road (81) Laurel Canyon Boulevard is the major road (other than freeways) through the Hollywood Hills, crossing the infamous Mulholland Drive, but there is no Laurel Canyon Road. across town to La Brea (82) Easy means La Brea Avenue, a major north-south street, not the La Brea Tar Pits. From ‘3451½ Dinker’ Easy would take Jefferson Boulevard to La Brea, and La Brea north to Santa Monica Boulevard. a cattail from a pond (83) Like ‘reed mace’ and ‘club rush’, ‘cattail’ covers any plant of the genus Typha, tall single-stemmed marshplants. When the male flowers drop off the stem is left ringed by the female fruits and resembles a knifehilt. The starchy rootstock is edible, and the plant familiar to the rural poor. Jell-O (83) A proprietary gelatine dessert, whence standard US ‘jello’ for ‘jelly’. Bernard Hooks ... Marcel Montague (83) These are presumably fellow AfricanAmerican GIs in Easy’s combat unit. The names seem African-American, and there are possible references—as to Benjamin Hooks (b. 1925), executive director of the NAACP, 1977–93; Addison Gayle, Jr (1932–91), a noted critic associated with the City College and City University in New York; and Alphonso Johnson (b. 1951), a noted jazz bassist of the 1970s–80s—but nothing to suggest more than Mosley’s imagination.

42 CHAPTER FOURTEEN The voice ... (87) The topos (and trope) of Easy’s mental ‘voice’ potentially invokes many connections and invites variant interpretation. Most obviously, the ‘Voice’ is more down-home Texas, and so more Mouse-like, but also underscores (as Charles Wilson notes, Walter Mosley, pp. 44–5) a parallel with Daphne—both she and Easy develop surface identities that conceal something older and more ruthless. More widely one might associate the ‘Voice’ with stress, and seek an origin in combat psychology—Easy says it first spoke to save his life in battle— or look in crime fiction to the long tradition of the doppelganger, the double-self or alter ego, stretching back through Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to Good Angel—Bad Angel debates in mediaeval morality plays. a black division (87) See note 1.7 above. Battle of the Bulge (88) There is a slight inconsistency in Easy’s story here. In this paragraph he says that by the Battle of the Bulge the ‘Allies’ (he should more properly say the US army, as no others were segregated) were so desperate they had de facto desegregated units, and that his platoon had “blacks, whites, and even a handful of Japanese Americans”—an observation invoking the particular desperation in the face of a German counterattack in January 1945 which did lead to both new black combat units and some further de facto desegregation (see note 1.7.3 above). But in the first paragraph after the break, when the narrative has reverted to Normandy in June–July 1944, his dead buddies are “Anthony Yakimoto and Wenton Niles”, suggesting his platoon included (as it might have done) Japanese-Americans well before the Bulge. A very similar incident, set in Düsseldorf in early 1945 and with the two dead multiracial buddies replaced by racist white GIs, is reported in Cinnamon Kiss, Ch. 6. The voice has no lust. (88) An extremely important qualification, confirming that Mosley had in mind the crime-writing tradition of the doppelganger, in which the alter ego is not only murderous but specifically lustful. The obvious example is certainly Mr Hyde, a determined voluptuary to Dr Jekyll’s upright Christian, but there is also Poe’s infamous Auguste Dupin story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) where the savage killing of two women turns out to be the work of an orang-outang—an ape aping man’s darkest impulses. The great modern example of an alter ego specifically driven by lust is Humbert Humbert’s paedophile self in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955).

43 CHAPTER FIFTEEN His drawl got thicker ... (93) Drawled (lengthened) vowels and diphthongs are particularly associated with a Southern US accent. Interestingly, while Albright’s thin veneer of civility is abandoned in the act of breaking in to Easy’s house, and his brutality openly on show in his conversation, it is only here when he thinks he has broken and collared Easy that his accent comes fully into his voice.

2.4 Chapters 16–20 CHAPTER SIXTEEN flies ... in Oran (94) Oran was an important port-city and naval base in NW Algeria, held from 1940 by Vichy France (the collaborationist state created by the Germans within occupied France) until captured/liberated by the Allies (primarily US forces) in November 1942. The city has particular associations with plague, historically, and as the setting of La Peste (The Plague, 1946) by Albert Camus (1913–60)—but soldiers everywhere fear and loathe the horror of flies on an uncleared battlefield, especially in hot climates. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN La Cienega Boulevard ... just below Melrose (97) La Ciénega (from Spanish, cienaga, a swamp) is a major North–South road in north-west LA, dividing the business district of West Hollywood from residential Beverley Hills. Melrose Avenue is the first major cross-street south of Santa Monica Boulevard, so this visit (like Ch. 13) takes Easy back to north LA. Angus Steak House ... Beefeater’s uniform (98) Presumably a franchise of the British Aberdeen Angus Steak House chain, once superior restaurants but latterly fallen into disrepute and bankruptcy. Angus is a breed of cattle; ‘Beefeaters’ is the nickname of the British Yeomen of the Guard, a ceremonial body of troops who guard the sovereign and the Tower of London and are known for their elaborate, red-and-gold mediaeval uniforms. a swooping falcon ... had three arrows in its talons (98) As with the Bald (American) eagle on the Great Seal of the USA, the arrows signify war (as against the olive branch of peace in its other talon). The real function of this company logo is probably to indicate its closeness to government and power.

44 velvety red fabric (102) Such textured fabrics usually signify expense and ostentation, as do the fancy panels. brocade curtains (102) Brocading is a technique whereby designs are woven into a heavy cloth, often a high-quality silk. rich men with sick appetites (105) The corrupt self-indulgence of the rich is a major topos in crime fiction generally, and the Californian PI novel in particular, drawing on the decadence of the Sternwoods in Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Carter most obviously means Teran, who presumably obtained his rent-boys from McGee, but by the end of the novel one might think Carter’s own wealthy appetites fairly damaged. buy my own life back (107) Another closing remark (cf. Ch. 9) which draws on a parallel between wage and chattel slavery. Although relatively rarer in US than other slaveries, most slave systems had some form of contractual manumission in which an owner allowed a slave to buy freedom—but the price was usually beyond achievability and the whole depended on the owner’s willingness. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Slauson (108) Slauson Avenue is a major East–West cross-street in LA, running from Culver City through Maywood to South Whittier at the level of 56th Street. Isabella Street (110) A fictional address in LA, though there is an Isabella Street in Houston. that made me sort of invisible (114) One of many significations by Mosley on Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison (1914–94). As here, the most interesting dynamic is that Easy seeks to be and imagines himself as invisible within the African-American community as much as within the encompassing white American world—so that Ellison’s fundamental metaphor, the invisibility of blacks to whites, is profoundly modulated. CHAPTER NINETEEN Zeppo (115) Presumably named for the fourth Marx Brother (Herbert ‘Zeppo’ Marx, 1901–79), who became a successful Hollywood agent after leaving the family act. Forty-ninth and McKinley (115) McKinley Avenue is a minor North–South street between South Central Avenue and Avalon Boulevard. The corner with 49th is just by the McKinley Avenue Baptist Church (5025 McKinley). half Negro, half Italian (115) A trope that was rarely mentioned in 1990, but was

