Black Mysteries
Many readers of all races tend to think that the black mystery genre began with Chester Himes in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, and that then there was a 30-year hiatus until Walter Mosley hit the scene.
But before Himes came many other black writers—as
Paula L. Woods pointed out in “Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century,” a collection she edited for Doubleday in 1995.
There was Rudolph Fisher, whose 1932 book “The Conjure Man Dies” was the first detective novel with a black hero. Fisher was a doctor, musician and writer who became part of the 1930s Harlem Renaissance; he died of cancer at 37, in 1934.
George S. Schuyler, prolific author of serial mysteries for such newspapers as the Pittsburgh Courier, is best known for his 1931 satirical novel “Black No More.” He worked as a journalist into his 70s, and died at age 82 in 1977.
And there is John A. Williams, author of “The Man Who Cried I Am,” a monumental 1967 thriller with implications that still reverberate today.
Since Walter Mosley arrived with a bang with 1990’s “Devil In A Blue Dress,” scores of other black crime writers have enjoyed critical and financial success: Paula L. Woods, Gary Phillips, Gar Anthony Haywood, Robert O. Greer, Grace Edwards and Eleanor Taylor Bland are just a few of their names.
WHITE BUTTERFLY, by Walter Mosley (Norton)
Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a Los Angeles apartment building owner who pretends he’s the janitor and who solves crimes not for money but to save his own and his friends’ skins, is trying to convince a grim secretary that he really does have an appointment to see the Oakland police chief.
“I had told her, in my best white man’s English, ‘I would like to be announced to the chief’s office. I know that this is an unusual request, but a police officer from Los Angeles, a Sergeant Quinten Naylor, told me to meet him with the chief concerning a case in Los Angeles that seems to overlap with a case in your lovely city.’
“ ‘You should go to your own precinct to give information you have there, sir,’ she said, and then opened a drawer to look in, giving me a chance to withdraw.”
But Easy Rawlins rarely withdraws, and finally, after much persistence and a lucky break, he gets the woman to call the chief’s office. “Miss Cranshaw almost spit bile as she made the call for me. Her jaws clenched so tight I thought her teeth might crack. It might have been the first time she’d had to serve a Negro. I was working for progress.”
The time—if the use of “Negro” hasn’t already given it away—is the 1950s, 1956 to be exact, and Easy has been sucked into yet another tumble-down-a-dirty-staircase of murder and worse by that same mixture of threat and curiousity that gave Walter Mosley’s first two thrillers such a distinctive glow. Like “Devil in a Blue Dress” and “A Red Death,” “White Butterfly” grabs you by the elbow from the getgo, letting you know that you’re in for some rough but very interesting times. And not since Chester Himes began to shake up the literary world with his Harlem-based crime novels has a black writer used the mystery genre to expose the kind of racism that has always lurked behind the benign, smoggy grin of Los Angeles.
Easy’s South Central Los Angeles of the late 1940s and 1950s is shown-minus the well-intentioned hand-wringing of the post-Watts riots years-as basically the same kind of armed and divided camp that it is today. Early on in “White Butterfly,” a posse of white officials gang up on Easy to enlist his help in the murder of a young UCLA coed (another pithy ‘50s echo) who moonlighted as a stripper in rough bars. One of the officials is a police captain named Violette, whom Easy suddenly remembers from a past encounter:
“He was only a detective when he dragged Alvin Lewis out of his house on Sutter Place. Alvin had beaten a woman in an alley outside of a local bar and Violette had taken the call. The woman, Lola Jones, refused to press charges, and Violette decided to take a little justice into his own hands. I remembered how red his face got while he beat Alvin with a police stick. I remembered how cowardly I felt while three other white policemen stood around with their hands on their pistols and grim satisfaction on their faces. It wasn’t the satisfaction that a bad man had paid for his crime; those men were tickled to have power like that.…”
The last thing Easy wants at this point in his life is to work for the police on a series of sordid killings that have captured the attention of the brass only because the latest victim is white and from a prominent family. Easy is married to a fine woman, Regina, a nurse who has a hard time accepting the fact that her janitor husband can quickly put his hands on large sums of money. (He hasn’t yet told her of the real estate business he runs with a man called Mofass.) All he really wants to do is spend time with Regina, with their baby daughter Edna, and with his adopted son Jesus, a mute Mexican boy he rescued from abuse in a previous book.
