As Easy once observed about himself, Mosley can find “more trouble in one day than most men come across in a decade.” Yet, in pure hardboiled form, Mosley escorts the readers to the dark side of paradise, where pimps, pushers, psychedelic parasites and petty policemen are aplenty. In the case of Little Green, the writer takes us behind the scenes of 1967’s so-called Summer of Love, when hippies and flower power were the rage. “By 1967, the Watts riots had already happened, the Panthers were there and the hippies were all over the streets.” “California always seems a few years ahead in terms of what’s going on socially,” Mosley (himself an LA native) says via telephone from his home in Brooklyn. Writing in a moody, urgent style akin to the work of noir stylists Georges Simmenon and Robert Towne, 60-year-old Mosley has a knack for cooking up a textual gumbo of fresh dialogue, pulp action and existentialist musings while painting a vivid socio-political backdrop of Los Angeles. Little Green, the latest Mosley novel, is his 12th in a series that just keeps getting better. Twenty-three years and 11 books later, brother Easy is still doing his thing.
A faithful film version of the book starring Denzel Washington came out in 1995.
After then President Bill Clinton cited Devil in a Blue Dress as a favorite in 1991, Mosley became a literary sensation. A former country boy who’d spent time in Europe and Africa during World War II, Easy was cool, smart and took no mess. When I stumbled onto Walter Mosley’s 1990 debut Devil in a Blue Dress (set in the Los Angeles spring of ’48), I knew I had found a new literary friend in protagonist Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. But with the exception of Chester Himes’s wild and wonderful Harlem novels featuring brutal bruisers Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, there were very few books featuring Black detectives written by Black writers. Reading everything from Dashiell Hammett to Charles Willeford, I devoured those gritty paperbacks and always returned for more. Back in the 1980s, when New York City was filled with secondhand bookstores, I fell in love with pulp fiction.
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