An Easy Rawlins Mystery

Sex with a woman in trouble, a dead body, questions from the police and the call of the streets along with a cantankerous pooch all conspire to disturb the settled life of Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins and that is just the beginning of Walter Mosley’s “A Little Yellow Dog”. The word formula applies to most mystery stories because there are certain rules to be followed. Like a dead body turning up in the first few chapters usually followed by several more corpses and a plot that thickens until the last chapter when all the threads are unraveled to reveal the killer. Sadly, too much mystery fiction has devolved into hackneyed & clichéd outings that seem to have been created by computers and not just written on them. Fortunately for readers everywhere Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series spins straw into gold by examining the mystery formula through the prism of color. Most of the books in the series have a color in the title “A Red Death” or “Devil in a Blue Dress”, but the primary colors of black & white always bring a tension and historical resonance to these stories. This is especially true in a nightmarish scene in an L.A. Police Station that feels more like a visit to hell. Over the course of these books Mosley has built Easy Rawlins into a rich character who might come out ahead at the end, but he pays a price in blood for his success.