45 foregrounded by the character of Lieutenant Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto) in the outstanding US TV series Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC, 1993–9). CHAPTER TWENTY Poland ... Auschwitz (121) Auschwitz, the German name for the southern Polish town of Oświęcim, became from 1941–5 the location of an enormous compound concentration and extermination camp where an estimated 1.5m people were murdered. The name has since become the primary metonym for the Sho’ah or Holocaust. From the details given, Abe and Johnny must have been in Auschwitz III, the Monowice labour camp, attached to the Buna-Werke factory run by I. G. Farben—with Primo Levi (1919–87), the most famous survivor-memoirist. Very few people survived Auschwitz II, the Birkenau extermination camp, where at least 1.2m died. Vincent LeRoy ... a twelve-year old boy (122) The overt use of Mosley’s father’s name signals the importance of this all too plausible story, repeated in other series books. Mosley’s mother is Jewish, and lost many extended family members in the Sho’ah, and for LeRoy Mosley, even more than for all soldiers, the experience of liberating a concentration camp was profoundly traumatic. The topic was dealt with at length in one episode of the TV series Band of Brothers (2001), based on a 1993 book by Stephen E. Ambrose (1936–2002) detailing the career of ‘Easy Company’, 506th Parachute Infantry regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

2.5 Chapters 21–25 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE teeth ... gold rim ... blue jewel (132) Mouse’s dentistry is above all expensive. The blue jewel is probably a small sapphire. plaid zoot suit (132) Zoot suits were highly fashionable from the mid-1930s to early 1950s, combining baggy, tight-cuffed (or ‘pegged’) trousers (tramas) with a long wide-lapelled and padded-shouldered coat (the carlango—according to a young Malcolm X, “a killer-diller coat with a drape shape, reet pleats and shoulders padded like a lunatic's cell”). The idea of a plaid one (in a bright tartan check) is excessive, but the whole description is lifted from Mouse’s first appearance in Ch. 1 of Gone Fishin’:

46

He had on a plaid zoot suit with Broadway suspenders and spats on his black bluchers. He wore a silk hat and when he smiled you could see the new gold rim and blue jewel on his front tooth. For someone who never worked, Mouse knew how to keep himself in style.

I have been unable to establish exactly what ‘Broadway’ implies of suspenders (braces), but ‘spats’ (abbreviating ‘spatterdashes’) are stiff fabric covers attached to the shoe and extending over instep and lower calf, highly fashionable from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, but rare by 1948. Mouse was a good soldier ... (137) One of Easy’s most puzzling comments, unless it means only that Mouse is a potent warrior. He didn’t fight in the war, presumably wouldn’t have done so at any price, and would from any military point of view be a terrible soldier, suited only for Special Ops. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO I didn’t tell Mouse everything. (138) Nor the reader. The extent to which Easy simply does not say things he believes it advantageous to suppress, at least temporarily, is an important aspect of Mosley’s writing, corresponding with Easy’s sometime mistaken belief in his own invisibility (cf. Ch. 18 (114) above). fingerprint (141) The individuality of human fingerprints has been known since classical antiquity, but forensic use developed only in the nineteenth century, largely in Anglo-India, London, and Paris. They began to be accepted in US courts in the early twentieth century, and have been an important element in US crime fiction since The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893–4) by Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemens, 1835–1910). The extensive forensic analysis of crime scenes usual today is more recent: beyond blood-typing and finger-printing little was available in 1948. thinking of every German I ever killed (143) The link between Easy’s wartime experiences and ability to defy white American assumptions of innate racial superiority is made explicit. See note 1.7. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE “He ain’t worf living,” ... “Let’s go,” (148) The Voice is ambiguous—worth leaving alive? or worth killing? Easy’s relations with his Voice (did ‘he’ agree with or countermand it?) are important; cf. its lack of ‘lust’ (Ch. 14 (88) above).

47 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR past Watts, in Compton (149) Compton is an incorporated city, but de facto a suburb between Los Angeles and Long Beach. Predominantly white before 1940, it became a prosperous, influential, overwhelmingly black community in the 1950s–60s, but went into economic decline from the early 1970s. It is now best known as a primary area of gang conflict, often between African-American and Latino groupings. Temple Hospital (149) Temple Community Hospital, 235 N. Hoover—north-west of downtown and at least 150 blocks from Bula Bouchard’s home. a friend’s house, Primo’s (152) Primo is introduced in Ch. 25, and like the mute Hispanic boy abused by Teran signals an important link for Easy with LA’s Latino culture. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE mostly Mexican (153) Much of south and east LA are predominantly Latino, and the specifically Mexican presence is strong. full-blooded Mexican Indian (153) Despite the predominance of mestizo culture and peoples in Mexico, the indígenas remain significant in numbers if not power. At least 10% and perhaps 30% of the Mexican population are reckoned as pureblooded Native American (the discrepancy arises largely because the Mexican Census uses language rather than ethnicity as a prime determinant). Marginalised politically, economically, and often geographically, indígena emigration has been heavy, especially to LA. Easy does not identify a tribe; 62 are recognised. East L.A. ... El Barrio (155) Still unincorporated, the suburb of East LA (directly east of downtown LA and Boyle Heights) has housed at least 100,000 people, most of Mexican origin, since at least 1960. Its population in 1948 was 80,000+. before Mexicans and black people started hating each other (156) There has often been friction between migrant African Americans and immigrant Latinos competing for jobs and security in south LA, but the situation worsened dramatically in the 1980s, triangulating with anti-Korean feelings, and eventually produced the 1992 ‘Rodney King’ riots. This is another place where a sense of Mosley’s late-1980s reality presses hard on Easy. Beverley Hills and Brentwood (156) Brentwood and Brentwood Heights are between Santa Monica and Bel Air. Like Beverley Hills, they are expensive residential areas on the southern face of the Hollywood Hills, where gardens will

48 be (very) large. off of Sixth (156) Even today there are surprising gardens in this part of downtown LA. honeysuckle, snapdragons, and passion fruit (157) An enticing array. Honeysuckle (any shrub or vine of the genus Lonicera) is sweetly scented; snapdragons (any plant of the genus Antirrhinum, but especially A. majus) have striking white, red, or yellow flowers supposedly resembling the fleshy lips of a dragon; passion fruit would here be Passiflora edulis, bearing fragrant flowers and the purple passion fruit probably so called for its suggestive interior appearance. All these plants would be appropriate for a bower or trysting-house.

2.6 Chapters 26–31 CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX pussy ... thing ... penis (160) The sexual terminology is strikingly asymmetrical in register. Perhaps as a function of commercial pressure, and certainly in keeping with a trend of the 1990s–2000s, Mosley’s crime fiction has over time become more explicit in sexual detail, if rarely in emotions, but often remains awkward. Here Daphne Monet’s pairing of ‘pussy’ and ‘thing’ doesn’t square with her implicitly frank whisperings—it isn’t as if slang for the penis was lacking—but is reinforced by Easy’s use of ‘penis’ (rather than, say, ‘cock’), suggesting the problem as Mosley’s (but see Ch. 27 (168) below). The topos matters in the hardboiled PI novel because of the putative relationship between ‘hard-boiled’ and graphic narration, and because in first-person narration the PI’s self-presentation of sexual desire, temptation, loyalty, and betrayal is a primary representation of the romance and chivalric codes that Hammett and Chandler (above all) embedded in the sub-genre. I feel confused (161) As well Easy might be. The ‘single night of astonishing sexual demands’ features as a topos in crime writing in many ways, usually ominous, and as Easy recognises Daphne is chameleonic, so her sexual surrender cannot be taken as underwriting loyalty, or even intimacy. This one-off stand, apparently celebrating interracial sexual attraction, is in potent contrast to Easy’s encounter with Coretta. Close consideration of the intentions and (concealed, real) desires of each woman brings the two scenes into fairly precise counterpoint. Mosley may also have had in mind a famous scene in The Hotel New

