Black Betty
Walter Mosley
Norton hbk (import), 255 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
The exponential rise and rise of Walter Mosley since debuting with Devil in a Blue Dress is one of the major successes of recent crime fiction. Two sequels - A Red Death, White Butterfly - propelled series character Easy Rawlins personally from the Thirties to the Fifties, through his triumph in the property market and a failed marriage; Mosley's frame of reference has motored through the ups and downs of racial politics in pre- and post-war America. The generous praise lavished by critics and readers alike seems, for once, more than justified; Mosley's talent has thus far proved more than a match for his ambition.
1961 finds Easy touching on the optimism of what will be the Kennedy era and the unstoppable surge for Civil Rights. For the moment though he is hired on-behalf of the wealthy white Cain family to find one Elizabeth Eady - their missing black maid, and a face straight out of the private detective's own past. But all too quickly Easy realises he's bitten off more than he can chew - others go missing, he's arrested and beaten by the sadistic white police commander Styles, people around him have a nasty habit of turning up dead, and all in a trail that leads directly back to "Black Betty".
The most obvious development over the previous trio of Rawlins novels is the insistence Mosley places here on the sheer force of his plotting. Previous books have certainly been informed by criminal doings, but this is the first time that one of his novels has been quite so plot driven. Easy Rawlins is a hunted man in these pages - people are moving in on his ailing property holdings, and people are violently moving in on him.
The central drive of the book, with its rich families and obscure sexual pasts, owes to Polanski's masterful Chinatown in its belief in the absolute corrupting influence of sex and money. But, like White Butterfly especially, Mosley slyly wields the racial facets of this less-than-liberal Los Angeles, weaving prejudices and pressures still very much in place in the early Sixties America into a stimulating tapestry. Here are places where to be poor and black is a crime; for Betty, her crime is to be poor, black, and a woman.
Mosley is never heavy-handed, his prose is suggestive of period rather than in-your-face with its research. As a writer, he never tries to shoe-horn characters into history, nor indeed to carry out a whitewash (sic) of these people. These are rounded portraits of a society with its bigotry and hostility, black or white: Easy's friend Mouse, gaoled previously for gunning a man down in an alley, is out of prison and looking to exact his violent revenge upon the man who turned him in, even should that man turn out to be Easy himself.
There is real ambition in the scope and depth of these novels, an epic sweep of history not often seen in 'genre' writing. The results are invigorating and often provocative, Mosley evidencing a breadth of belief in 'crime' fiction from which the majority of his competitors would do well to learn. Of these books, Black Betty is most assured and compelling example to date.