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...

Play Review: The Tragedy of Macbeth Probably not about to be sponsored by the Scottish Tourist Board, this sparsely staged theatre play looks at ambition, inheritance and honour in a Scottish setting. It externalises the troubled consciences of the almost reluctant murderer, Lord Macbeth and his vastly more ambitious and competent wife, Lady Macbeth. While there is some beautiful (if occasionally unconvincing) poetry, the language is intermittently spoilt by the playwright’s reliance on cliché (eg ‘is this a dagger I see before me’ ‘the milk of human kindness’ ‘out damn spot, out I say!’ etc). There are some nice wind effects, umpteen ghostly scenes, sleepwalking adventures, and the litres of blood spilled quotient should please both Goth and Zombie fans. I can’t find any twitter account linked to this play – a fatal omission on the part of the playwright – so I presume it will disappear without...

  Being Dead depicts a relationship which ends in the opportunistic murder by a stranger of the couple, Celice and Joseph, two zoologists. Time runs primarily backwards in the novel, so it begins with their death. There is a chilled, detached vibe to the writing, augmented by the choice of third person narrative and the two scientist main characters. Here’s a sentence from Chapter 1: “they were the oddest pair, these dead, spread-eagled lovers on the coast”. Chapter 2 speculates on how their death might have been lamented publicly in, say, the year 1900 instead of 2000, reflects on how the ritual of mourning, of public weeping was now lost. The book essentially performs the same ritualistic task for the fictional couple, recreating their lives, running along the timeline of their relationship backwards. It’s lyrical. It’s very light on dialogue. Deeply poetic. The descriptions of nature – the dunes, the ways of the insects etc – is only possible from deep study of it. Here’s a few more lines lifted from chapters: “The universe has learned to cope with death.” “The bodies were discovered straight away. A beetle first. Claudatus maximi. A male. Then the raiding parties arrived…” “She closed her eyes against the dawn to find to what it felt like to be loved and dead.” The author is completely un-shy about being authorial (eg ‘Celice, at fifty-five, was hardly old enough to have lost her fear of death’: who could be thinking this thought except the author?) yet he ‘goes into character’ –shows us the minds, inner thoughts and feelings of the characters– with complete assurance. The two main characters are avowedly boring zoologists. So it has not got the epic-ness of a Romeo & Juliet story. Their scientific coldness becomes the emotional cold of the novel. Yet this reflects in some way the existential cold of the universe, an un-dramatic acceptance of death, the uncaringness that nature holds for the human drama on...