49 Hampshire (1981, filmed 1984) by John Irving (b. 1942), in which a brother and sister who are incestuously attracted control their desire by giving themselves one night and deliberately continuing past exhaustion and soreness into a genuine physical aversion to further sex. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN egg foo yong ... chow mein (166) Egg foo yong (or young) is served only in westernised Chinese restaurants, and resembles an omelette (with whatever nonegg ingredients) folded over and spiced with a sauce. Chow mein is also more Chinese-American than Chinese, stewed vegetables and meat over fried noodles. leathery thing stabbing ... jissum (168) This whole episode is odd, owing more to the extraordinary narrative outbursts by women in the plays of Tennessee Williams (1911–83) than, say, the treatment of incest by Alice Walker (b. 1944) in The Color Purple (1982, filmed 1988)—a novel of great importance to Mosley (see note 1.1). The story she tells does go some way to explaining Daphne’s dehumanising use of ‘thing’, and certainly correlates Daphne (if one believes her) with the mute boy abused by Teran, but objections of various kinds could be made to the credibility of the episode. The early citations for ‘jism’ in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang all specifically refer to animals, and transference to use of human semen is early twentieth century. an explosion ... in my head ... and then there was nothing (169) Coshing, pistolwhipping, or drugging the PI into unconsciousness is a strong topos, even a cliché, in PI novels. One part of its functioning is obvious: the hard and cynical protagonist gets to show that s/he is (like everyone) vulnerable but (like few) tough enough to come back. In interrupting narrative consciousness, however, the trope descends primarily from the ‘Gothic’ (Romantic) novel, where heroines are so overcome by fear or desire they faint, and before that from the epistolary eighteenth-century novel, in which gaps between successive letters and in the traumatised psyches of letter-writers eclipse the writing consciousness for briefer (...) or longer (***) periods. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT on a great battleship (170) The kind of action Easy describes is, for the US in World War 2, suggestive of the Pacific theatre, in which Easy never served. He might have seen John Ford’s propaganda film The Battle of Midway (1942). Route 9, in the Malibu Hills (172) Malibu is 12 miles west of Santa Monica on

50 the Pacific Highway (Route 1). The Malibu Hills are foothills of the Santa Monica Range. There is no Route 9 in Malibu. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE I drove past Santa Monica ... (173) A sleight-of-hand by Mosley. The route to Malibu is direct, and simplicity is made to vouch for the ease with which Easy tracks Albright to his lair—perhaps the only weak point in a highly crafted plot. a frightened kitten ... Fourth of July (175) Cats are terrified by fireworks, used widely in the US on Independence Day. Ruby Hanks ... Lake Charles, Louisiana (179) In the ‘Arly Hanks’ series by Joan Hess (b. 1949), which started in 1987, Arly’s mother is Ruby Hanks. Mosley’s choice of name seems more a flat, unallusive contrast with Daphne Monet. Lake Charles, SW Louisiana, is a deep-water port and petrochemical centre connected to the Gulf of Mexico by a canal; it has a white majority. CHAPTER THIRTY just north of Santa Barbara ... that long (181) Using modern freeways, Malibu to Santa Barbara is 70+ miles. Albright drove 90+ on the old Pacific Highway. as many children as Ronald White (181) A name explained in the next chapter: White would provide some of Easy’s next work as a PI. You could try Junior Fornay ... (186) A fusion of two major crime topoi already running strong and clear in Hammett and Chandler: (i) that when murder has been done, someone must pay, the choice riding on Easy’s long rivalry with Fornay and distaste for his motives and methods of murder; and (ii) the terminal betrayal of a friend, often functioning (explicitly here) as simultaneous loss of innocence, necessary self-preservation, and self-sale into a doubly compromised position— the line Easy will have to walk between street loyalty and police co-operation. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE All you got is your friends ... bad luck (188) This ending was a critical signature for Mosley’s series—a genuine ethical and moral problem, shopping Fornay but protecting Mouse, and its pragmatic justification, underwritten by Easy’s pleasant situation with a friend on his own stoop. Later events in the series bring profound differences between Easy and Odell, and the conclusions they reach here are repeatedly tested—one of the joys of reading Mosley’s series.

51

3. Essay : ‘In the mortgage of his skin’: Walter Mosley’s Meaningful Streets

P

erhaps the single most influential, widely known and quoted title among the many post-colonial novels in English, certainly among those emerging from the Caribbean, is In the Castle of My Skin (1953) by the Barbadian writer, critic, and social commentator George Lamming (b. 1927). Yet though superbly capturing in Lamming’s hands many aspects of what it meant to come to maturity as a Black man in the late-colonial culture of the Eastern Caribbean in the 1930s, the phrase actually originates in an early and now unavailable poem by the great St Lucian poet and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, written and published in 1949, when he was only 19 years old: In the room the clock thunders on the mantel The brittle china shepherdess holds Her crook like a question sign, asks Why your complexion should have held you from me. You in the castle of your skin, I the swineherd.1

Initially, in Walcott, it is White (or at any rate light) and implicitly female skin that is petrified and castellated, keeping Walcott out because he is a ‘Brown’ or ‘Red’ man, one of obviously mixed racial inheritance and hence, in that culture at that time, socially inferior, to whites or still lighter-skinned creoles wholly unacceptable as a putative impregnator of daughters. Potent as it is, in this sense the phrase is in many ways traditional, harking back to standard Renaissance images of women as castles to be stormed and won (or palaces to be invested and decorated). Lamming’s genius was to switch the sense to an impregnable castle of Black and male skin, holding in spirit, life, and culture, but keeping out others and their mis/understandings of the individual or his race. There is also a strong and often missed or underestimated twist in Lamming’s novel, in that the hero ‘G.’ (for George?) is to a considerable extent isolated as much by greater intelligence and restless sociopolitical curiosity from his ‘own’ culture and even family, as he is isolated from a 1

Derek Walcott, Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1949), quoted in Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 68.

52 wider world by prejudices about and incomprehensions of his complexion—so that one might wonder about ‘the castle of his mind’ as well as that ‘of his skin’. In general the phrase is still used and understood positively, both in African-American & Caribbean criticism and in Lamming’s wider reception, as signifying an advance to self-sufficient independence, the castle-stones and curtain-walls keeping out the overseer’s lash and the reductive imperial siege of identity. But in retrospect ‘castle’ also has uneasy implications of willed inflexibility, hardened rigidity, defensive posture, immuration, and insensitivity; of individual isolation, each non-White citizen making of their own body a ghetto of one. Disturbing and uncomfortable, that ramifying uneasiness, taken with the ambivalence of the colour vector achieved by juxtaposing Walcott’s original phrase and Lamming’s adaptation of it, and Lamming’s attention to mind as well as body, make of his title a powerful tool with which to approach Walter Mosley’s extraordinary sequence of novels narrating the cases and chronicling the life of Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins. Mosley has repeatedly emphasised in interviews, and openly declared in his powerful memoir What Next? (2003), that his greatest influence by far was his father Leroy. Easy’s Los Angeles world (as it first appeared in Devil in a Blue Dress) is not the 1950s Watts that Mosley grew up in, but the late 1940s Watts to which his father came, discharged from the army and trying to escape the constrictions and insult of the south. Even before Devil in a Blue Dress, in Mosley’s first completed novel, Gone Fishin’, unpublished until his name guaranteed sales and then pointedly given to a small Black publishing house,1 it had been his father’s late adolescence that he sought to narrate, not his own—and the course of Easy’s life, from Louisiana to Texas and via the army to California, like his work as a school custodian and eventual, concealed rentier status, are closely modelled on the real life Leroy Mosley lived. But there is one major exception, an issue at once deeply private and unavoidably public, that sets Easy aside from Mosley père et fils: they both married white Jewish women (Mosley, of course, being the son of a Jewish mother is no less Jewish than he is Black), but Easy, while certainly attracted by White and Chinese women and sometimes successful in seducing (or being seduced by) them, has his heart most fully engaged by Black women whom in the end he usually believes have failed him, and been failed by him. From Mosley’s loving recollections it is clear that Leroy Mosley was a wise and remarkable man, but the circumstances he faced were the lot of very many. Perhaps the single most striking illustration is the story with which Mosley chose to begin 1

