What do You think about Fearless Jones (2004)?
Last summer I read through the last three of the Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley. Apparently, Mosley has had second thoughts and has resuscitated Easy, but the new book isn't yet available on kindle. So, I figured why not try a different Mosley series, the one featuring Fearless Jones. This is the first of them in which we are introduced to the narrator, Paris Minton, a second-hand book seller who is in the business primarily because he gets to sit around all day reading books, and his friend Fearless Jones, an army-trained killer, who has a strong sense of honor, but who keeps getting into scrapes of one kind and another, and who seems always to enmesh poor Paris in his trials.This book was fast-paced and interesting. It was set in 1954, and has much to say about the problems of racism. I think that might be one of my primary interests in reading Mosley, he's an acute observer of the problems and effects of racism. Basically, he is opening up a mostly unknown world to me despite my having been brought up in Baltimore before the Civil Rights era (believe it or not, I never knew about slavery in my home state until I read Frederick Douglass a few years ago. WTF?). I found the story itself a bit convoluted and am not sure it makes a whole lot of sense, we have Nazis, Israeli spies, crooked cops, ambitions and wanton young women, crooked store-front preachers, etc. all involved in essentially the same scam. Whatever, Paris and Fearless eventually survive repeated attempts to kill them and more-or-less figure out the reasons they kept coming across dead bodies.
—Larry Piper
This book fit right into my fiction wheelhouse. I've been an unabashed fan of Mosley's Easy Rawlins series forever, and have always loved how Mosley scripted Easy's interaction with the Jews of mid-century Los Angeles, a group who experienced very different, but still profound, racism from the general populace. Fearless Jones inhabits the same Los Angeles that Easy Rawlins does. Easy doesn't make an appearance, but there are a few references to his associates that make reading this novel feel like meeting up with an old friend after a long time apart. Fearless Jones opens with an epic, film noir-worthy heaping pile of steaming shit delivered on the rickety doorstep of one Paris Minton by femme fatale Elana Love. In no time at all he's been beaten, shot at, sought by the police, robbed, and victimized by arson, so he cashes out his saving account and bails out his best buddy/bad MF Tristan "Fearless" Jones from jail and starts his adventure into a Jewish neighborhood of 1950s Los Angeles, where they are received about as well an one would expect with one notable and fortuitous exception.Mosley's peerless prose practically leaps off the page as protagonist Paris describes LA and his travails in literate detail. Mosley's ability to make the reader feel, and seethe at, the institutional racism that blacks of the era endured, and still endure, is powerful and profound. Adding antisemitism to the equation just ups the ante for a Jewish reader like myself.I am likely a bit biased, but I loved this book. Highly recommended.
—Stewart
"Man, Paris, you got us into a real mess here.""I didn't get into no mess. Mess just fell right top'a me. I was just sitting in my store reading a book."It's 1954. Paris Minton is living the dream, running a used bookstore in Watts. Business wasn't brisk, but it paid the rent and utilities. And all day long I could do the thing I loved best - reading. I read Up from Slavery, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Mein Kampf, and dozens of other titles in the first few months. Whole days I spent in my reclining swivel chair, turning pages and drinking Royal Crown colas.For three solid months, I was the happiest man in L.A. ...Then SHE walked in.And of course, everything went to crap.Soon Paris and his friend, Fearless Jones, are stumbling over dead bodies, being beaten, chased, shot at, and hauled in by the cops. Everyone wants a stolen bond and it's a convoluted shell game as to who has it and who will end up with it. There's some beautiful writing here, but the characters are basically made of smoke. You never really get to know them. The women are little but hairstyles and high heels. What makes Fearless tick? Your guess is as good as mine. And all I really know about Paris is that he loves to read and has a big penis. (He was more than happy to tell me THAT particular fact.)Hmm...wait a minute... Loves to read, big penis... Mosley may have just created the perfect man.
—Melki