But the cops get to Rawlins by threatening to arrest Raymond Alexander as a suspect in the murders. Raymond, known as “Mouse,” is a boyhood friend of Easy’s and is in fact a stone killer with a hair-trigger temper who will shoot a man on the slightest pretext. But Mouse doesn’t murder women: He’s too busy getting them into bed. So Easy is forced off on a journey through mayhem and memory as rich as the best of Chandler and Ross Macdonald, trying to keep Mouse out of jail and the hard-breathing white cops off his own back.
Along the way, Mosley also manages to distill some prime observations about racism, as true to today’s times as they are to his period. At the corner of 93rd and Hooper stands one of Easy’s private temples, a small public library run by an almost saintly woman from Wisconsin named Mrs. Stella Keaton:
“We were on a first-name basis, Stella and I, but I was unhappy that she held that job. I was unhappy because even though Stella was nice, she was still a white woman. A white woman from a place where there were only white Christians. To her, Shakespeare was a god. I didn’t mind that, but what did she know about the folk tales and riddles and stories colored folks have been telling for centuries? What did she know about the language we spoke? I always heard her correcting children’s speech. ‘Not “I is,” ’ she’d say. ‘It’s “I am.” ’ And, of course, she was right. It’s just that little colored children listening to that proper white woman would never hear their own cadence in her words. They’d come to believe that they would have to abandon their own language and stories to become a part of her educated world.…”
At the end of “White Butterfly,” Easy Rawlins finds the real killer and gets Mouse off the hook, but he has to pay a sad and terrible price for his victory. In a way, it’s the same price that Chester Himes and Walter Mosley and millions of other Americans of all colors have had to pay to get us to the dubious place we are today.
A LITTLE YELLOW DOG, By Walter Mosley (Norton)
Of all the many fine things in the five mystery novels that Walter Mosley has written featuring Easy Rawlins—the richness and depth of the characters, the constantly tightening fist of the stories, the way the violence and death are so surprising and so inevitable—the one that really puts the glow of greatness on the series and makes it unique is the way Mosley has rooted his books in the land-owning dream of Los Angeles.
“When I was a poor man, and landless, all I worried about was a place for the night and food to eat; you really didn’t need much for that,” Easy said early on in “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the first in the series. “A friend would always stand me a meal, and there were plenty of women who would have let me sleep with them. But when I got that mortgage I found that I needed more than just friendship.”
The need to pay the $64 monthly mortgage on his little house in Watts is what motivated the Easy Rawlins we first met in 1948: a 28-year-old veteran of World War II who moved, along with many of his old friends, from Houston to Los Angeles because “California was like heaven for the southern Negro. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn’t like the dream.…” Out of work and offered $100 by a sleazy fixer to find a white woman who “has a predilection for the company of Negroes,” Easy went against all his hard-won survival instincts to keep his house.
Unlike Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Lew Archer and other detectives who walked the meaner streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco, Easy wasn’t a loner in a rented apartment, doing some client’s bidding. On through the 1950s and early 1960s, with “A Red Death,” “White Butterfly” and “Black Betty,” the need to protect a growing, changing family and more property secretly acquired to avoid calling attention to himself were what forced a reluctant Easy into action. At the end of “Black Betty,” the bloodiest and darkest book in the series, he was looking for a job “that would keep me out of the streets forever.”
Now, in “A Little Yellow Dog,” it’s 1963, and the 43-year-old Easy seems to have found that job, as head custodian at Sojourner Truth Junior High in South-Central Los Angeles. It doesn’t pay much but comes with medical insurance for the two children, Feather and Jesus, whom he rescued from the streets and is raising in place of the daughter stolen by his ex-wife.
Almost all of his surviving friends have gone straight: Even the lethal weapon Raymond “Mouse” Alexander is pushing a broom. Driving Mouse to work one day, Easy stops to look at two apartment buildings he owns, on Magnolia and Denker. “I was still in the real estate business in a small way,” he tells us. “But I no longer dreamed of making a fortune on speculation.”
