CINNAMON KISS: Walter Mosley

Cinnamon Kiss
By Walter Mosley (Little, Brown)

"Was it just to have the right to step on some other poor soul's neck?"

Easy Rawlins is legit at last: The city of Los Angeles has granted him a private detective's licence. But he's still a black man trying to make his way in an indifferent, and often hostile, white America. He's on the job when two white cops stop him and his dangerous friend, Mouse, demanding to know what they think they are doing outside an insurance company in downtown Los Angeles. "Most Americans wouldn't understand why two well-dressed men would have to explain why they were standing on a public street," Easy's creator, Walter Mosley writes. "But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage. Those two cops felt fully authorized to stop us with no reason and no warrant. They felt that they could question us and search us and cart us off to jail if there was the slightest flaw in how we explained our business." It's not the great characters or the superb writing that distinguish the continuing saga of Easy Rawlins from every other detective series. After all, Michael Connolly's Harry Bosch and James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux are great characters, too, and Dennis Lehane and James Elroy are Mosley's equals as stylists. But only Mosley has employed detective fiction as a vehicle for a thoughtful, textured examination of race relations in the United States. Only Mosley puts white readers, if just for a few hundred pages at a time, in a black man's shoes.

It all began with Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), when Easy, fresh from killing Germans in the Second World War, joined thousands of black Americans who fled the South for a fresh start in the Golden State. As the 10th book in the Easy Rawlins series opens, it's 1966 and the promise of that fresh start has long since faded. Watts is in ruins, consumed in a burst of communal rage that Easy at once understands and abhors. Young black men are dying in Vietnam, fighting people with whom they have no quarrel. And Easy, in his 40s now, agonizes that "the taxes I paid on my cigarettes and the taxes they took out of my paycheck were buying the bullets and gassing up the bombers." "Is that what we labored for all those years?" he laments. "Was it just to have the right to step on some other poor soul's neck?"

The story begins with Mouse urging Easy to join him in an armoured car holdup. Mouse knows Easy's adopted daughter, Feather, has a rare blood disease, and Easy is so desperate for the $45,000 required for her treatment that he's ready to listen. Easy is spared that choice when his lawyer friend, Saul Lynx, comes up with a detective job for an anonymous client: Find a woman named Cinnamon, her hippie lover and some mysterious papers they have stolen. As the plot unfolds, we meet familiar friends from earlier books including the brilliant and cowardly Jackson Blue, Easy's lovely airline stewardess girlfriend, Bonnie, and some great new characters, notably a powerful, crazed Vietnam veteran named Christmas Black. As Easy tracks down Cinnamon, bodies start to pile up; perhaps Easy would have been better off pulling the armoured car job. The convoluted plot isn't as rich as previous Mosley works - certainly not equal to the brilliant Little Scarlet(2004). But with Mosley, it's never about the plot. It's about Easy and his struggle to protect those he loves, and to maintain his honour and sanity in an unjust world. Reviewer: B. Silva