Black Classics Press, in Baltimore.

53 What Next?: When I was eight, I asked my father if he was afraid to go off and fight in World War II. He said, “No, honey. I wasn’t afraid. You see, I knew that the Germans were fighting the Americans, but I didn’t know that I was an American.” “Why not?” I asked. “Nobody thought that Negroes were Americans where I was raised,” he said. “We couldn’t vote, we had no rights that couldn’t be taken away by white people, and most of us believed that we weren’t really equal to whites. So I thought that the Germans would just pass me by looking for their American enemies.” “Did they?” I asked, and my father laughed. I always loved it when my father laughed. Humor in our house was both strength and knowledge. “No,” he said. “Those Germans wanted to kill me just as much as they wanted to kill every other foreign soldier. As a matter of fact, them shooting at me was what made me realize that I really was an American. That’s why, when I was discharged, I left the South and came here to Los Angeles. Because I couldn’t live among people who didn’t know or couldn’t accept what I had become in danger and under fire in the war.”1

The inherited and well-maintained prejudices of the ‘Jim Crow’ south could not so easily be left behind as the dust of Texas and the swamps of Louisiana, but for all the entrenched or casual bigotries of post-war California, memorably shown from the White side in James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, there was a greater freedom and opportunity out west than the south had ever offered a Black man. The booming military-industrial corridor stretching from the great US Navy base for the Pacific fleet in San Diego to the Hughes and McDonnell aircraft factories around LA offered long-term work at what were for the time respectable wages, and very many people had taken the chance. The population of California grew from c.6.9 million in 1940 to c.10.6 million in 1950, an increase of more than 50%, and grew almost as much again by 1960, to c.15.7 million—and while there was steady internal White migration and a large influx of Koreans, the largest groups were southern Blacks moving west and Hispanics & Amerindians moving north from Mexico. Having participated in the great enrolment of Blacks into the US Army after 1941, Leroy Mosley had also found himself at the sharp end of rapid military change as the non-combatant service and support units to which Black volunteers had 1

Walter Mosley, ‘A Father’s Story’, in What Next? A Memoir Toward World Peace (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2003), pp. 9–10.

54 traditionally been confined gave way to the glories of the Tuskegee Airmen and the appalling realities, after D-Day, of fighting in a European ground war. The experience of legally, praiseworthily shooting at and killing men is transformative for all soldiers, but for Black soldiers from the U.S. south the Whiteness of the men they were paid to kill was an additional and tremendous dislocation. Yet as Easy repeatedly makes clear, and as one imagines Leroy Mosley must also have done, the most shattering of all experiences was the heart- and mind-rending sight of the konzentrationlager dead, and, in some ways even worse, of the shambling, skeletal survivors—White (Ashkenazi) Jews and other ‘undesirables’ reduced through slave labour and malnutrition to a condition as bad as or worse than that of the grimmest chattel slavery. This was a terror, and a terrible lesson, to all who saw it, haunting them as witnesses throughout their lives, and while it is a dimension that Mosley has (perhaps as a matter of loving decency) never explored in print, one cannot but feel a connection between Leroy Mosley’s vision of Jewish suffering and his marriage, after internally migrating west, to a Jewish New Yorker whose family had lost most of their European relatives. And domestic political change was quickening after 1945. President Truman formally desegregated the US Army in 1948, Executive Order 9981 specifically citing the achievements and tremendous service of Black combat units—in many ways the first major achievement of Civil Rights and one the ‘GI Bill’ (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, 1944) had already begun to underwrite by making possible for the first time the mass-creation of a propertied Black urban class. Even in the most liberal northern states whose White politicians denounced post-bellum ‘Jim Crow’ laws and culture in the defeated Confederacy, low wages and strict, hostile bankers had made a mortgage out of all possibility for the vast majority of Blacks, and any capital that was acquired seems (in the old and traditional way) far more often to have been hoarded than invested. But with the legal and financial provisions of the GI Bill, the self-confidence gained in soldiering and surviving combat, and the moral weight of public gratitude for military service and sacrifice, matters really did begin to change. The post-war decade saw the founding of the modern AfricanAmerican middle-class, prosperous and propertied, and there is a strong argument that while the great Civil Rights leaders—including both Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) and Malcolm X (Malcolm Little, 1925–65)—were just of a younger Black generation who missed the war, the strength and drive of the Civil Rights Movement came overwhelmingly from Black veterans, the African-American families they created, and the increasingly prosperous communities they influenced.

55 It is this emergent society, newly tipping into great change after long fixity, that Mosley gathered through his father’s memories and created as Easy’s world. For the intellectual George Lamming, as for his close contemporaries Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, it was an idea of Blackness and dignity that shaped their visions; for Leroy Mosley, as for Easy, the idea was in no way lacking but the vision was more stringently pragmatic, and tied to brick-and-mortar reality. Leroy and Ella Mosley made a down payment on a house valued at $9,500, moved in, living openly as an interracial couple, married, began to raise a biracial child, and over nearly a decade paid in full the mortgage; when they sold the house the money went into a better property, and Leroy Mosley later acquired additional property to rent.1 In Devil in a Blue Dress, from the very beginning of his saga, Mosley puts Easy right into that struggle to pay the mortgage while maintaining the dignity it confers: first and last, through varying employment and sexual adventures, child rescue and political interventions, it is his house and the need to secure it that drives Easy. Is his small Californian house then the castle of Easy’s Black skin? Clearly there is much in the metaphor that still applies and appeals, for Easy’s home as much as any Englishman’s ‘is his castle’, and he defends it at all costs. Nor is there any fundamental problem with understanding either the equations of Blackness and the need for refuge and domain, of skin and stone, heart and hearth, or the mechanisms that wartime industry and the GI Bill used to power the processes of owneroccupation and self-castellation. But as castles go—and they are rare in California, outside Disneyland—Easy’s seems to be none too secure: the LAPD can take him away from it at will, DeWitt Albright, Frank Green, and Mouse Alexander can stroll in as and when they wish, and a bigoted White factory supervisor can by arbitrarily firing Easy plant beneath the whole a mine that he must scramble desperately to defuse. Nor is this simply a foolish (if funny) literalism of metaphor. All else aside, crime writing has fetishised the private investigator’s dwelling at least since Sherlock Holmes repeatedly mounted the steps to 221b Baker Street, and Mosley’s colourful Floridian exemplar, John D. MacDonald, embellished the topos mightily with Travis McGee’s dubiously-gotten houseboat, the Busted Flush—so there is a fundamental generic ground to take seriously. For any man walking Chandler’s ‘mean streets’ and preserving his honour and integrity in the castle of his maleness and righteous pursuit, a den where relaxation and vulnerability are possible is a necessity. And still more importantly, the curious vulnerability of Easy’s dwelling, 1

Mosley, What Next?, pp. 47–8.

