Mouse is dead.

Some authors (traditionally, bad ones) are sprinkled with fairy dust the moment their pen first meets paper. Most struggle on for years, accruing an entire bottom drawer before anyone bites. Only occasionally, if the bite’s big enough, will publishers scratch one another’s eyes out for those neglected ’scripts. Gone Fishin’ was the first novel - more accurately, novella - computer programmer Walter Mosley wrote, two years before Devil In A Blue Dress introduced us to series detective Ezekiel - Easy - Rawlins and his best buddy Mouse. Before all the strange, violent by-ways that have taken Easy to the early sixties of the recent A Little Yellow Dog.

At the end of that book the world holds its breath as a white man is assassinated in Dallas. Hundreds of miles away in Los Angeles a second man - a black man - is also cheated of his life. That’s Mouse, and few outside Easy’s intimate circle will ever know, even less care.

That history and contradiction is what renders this ‘new’ book so fascinating. Published in sequence, Gone Fishin’ would still have been a tightly written, imaginative account of black American identity in the build-up to WWII. As its stands, Mosley’s early meditations throw the subsequent novels into sharp and unexpected relief.

We meet 19-year-old Easy, a resident of Houston, illiterate and directionless. And his best friend Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander, the dapper womaniser with a reputation for impulsive violence. But Mouse is about to marry and wants the money he thinks as owing off of his stepfather. He wants for his buddy to go along, leading us initially to teen lovers on-the-lam and on through a beautifully sustained cross-country fever dream of church and voodoo and magic and sex and violence. "I got wheels turnin’ all over," Mouse avers. "Wheels inside’a wheels, like a great big ole clock."

In this book we locate the roots of Easy’s unswerving loyalty to his friend, and, conversely, the fear that hangs over subsequent entries in the series. The irrational winds of publishing, for once, blow in our favour, directing our understanding of the final trajectory Mouse and Easy’s relationship will take. It brings an added, unexpected poignancy to the final pages.

We see the sparks of the compromise that will serve Easy well in years to come, of his need to better himself, to prove his worth not to a white, racist society, but over and again to himself. Easy is the diplomat, Mouse - Mosley’s real hero - a man of action. At one point in this marvellous book our narrator describes his friend as an artist, a man who "created lead from gold." From here the course of these particular black men in the immediate post-war America is set: "Either you believed in God or family or love," Easy confesses towards the end. "I didn’t believe in any of those things anymore."