You pays your money, you chooses your conspiracy: JFK was shot. MLK was shot. MX was shot.
News has just (25th May 2015) come through that Elmer Pratt aka Geronimo of the Black Panther party has died in Tanzania. He did 27 years in jail till the US judicial system accepted he may well have been stitched up by government agencies. Consistent with this, declassified documents show that President Hoover ordered agents to thwart black nationalist movements using any means necessary viz agents should “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” them. “Otherwise neutralize” has a ring to it, nuh?
So what the heck has this got to do with Mosley’s Bad Boy Brawly Brown? Well, the ‘Urban Revolutionary Group’ featured in the novel has a close resemblance to the Black Panthers. A little plot of the novel first: when young hot head Brawly goes missing, his mum asks the hero, Easy Rawlins, a black janitor by day, a kind of makeshift detective service by night, to find him. Easy discovers Brawly is up to all kinds of things, some of it revolutionary, some plain venal.
BBBB is a crime fiction novel and it has the usual complex plot of the genre (Spoiler alert: for those like me who get lost in plots easily, the answers to who is doing what to whom and why are all in Chapter 43) as well as the matching body count, smart fisticuffs, midnight deadly rendez-vous*, double-crossings and derring-do. Walter Mosley has been described as the natural successor to that great Harlem crime fiction writer, Chester Himes. And no doubt he is. Though Himes’ plots are set in NY and Mosley’s in LA, they both describe African-American lives in the 60’s, albeit in radically different ways.
Mosley has evolved the genre. Easy, his hero is less hard-boiled, less wise-ass, more meditative; his circumstances are more real: he has a steady woman, Bonnie, who is an independent, thoughtful woman with a life of her own; he has two adopted children he cares deeply about, he has a solid job – cartakering at a local school. Easy has a thoughtfulness to him.
Some writerly stuff: Mosley positions the narrator in such a way that Easy Rawlins tells the story conventionally as if it is happening in the moment of telling. But at times Mosley has Easy Rawlins reflect on the times – as if Easy is telling the story from some vantage point much further down the line than the 1960’s, say in 1980. I think this allows Mosley to show the wider sociological, political /racial panorama of 60’s America in a way Himes perhaps didn’t.
There are other significant differences between Himes and Mosley: where Chester Himes does big crowd scenes, brilliantly, Mosley tends to paint intriguing, insightful vignettes of individual characters. His Easy Rawlins is humble, aware of his limitations where Himes’ characters are often writ large. The crazy, the cooky and the unexpected happens less often with Mosley, but his engagement with what it is to be black in a white dominated society is more sustained and subtle.
Ultimately it is a quieter, more ruminative, but for all that still highly effective hero Mosley has created in Easy Rawlins. We’ll give him the last words: ‘I’m just a everyday black man, doin’ the best I can in a world where the white man’s de facto king. I got me a house with a tree growin’ in the front yard. It’s my tree; I could cut it down if I wanted to, but even still you can’t call it a black man’s tree. It’s just pine.’