56 highlighted by the Walcott-Lamming metaphors of castellation as by a stain on a biologist’s slide, corresponds with his profound uneasiness and inconsistency about whether and how the complexion of skin matters, especially but not only between a man and a woman. The central image and character of Devil in a Blue Dress, ‘White’ Daphne Monet born ‘Black’ Ruby Hanks, poses the greatest questions, but not necessarily the most important tests. One might in the first place wonder why, if she looks White, talks White, and so far as (almost) everybody knows is White, it matters that one of her parents would legally have been classified as ‘Black’ (or at some points in U.S. history, ‘quadroon’ or ‘octaroon’). Mosley perhaps left the answers out because most of his US audience, Black and White, would have understood without being told, and he did include by way of illustration Easy’s brush with the Iowan youths on Santa Monica Pier, where the merest suspicion of interracial flirtation sparks preening threats of violence and lynch-mob retribution. But however you cut it, one thing missing from the novel is Daphne’s experience of living her deception— mainly because Easy’s post hoc investigation and maleness as a narrator preclude it save as it manifests to him, but also because something else is substituted. If there are any hard and fast records or reliable statistics about the number of mixed-race women who endeavoured to pass for White in the US, I have not been able to find them, and it is not an easy thing to imagine in US culture, but the phenomenon is well attested from the British raj in India before 1947, where light-skinned Eurasian women were notoriously supposed to seek to pass, sometimes permanently, sometimes only until a marriage could be celebrated. The great novel of that anguished female experience is Paul Scott’s The Alien Sky (1953),1 set largely in 1945, close to the narrative 1948 of Devil in a Blue Dress; Scott’s heroine, Dorothy Gower, has managed full marriage as an Englishwoman to an Englishman, and social as well as intimate passing, but lives in terror of two constant possibilities: falling pregnant and bearing a child whose complexion could reveal (as the crescents of fingernails in certain lights) her own Indian genetic inheritance, and meeting another White woman who truly comes from the English town, carefully selected for smallness and imperial isolation, which she (having to name somewhere) claims as her place of childhood. Both issues transfer directly to Daphne Monet née Ruby Hanks, and in spades (pun unavoidably intended), because of her White would-be husband’s political ambitions and profile, and even today, as one watches the US 1

London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953; as Six Days in Marapore, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953.

57 media circle Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton very much like sharks hoping for blood and fish-chum, the political realities of deception or of anything unusual in private life are plain enough. But Mosley doesn’t simply take all this as read; he substitutes a different set of motivations and abusive scarrings. The extraordinary and ecstatic night Easy spends with Daphne is itself an old and a generic topos, in which sexual and orgasmic transcendence are tied to the encounter being a one-off, an isolated night out of time: When I look back on that night I feel confused. I could say that Daphne was crazy but that would mean that I was sane enough to say, and I wasn’t. If she wanted me to hurt, I loved to hurt, and if she wanted me to bleed, I would have been happy to open a vein. Daphne was like a door that had been closed all my life; a door that all of a sudden flung open and let me in. My heart and chest opened as wide as the sky for that woman.1

In crime writing any such epiphanic deliverance is suspect, and has been at least since Sam Spade scorned Miss Wonderley in The Maltese Falcon, but two of Hammett’s more open-minded successors, Ross MacDonald and John D. MacDonald, also press on this moment and offer more hope. Still, if Chandler’s mean-street-walking hero, who must be “neither tarnished nor afraid” and “a man of honour in ... all things”, has a certain sexual leeway and “is neither a eunuch nor a satyr”, 2 such wiggle-room does not and cannot extend to masochism or selfphlebotomy on female demand. And there is in Easy’s last, dramatic metaphor of his heart and chest opening “as wide as the sky” an uneasy echo of “crazy Ahab”, in Melville’s great novel of obsession, Moby Dick: All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the white whale’s hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam

1

2

Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990; in The Walter Mosley Omnibus, London: Picador, 1995), p. 161 (Ch. 26). Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, in Allen & Chacko, eds, Detective Fiction: Crime and Compromise, p. 398.

58 down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, his burst his hot heart’s shell upon it. 1

Ahab’s extremity of hate (also locked to abnormal whiteness) is the reverse vector of Daphne’s astonishing invitations and Easy’s extravagant declarations, and love and hate are not so far apart, for once ‘Daphne’ knows that Easy knows of her ‘Blackness’ she cannot bear to be touched by him. And once he knows that ‘Daphne’ was complicit in the killings of Howard Green and Coretta James by Joppy Shag, and herself killed Mathew Teran, he calls her “death herself” and is despite his own undiminished physical desires “glad that she was leaving”.2 Given his friendship with Mouse Alexander, responsible (in this novel alone) for killing Frank Green, Joppy Shag, and DeWitt Albright, Easy calling Daphne “death herself” is rich—but the title names her as a devil, and Easy is responding viscerally, as Daphne herself does, to the shared knowledge of her ‘’true’ racial identity. Even as he accepts that ‘truth’ of her heritage he continues to insist otherwise—“I looked at her to see the truth. But it wasn’t there. Her nose, cheeks, her skin colour—they were white. Daphne was a white woman. Even her pubic hair was barely bushy, almost flat.” 3—and the confusions run deep, as the echo of South African racial definitions, that under apartheid cited pubic hair-type as a legal determinant, suggests. Mouse thinks he hits the nail squarely on the head when he bluntly tells Easy that “She look like she white and you think like you white”,4 but it’s more complicated that that. Was Easy thinking ‘like he was White’ when he cheerfully accepted Black Coretta’s invitation to cuckold poor Dupree while he snored in the next room? Or when he found (as he believed) an epiphany in ‘White’ Daphne’s arms? That “door that had been closed all [his] life” cannot, after Easy’s war-time experiences with the mademoiselles and frauleins, be simply a revelation of White female sexuality (assuming ‘Daphne’ could in fact reveal that), and his ecstasy seems tied as much to Daphne’s apparent class as to her supposed race. In any case, for both he (bound to his mortgage) and Mouse the bottom-line in the end is the cash Daphne can distribute, and as soon as Mouse has his share he takes off—subtly reminding readers that for him by far the Whitest thing Easy has done, apart from volunteering to fight in an army, is to own a house. But for Easy, as for Leroy and 1

2 3 4

Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851; ed. Harold Beaver, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 [Penguin English Library]), p. 283 (Ch. 41). Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, p. 179 (Ch. 29). Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, p. 176 (Ch. 29). Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, p. 180 (Ch. 29).