So, on the surface at least, Easy’s rough years of danger and sudden death appear to be behind him. But because we have come to know him so well (and because, it must be said, of certain expectations built into the mystery genre), when Easy tells us, “I didn’t have faith that anyone would care for me,” on entering the Hollywood police station for what a cop calls “just a few questions,” we recognize the bald truth and wisdom of his words. Just beneath the thin cover of everyday work and aspiration, Easy is as much at risk as ever—set apart by his nature and the color of his skin. At any second he can still lose everything.
Easy’s latest trip to the edge begins with two impulsive acts: having casual sex with an attractive teacher on her desk at 6:30 in the morning, and then agreeing to protect her nasty, yapping dog from a dangerous husband. Both acts saddle him with unwanted responsibilities, especially after the husband and his even more dangerous brother are murdered.
Caught between a coldly ambitious, totally plausible Latino police sergeant convinced that Easy’s a thief and killer, and a truly frightening array of professional criminals of all colors, Easy has to solve a lot of other people’s problems before he can begin to address his own: how to continue surviving as a man and a father.
The book ends with two major deaths—John F. Kennedy’s in Dallas and Mouse’s apparent passing after being shot and lapsing into a coma. Easy’s job is also in danger because of all that has happened. But there are several hints of hope.
When last seen, Mouse is being carried away from a hospital in the formidable arms of his wife, Etta Mae, so there’s a tiny chance he may return. A relatively honest gambler has presented Easy with a year’s pay for favors rendered: The $6,735 will help cover future mortgage payments and college tuition. Perhaps the airline stewardess Bonnie Shay—a mysterious woman who at least “smiled and carried no weapons”—might be persuaded to change her plans and become a part of his family.
Easy has also decided to let his children keep the nasty little yellow dog. “As long as Pharaoh was around snarling and cursing,” he says, “I’d remember the kind of trouble that a man like me could find.”
DIE UPON A KISS, by Barbara Hambly (Bantam)
As Barbara Hambly reminds us in astonishing depth of detail in her fifth book about Benjamin January, New Orleans in 1835 was the most European city in America, home to two rival opera companies.
January, a “free man of color” who studied music and medicine in Paris but returned home to New Orleans after the death of his wife made that city unbearable, is working as a pianist for an Italian opera company about to mount a production of “Othello,” one of the many early attempts to set Shakespeare’s tragedy to music before Verdi got it so right.
As always, January is a wonderfully rich and complex character, a man whose earliest musical memories are of his African-born slave father whistling a tune he had heard a violinist play at the plantation owner’s home the night before as he washed himself. “What would Antonio Vivaldi have thought had he known that his ‘Storm at Sea’ concerto would be whistled by a tall black man with tribal scars on his face, walking out to the sugar harvest with his cane-knife in his hand?” January wonders. He is also —through the experiences of his mother, a lighter-skinned beauty who has become the mistress of several important white men—our guide through the intricate thickets of color and sex that make up Creole social life.
The story—described by Hambly herself as a “tangle of conflicting tales of Austrian spies, slave-smugglers, mysterious veiled ladies, nameless hired bravos, Italian politics, and enraged divas”—begins when January breaks up an attack on the pompous, vain but apparently brilliant Italian impresario who composed the latest version of “Othello.” The plot may not be a thing of beauty, but it provides plenty of hooks on which Hambly can hang a particularly dazzling array of coloratura set pieces.
THE DYING GROUND, by Nichelle D. Tramble (Villard)
Nichelle D. Tramble does so many things so well in this her first novel that it’s hard to know where to start raving.
Her setting—the scarred streets of Oakland in 1989 —leaps to life with the force of recovered memory: Even if you weren’t there, you’ll think you were. Her lead character, a young man named Maceo Redfield with a remarkable talent for baseball that might just offer him a way out if he can tear away all the roots that hold him, is one of the most satisfying and frustrating figures in recent fiction. Although the book is subtitled “A Hip-Hop Noir Novel,” Tramble’s writing is multidimensional, muscular and poetic, capturing the voices of African-Americans of many ages and backgrounds without slipping into pretense or parody. And her story has the depth and resonance of true legend: a modern myth filled with age-old pain and tears.