Devil in a Blue Dress

The time is 1948, the town is Los Angeles, and Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friends' bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Monet, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs... (1990)

Meanwhile, Easy's romantic life becomes equally complicated and dangerous when he takes in his old flame Etta Mae Harris. Hard on her heels is Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, her ex-husband, Easy's best friend, a dark, gleefully homicidal angel. Then the murders begin...and the LAPD decides that Easy is a convenient suspect. His search for the actual murderer must be conducted in an ethical mine field, where the stark choice is between betrayal and survival.

A Red Death again displays Walter Mosley's wonderful strengths: a hypnotic narrative voice, crackling dialogue, wonderful subsidiary characters, the vivid sense of an almost mythical Los Angeles - and a hero with a winning combination of hard-boiled attitude and hard-earned compassion. It is clearly the work of an emerging master of American crime writing. (1991)

Los Angeles, 1961. Kennedy is in the White House and King in marching down South. It's a new day for many blacks in America - but not for Easy Rawlins. Easy's small real estate empire is in trouble and he is facing bankruptcy when Saul Lynx, an oily white private eye, offers him $400 to track down one Elizabeth Eady, aka "Black Betty." The sensuous Betty was a housekeeper for an immensely wealthy Beverly Hills family - but now has mysteriously disappeared. Finding Betty seems a simple enough task, but nothing about this woman is as simple as it appears to be. Easy soon finds out her trail is paved with blood - and he might be the next victim of her deadly charms.

A Little Yellow Dog

Black PI Easy Rawlins, working as a school janitor in Los Angeles, is seduced by a teacher into taking her dog which her husband threatens to kill. When the husband is murdered, Rawlins becomes the prime suspect and must clear his name.

Everything Easy Rawlins and Mouse Alexander ever knew about friendship, and themselves, comes apart at the seams when they enter a steamy bayou world of voodoo, sex, revenge, and death. One of the few books on this page that doesn't take place in Los Angeles, it's nonetheless a must-read - it takes place before the rest of the Easy Rawlins books.

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

Three decades ago, the young Socrates had, in a burst of drunken rage, murdered a man and a woman with his huge "rock-breaking hands." Twenty-seven years of hard time in an Indiana prison followed. Now Socrates lives in a cramped two-room apartment in an abandoned building in Watts, scavenging bottles and delivering groceries for a supermarket. In each of the linked stories that comprise this richly brooding work, Socrates, like his namesake, explores philosophical questions of morality in a world beset with crime, poverty, and racism. He is an unforgettable presence and his perceptions cast a glow of somber lyricism upon an often harsh world. He is a creation of stunning originality; the book he inhabits is Mosley's most powerful and eloquent to date.

Yet Socrates is no poster child for racial victimization. Why? Because Mosley never soft-pedals the fact that he is, or was, a murderer. Deprived of any sort of sentimental pulpit, Socrates makes his moral determinations on the fly. Should he admit that he killed a mugger in self-defense? Can he force his adopted son Darryl to stay in school? Should he murder a corrupt cop who's terrorized his entire neighborhood? His answers are consistently surprising, and that fact--combined with the author's shrewd, no-nonsense prose--should make every reader long for Mosley's next excursion into the Socratic method.