59 Walter Mosley, the social climb to bourgeois responsibility was and is an extension of race, not a denial of it. Everything in this tangle of sexual, racial, and socio-economic status issues is additionally complicated by the thread of child abuse that runs with cold rage and contempt through Devil in a Blue Dress, centrally concerning the orphaned, stolen, or sold, and in any case hideously enslaved Hispanic boy who serves as Teran’s catamite, and is rescued by Daphne before passing into Easy’s permanent care (eventually as his adopted son, Jesus). In this Mosley claims an honourable place among the crime writers who have from the later 1980s been responding far more widely and intelligently to the crisis of child abuse than more ‘mainstream’ literary writers, 1 but the extension of the abuse theme from evil Teran and poor Jesus to Daphne herself is more troubling. Between the one ecstatic night she and Easy share and the violent revelation of her actions and ‘true’ identity, she tells Easy a story of her father’s sexual abuse of her after they had both seen zebras coupling at the zoo, but insists she loved him anyway, that he was “sweet” and that he “left Momma and me in the spring”, implicitly as a final form of apology for his transgression.2 Later, after the revelations, she says something rather different, and a great deal more complicated: “I’m not Daphne. My given name is Ruby Hanks and I was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I’m different than you because I’m two people. I’m her and I’m me. I never went to the zoo, she did. She was there and that’s where she lost her father. I had a different father. He came home and fell into my bed about as many times as he fell into my mother’s. He did that until one night Frank killed him.” 3

It’s difficult by this stage to know what to believe. In generic terms Daphne–Ruby has lost rather than gained credibility by the revelation of her lies about identity and actions, especially as she has been an accessory to murder and is herself the murderess of Teran; however he may have deserved it, any story she tells may be 1

2 3

See, for example, Andrew Vachss’s Burke novels, following Flood (1985); Robert Campbell’s In La-La Land We Trust (1986) and sequels; Robert B. Parker’s Double Deuce (1992); Anna Salter’s Michael Stone novels, following Shiny Water (1997); Stephen Dobyns, The Church of Dead Girls (1997); Andrew Taylor’s The Four Last Things (1997) and sequels; Reginald Hill, Of Beulah Height and Singing the Sadness (both 1998); and Toni Cade Bambara, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999). Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, p. 168 (Ch. 27). Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, p. 179 (Ch. 29).

60 tainted with self-interest or a wholesale fabrication. The zoo episode, as she first narrates it, is itself a curious tale, recalling more than anything in overt crime writing the extravagant outbursts of traumatic memory characteristic of Tennessee Williams’s plays. But the dissociated duality in this statement of I and she, her and my, rings very real as well as literary and generic bells, for the badly abused may well develop in traumatised defence some such encapsulation of what must but cannot be endured. And although certainty is impossible it seems probable (assuming him to be real) that the raping father was Daphne’s ‘White’ parent, and her Black half-brother Frank’s killing of him an assertion of family and blood over skin-colour—in a violent mode, the plain truth of Leroy’s and Ella’s Mosley’s marriage, not the half-truths and confusions of Easy’s responses to the problem Daphne represents, let alone Mouse’s reductive aphorism about being and thinking ‘White’. Turning again to Walcott’s and Lamming’s phrase for guidance, and pushing the metaphor still harder towards literalism, one might ask for whom in Devil in a Blue Dress has complexion truly made a castle of their skin—and Easy’s house starts to fade. Daphne, most obviously, moves in her faux Whiteness through a Black society, and becomes as repellent as stone walls, repudiating touch and penetration, once she knows a man knows of her ‘Blackness’ (however that may be defined, theoretically in general or pragmatically in her particular case). Mouse too is far more castellated than Easy, and like Frank Green a man whose constant aggression and absolute will make him as mentally and figuratively armoured as he is literally armed. The peacock clothes he favours frame the Blackness of his skin to showcase the glittering darkness of his mind, and his whole personality projects danger, filling rooms with menace as an urban prison-wall looms over the surrounding streets. And in this light Easy’s house is actually the thing least like a castle, least tied to complexion, however defensive a refuge it may be, for with the money and the GI Bill any veteran—almost by definition a man who has put nation before self or immediate community—could buy a house; and one of the things any castle worth its name really shouldn’t be, even in California, is mortgaged. That curious word does have the etymology it appears to have, ‘dead gage’, from Latin mori, mortuus, ‘to die, have died’, via Old French mort + gaige, ‘a pledge’ (as in those cinematic moments of Errol-Flynnery when a gentleman’s glove goes thwapp across some sneering face before being thrown to the ground as a ‘gage’ of honour). The point was that such a ‘dead pledge’ would ‘die’ either when all payments had been made (it was not in perpetuity), or if they ceased to be made (it

61 was contingent, not absolute)—the same sense or shade of ‘dead’ as in ‘dead man’s handle’, the safety device on trains that should bring them to a halt if a driver’s hand slips off their well-sprung arms. Castles thus dislike and repel the idea of being mortgaged for good reasons, arising as they do from (i) feudal and permanent necessities having everything to do with protecting income—the productive fields and farmyards, stock and tools of the surrounding countryside—and (ii) controlling a landscape through military reading and domination of topography. Conversely (at least in theory), they can have nothing to do with any sort of contingent mercantilism, let alone suburban owner-occupation and the financial instruments needed to enable it on a mass-scale. The self-castellators in Mosley’s world really are Daphne in her disturbed and/or self-interested pretence of mysterious White female sexuality, Mouse in his purely confrontational assertion of Black male selfhood, Frank Green in his criminal empire of theft and intimidation, and Joppy in his panicked readiness of violence, flailing about him as if he were still a chancer in the boxing ring of his indifferent glory days. And by the same tokens, Easy is not in any castle, for though he like us all cannot move out of his skin, and in some ways seems not really to know any more what he thinks of his own complexion or its social meaning, he has (not least in leaving ‘Champion’ and forcing from them some serious severance pay) moved out of the castle, once and for all, as a man, as an African American, and as a private eye. His world is no longer the feudal south, and in the suburban Pacific west a castle is a millionaire’s folly, not a dwelling for grounded people, and as rarely a genuine refuge in crisis as an ordinary house (as Michael Jackson and others have found out). For many people reading Chandler’s great essay on ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ in or shortly after its first appearance in 1944, those “mean streets” down which a man “must go who is not himself mean” would most obviously have been the streets of the poor and threatening, and so in the mass White imaginary far more like the streets of Watts than any district closer to central Los Angeles or the Hollywood hills—just as they now lie for the most part in those inner-city ghettos we know from TV, with crack-houses and ‘hoes’ on every derelict block and corner. But if one grew up in a well-kept, loving, and intellectually rich home right in that very Watts, knowing it truly from within, and watched one’s interracially pioneering parents pay off nearly ten thousand dollars of a mortgage, those streets are more meaningful than mean—or ‘mean’ only in the sense of ‘average’, and never with the senses of ‘stingy, inadequate’ or ‘dangerous, minatory, threatening’. And the real twist, the corkscrew truth that Mouse half-grasps when he says Easy thinks ‘like

62 he’s White’, is that in moving out of the castle and into the mortgaged house, Easy (and Leroy Mosley) were in a quite new way mortgaging their skins—forsaking a southern racial community, as constraining (and constrained) from without as it was supportive from within, for a polyethnic suburban multiculture; enlarging what Blackness could mean by extending it into areas shared with White, Hispanic, and Amerindian identities and cultures; and embarking on a journey and a rolling change that has no end, and little rest, until death is strict in his arrest or the payments cease to be made. Then the deal breaks, and the act of repossession rebuilds the castlewalls with you outside them—but Easy, case by case, has gone on paying his dues, as Walter Mosley does, novel by novel, gage by gage, trying to save and build something for himself, and for all: man, mean, and meaning, necessarily moving on.

