What do You think about A Red Death (2004)?
Satisfying Easy Rawlins followup to his debut. Five years after the events in 'Devil In A Blue Dress,' you find Ezekiel 'Easy' Rawlins living a quiet life, keeping up his beloved house and having become a landlord to several properties acquired due to his financial gain from 1948. HIs world in Los Angeles is changing slightly with the McCarthy committee years.First, Easy is hit by the IRS, then by the FBI. He's between a rock and a hard place, but if he does what the FBI is asking then he will be given leniency with the IRS. The agencies are not working together, which builds up the drama.At the same time, Easy has personal issues between a death at one of the apartment complexes that he owns, a surprise visit by a woman and her child, who he knew back in Houston, and was married to his best friend at that time, and then the complications of trying to figure out who is a friend and who isn't both in his neighborhood of Watts, and his interactions with government and potential communists.Good read. Leading me further down this 'Easy Rawlins' rabbit hole.By the way, it really helps to listen to blues and jazz from the era as you read the book.
—Gavin
Mosley takes the traditional hard-boiled detective mystery and gives it a refreshing spin by spotlighting African-American communities. His lead, Easy Rawlins, is a Louisiana/Texas transplant now working in L.A. as a janitor, maintaining the building he surreptitiously owns. As any decent detective fiction, the city plays a prominent role in the life of the detective and Mosley nicely captures a range of African-American experiences in period L.A. Easy is in a tough spot and is hoping Mofass, the man who manages his property, can give him some tips on dealing with the I.R.S. Mofass' not-so-helpful advice is to lie to the Revenue Man. "Go on in there and lie, Mr. Rawlins. Tell 'em you don't own nuthin.' Tell 'em that you a workin' man and that somebody must have it out for you to lie and say you got that property. Tell 'em that and then see what they gotta say."When he arrives at home, the wife of his volatile best friend, Mouse, is in his house with their son. She's split with Mouse and thought Easy would provide a refuge. "She could knock a man into next Tuesday, or she could hold you so tight that you felt like a child again, in your mother's loving embrace." Easy follows Mofass' advice, but gets a bad feeling when the agent subsequently asks him to get (non-existent) paperwork together and to be ready for his call. When he returns downtown, he comes to the attention of a different kind of fed. It's 1953, Communist hunting is a national pastime, and when Easy is offered an out with the IRS if he 'reports for his country,' he finds himself reluctantly agreeing.I like the language, although thankfully Easy's internal dialogue avoids dialect, as I find it makes for a long read. I like the awareness Easy has of modifying his speech patterns depending on which sub-culture he's in. Its a survival strategy, and I enjoy seeing how Easy uses it to his advantage. Mosley is masterful at weaving different race issues in the story, from Easy getting an education on the marginalization Jews experience, to Easy's own interaction with mostly white lawmen. There's an enlightening scene where he meets a black L.A. detective at a death scene and watches him interact as equals with his partner. I also love the way Easy describes the people he meets:"His color was dark brown but bright, as if a powerful lamp shone just below his skin.""A sepia-colored woman""John's face looked like it was chiseled in ebony""Jackson's skin was so black that it glinted blue when in the full sun"It's a small thing that doesn't appear in most white detective fiction novels, but it says so much about the author and his regard for his characters.Problems for me center around narrative arc; I feel like Mosley slips a lot of characters in, some important and many incidental. It becomes hard to distinguish between important and inconsequential. More significantly, I found the character of Easy a bit less likeable in this book; as Kemper said, Easy has "man ho tendencies," making him harder to like. I give Mosley credit for putting Easy in a hard ethical place in relation to the I.R.S.; however, he also does it to him in his emotional life. Between the sexism, Easy's own anti-Semitism, his willingness to use the church and his affair, there isn't much to redeem him.Note: this edition also contains a short story, 'Silver Lining,' inserted before the main story. It proves to be a sort of spoiler for a plot point in A Red Death. If you care about such things, skip it.Overall, two and a half stars. I think I'll head back to Devil in a Blue Dress and capture more of the magic I remember from Easy.Cross posted at http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/0...
—Carol.
This is the first sequel to "Devil in a Blue Dress" and is a marked step down in quality. Still very enjoyable writing and great social commentary on what it meant to be a black man in Los Angeles in the 1950's but this time there was a bit too much commentary and a bit too little mystery. In fact, it kind of felt like Mosley forgot about the mystery and tacked on the mystery at the very end. Also, the final 'bad guy' was cartoonish and strange. Too many dangling threads were left out there for no discernible reason.That being said, the character development was fantastic and I'll definitely be checking in again with Easy Rawlins."I didn't even believe in history, really. Real was what was happening to me right then. Real was a toothache and a man you trusted who did you dirt. Real was an empty stomach or a woman saying yes, or a woman saying no. Real was what you could feel. History felt like TV for me, it wasn't the great wave of mankind moving through an ocean of minutes and hours. It wasn't mankind getting better either; I had seen enough murder in Europe to know that the Nazis were even worse than the barbarians at Rome's gate. And even if I was in Rome they would have called me a barbarian; it was no different that day in Watts."
—Joe