P

erhaps the single most influential, widely known and quoted fact about Walter Mosley, even today, is that he was (and presumably remains) one of President William Jefferson Clinton’s favourite crime writers. On the face of it Clinton did Mosley a huge favour by publicising his name, and the corollary most often drawn is simply the enormous boost in sales both of his backlist paperbacks and new hardbacks—all of which is undoubtedly true (Black Betty reportedly sold more than 100,000 copies in hardback), but at least two other points ought to be made that rarely are. The first is that if Clinton was doing Mosley such a favour, it shows him to have been pretty quick off the literary mark. When he made his comments during the 1992 Presidential Election campaign, he could only have been talking about the first three Easy Rawlins novels, Devil in a Blue Dress, A Red Death, and White Butterfly, published annually in 1990–2. He might well have seen favourable reviews, but Mosley’s sales were not then enormous, nor anything like, so for a man busier than most of us can imagine Clinton did well to get onto Mosley so fast, and was perspicacious in realising his worth. The most intellectually capable and well-read US President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Clinton is a confirmed and lifelong reader of modern crime as well as classics, and might well have seen as soon as he first turned a page of Devil in a Blue Dress both the shadows of Chandler and the shades of those early, pre-Harlem Cycle novels by Chester B. Himes that similarly reflect the great internal wartime migration of Southern and Mid-Western Blacks to California. His reading experience of Mosley would from the first then have been much richer than it can be for those who see only the Chandlerian paradigm, or Easy as only a re-dyed hero—and other perceptions would then have been relevant also,

63 which points to the second thing, simply enough why Mosley should so have appealed to Bill Clinton that at an important moment in his political quest he pointedly and very successfully promoted Mosley’s work to an avid national and international audience. Writing in The New Yorker in October 1998, as one of several contributors invited to comment and puzzle on the meaning of the Monica Lewinsky hysteria that had gouted poisonously all summer in the U.S. media and on a shrill, intently meanspirited Capitol Hill, the great African-American novelist and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison said a number of astonishing things: African-American men seemed to understand it [the puzzle of the obsessive nonstory about Lewinsky] right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”1

Such an astonishing testimony to a White President is neither earned nor formulated overnight. It had been clear on television back in 1992 in his first national campaign—and not just (if most memorably) when joyously playing his sax—that Clinton was in a fashion never seen before, even from President Jimmy Carter, at genuine ease in African-American company and society, people apparently being for him simply people. It was why he was and is beloved, both by African Americans and genuinely multiculturalist Democrats, and more intensely so as the victim of perhaps the most grotesque political lynching in living memory, a prophetic crossparty adumbration, in its gross ignorance of the spirit and overthrow of the letter of 1

Toni Morrison, in ‘The Talk of the Town’, in The New Yorker, 5 October 1998, p. 32a–b.

64 the US Constitution, of the Bush years to come. It’s also why Clinton would truly value on first and every subsequent reading the work of Walter Mosley and the companionship of Easy Rawlins, not just as an African-American writer of great civility and conscience and a black man of great if often troubling sympathies and good heart, but as men who self-consciously turn their backs on the castellation of home and kin, or hearth and skin, however proud of them and tending to them, and instead set about paying the mortgage of living in a flexible, bruiseable, touchable, and healable human skin, with the neighbours and the friends, the lovers and the children chance will bring.

65

4. Bibliography 4.1 Works by Walter Mosley NOVELS Easy Rawlins Devil in a Blue Dress (New York: Norton, 1990) A Red Death (New York: Norton, 1991) White Butterfly (New York: Norton, 1992) Black Betty (New York: Norton, 1994) A Little Yellow Dog (New York: Norton, 1996) Gone Fishin' (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997) Bad Boy Brawly Brown (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2002) Little Scarlet (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2004) Cinnamon Kiss (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2005) Socrates Fortlow Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (New York: Norton, 1998)

One of the stories in this cycle won an O. Henry Award in 1996, and appears in William Abraham, ed., Prize Stories 1996: The O. Henry Awards (New York: Anchor, 1996).

Walkin’ the Dog (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 1999) Fearless Jones and Paris Minton Fearless Jones (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2001) Fear Itself (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2003) Fear of the Dark (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2006) Science Fiction and Fantasy Blue Light (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 1999) 47 (New York: Warner, 2005) This interesting fable of slavery is aimed primarily at ‘Young Adults’, and tends to wind up in the children’s rather than the SF & F section of bookshops.

The Wave (New York: Warner, 2006)

66 Other novels RL’s Dream (New York: Norton, 1995)

Black Caucus of the American Library Association

Literary Award, 1996.

The Man in My Basement (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2004) Fortunate Son (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2006) Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007)

This recent novel has already been classified on Wikipedia as ‘Erotica’, but is clearly contiguous with Mosley’s crime writing.

SHORT STORIES Tempest Tales (serialised stories in Savoy, 2001 issues) Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World (New York: Warner, 2001) Contains ‘Whispers in the Dark’, ‘The Greatest’, ‘Doctor Kismet’, ‘Angel’s Island’, ‘The Electric Eye’, ‘Voices’, ‘Little Brother’, ‘En Masse’, & ‘The Nig in Me’. Six Easy Pieces (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003) Contains ‘Smoke’, ‘Crimson Stain’, ‘Silver Lining’, ‘Lavender’, ‘Gator Green’, ‘Gray-Eyed Death’, & ‘Amber Gate’. All except ‘Amber Gate’ first appeared in the 2002 Washington Square Press paperbacks of the Rawlins novels to date.

‘Black Woman in the Chinese Hat’, in GQ, August 2000, p. 94. ‘Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large: Walking the Line’, in Ed McBain, ed., Transgressions: Ten Brand New Novellas (New York: Forge, 2005) The paperback edition was in 4 vols; Mosley’s novella appeared with texts by Ed McBain and Donald E. Westlake in Transgressions, Volume 3, 2006, and is commonly cited simply as ‘Walking the Line’.

ESSAYS AND ARTICLES Workin’ on the Chain-Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History (New York: Ballantine, 2000 [The Library of Contemporary Thought]) What Next? A Memoir Towards World Peace (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2003) Life Out of Context: Which Includes a Proposal for the Non-violent Takeover of the House of Representatives (New York: Nation Books, 2006) This Year You Write Your Novel (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2007) ‘Walter Mosley’ in Journeys (Rockville, MD: Quill & Brush/PEN/Faulkner Foundation, 1996)

67 ‘The Black Man: Hero’, in Don Eelton, ed., Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream (Boston: Beacon, 1997), pp. 234–40 ‘Black to the Future’, in The New York Times, 30 November 1999, and at: Œ http://www.twbookmark.com/features/waltermosley/futureland_article.html ‘No Renaissance without Our Editors and Publishers’, in Elizabeth Nunez and Brenda M. Greene, eds, Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the ’90s (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 9–14 ‘For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day’, in The New York Times, 3 July 2000, and at: Œ http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/070300mosley-writing.html ‘The Writing of Fearless Jones’, at: Œ http://www.twbookmark.com/features/waltermosley/fearless_article.html ‘Liner notes’ for Richard Pryor ... And It’s Deep Too!: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992) (Warner Archives/Rhino Entertainment, 2002) Mosley won a Grammy Award for these liner notes.

‘On Writing 47’, at: Œ http://www.twbookmark.com/features/waltermosley/47_article.html ‘Lecture on 47’, at: Œ http://www.twbookmark.com/features/waltermosley/47_lecture.html ‘A New Black Power’, at: Œ http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060227/mosley EDITED WORK Black Genius: African-American Solutions to African-American Problems (Walter Mosley, Manthia Diawara, Clyde Taylor, & Regina Austin, eds, New York: Norton, 2000) Mosley was the driving force behind this solicited collection of essays. The Best American Short Stories 2003 (Walter Mosley, ed., Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003) This prestigious and well-established series invites guest editors to undertake for one year the enormous task of reading and selection.

Maximum Fantastic Four (Introduction and commentary by Walter Mosley, New York: Marvel Comics, 2005) Mosley is a serious fan and collector of all Marvel comics, with a special attachment to the Fantastic Four. This is an enlarged reprint of the first issue with extensive panel-by-panel commentary—a labour of love that Mosley drove to fruition against considerable odds.

68 4.2 Works about Walter Mosley and Crime Writing CRITICISM ALLEN, Dick, & CHACKO, David, eds, Detective Fiction: Crime and Compromise (New York etc.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974) AUDEN, W. H., ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ (1948), in The Dyer’s Hand and other essays (1963; London: Faber & Faber, 1975), pp. 146–58. BERGER, Roger A., ‘‘The Black Dick’: Race, Sexuality, and Discourse in the L.A. Novels of Walter Mosley’, in African American Review 31 (Summer 1997): 281– 94 BERRETTINI, Mark, ‘Private Knowledge, Public Space: Investigation and Navigation in Devil in a Blue Dress’, in Cinema Journal 39 (Fall 1999): 74–89 BINYON, T. J., ‘Murder Will Out’: The Detective in Fiction (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Something of a catalogue, but the widest historical survey of the genre since Symons’s Bloody Murder, and far less idiosyncratic in both opinion and historiography.

CHERNAIK, Warren, SWALES, Martin, & VILAIN, Robert, eds, The Art of Detective Fiction (London: Macmillan, & New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000) FINE, David, ed., Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays from James M. Cain to Walter Mosley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1995) FREELING, Nicholas, Criminal Convictions: Errant Essays on Perpetrators of Literary License (London: Peter Owen, 1994) FRIEBURGER, William, ‘James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, and the Politics of the Los Angeles Crime Novel’, in Clues: A Journal of Detection 17 (Fall–Winter 1996): 87–104 FRIEDLAND, Martin L., ed., Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature (Toronto, Buffalo, & London: University of Toronto Press, 1991) LENNARD, John, ‘Of Serial Readers: Living with Genre Fiction’, in John Lennard, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (Tirrell: Humanities-EBooks, 2007), pp. 10–32. PRIESTMAN, Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) SOITOS, Stephen F., The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Crime Fiction (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986) The major study of Black crime writing, but published before Mosley’s emergence.

SYMONS, Julian, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber & Faber, 1972; as Mortal Consequences, New York:

69 Harper, 1972; with revisions, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974; 4th ed., London: Pan, 1994) The single most influential ‘history’ of crime writing, but felt by many to be profoundly misconceived, and certainly strongly influenced in its analyses by personal taste.

WESLEY, Marilyn C., ‘Power and Knowledge in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress’, in African American Review 35 (Spring 2001): 103–16 WILSON, Charles E., Jr., Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT, & London: Greenwood Press, 2003 [Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers]) This is the only full-length critical study to date, and has an excellent bibliography, including of newspaper reviews of individual Easy Rawlins novels.

A fan-site at: Πhttp://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/mosley/mosley_walter_primer.html has plot-summaries etc. while: Πhttp://www.galeschools.com/black_history/bio/mosley_w.htm has an excellent bibliography of articles, interviews, and reviews. Other useful sites include: Πhttp://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm?author_number=636 Πhttp://authors.aalbc.com/easy.htm Πhttp://authors.aalbc.com/waltermoselychattext.htm Πhttp://www.pbs.org/now/arts/mosley.html Πhttp://www.scifi.com/transcripts/2001/mosley_chat.html Πhttp://www.locusmag.com/2001/Issue12/Mosley.html Πhttp://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1035760,00.html INTERVIEWS There is an interview directly concerned with Little Scarlet, the ninth Easy Rawlins book, at : Πhttp://www.powells.com/authors/mosley.html and one about Bad Boy Brawly Brown at: Πhttp://www.twbookmark.com/features/waltermosley/interview2.html There is a substantial streaming audio piece (including a Socrates Fortlow story) at : Πhttp://smithsonianassociates.org/programs/mosley/mosley.asp Many short newspaper interviews done on publicity tours are listed in Wilson, Walter Mosley.

70 4.3 Useful Reference Works There are entries on Mosley in : ANDREWS, William L., FOSTER, Frances Smith, & HARRIS, Trudier, eds, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) A giant A–Z by many contributors, intended (and largely succeeding) as a first reliable general survey of the whole field in fair detail.

ASHLEY, Mike, ed., The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction (London: Robinson, 2002) Restricted to work after 1950, but very full within that limit ; there is a substantial section dealing with films and TV, and useful appendices, including the most comprehensive listing of award-winners available.

HERBERT, Rosemary, ed., The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) A mildly idiosyncratic A–Z by many contributors ; some topic essays are provocative, and coverage of older authors is good, but treatment of living ones is scattered and often thin.

KLEIN, Kathleen G., PEDERSON, Jay P., & BENBOW-PFALZGRAF, Taryn, eds, St James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1st ed., 1978; 4th ed., Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 1996) A detailed and expensive guide, with full bibliographies and in many cases brief comments by the subject as well as a short critical essay.

MURPHY, Bruce F., The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery (New York: Palgrave, 1999) A monographic A–Z, a labour of love well-presented and crisply written; Murphy’s views are often helpfully challenging, and coverage of living authors is generally excellent.

Several of these have general entries for African-American crime writing, and on relevant topoi; most have entries on Chester Himes, Raymond Chandler et al.. The general topic of African-American detection is dealt with at length in Soitos, The Blues Detective (see section 4.2).

Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/ Genre FictionSightlines Octavia E Butler: Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood Reginal Hill: On Beulah’s Height Ian McDonald: Chaga / Evolution’s Store Walter Mosley: Devil in a Blue Dress Tamora Pierce: The Immortals

History Insights The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Methodism and Society Southern Africa

Literature Insights (by author) Chatwin: In Patagonia Conrad: The Secret Agent Eliot, George: Silas Marner Eliot, T S: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury Gaskell, Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the Durbervilles Hopkins: Selected Poems Lawrence: The Rainbow Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love Shakespeare: Hamlet Shakespeare: Henry IV Shakespeare: Richard II Shakespeare: Richard III Shakespeare: The Tempest Shelley: Frankenstein Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads

Literature Insights (general) English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time Fields of Agony: English Poetry and the First World War

Philosophy Insights American Pragmatism Business Ethics Ethics Existentialism Formal Logic Heidegger Informal Logic and Critical Thinking Islamic Philosophy Marxism Meta-Ethics Philosophy of History Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Mind Philosophy of Sport Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism Wittgenstein

General Titles An Inroduction to Feminist Theory An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Commissioned Titles Include Aesthetics Austen: Pride and Prejudice Blake: Songs of Innocence & Experience and The Marriage of Heaven & Hell’ Eliot: Four Quartets Fielding: Tom Jones Heaney: Selected Poems Hughes: Selected Poems Lawrence: Selected Poems Mental Causation Toni Morrison: Beloved Philosophy of Religion Plato Plato’s Republic Renaissance Philosophy