THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9407270331
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
PRESIDENTS HAVE long been partial to the thrillers of their times.
Scholar Woodrow Wilson expressed enthusiasm for the Craig Kennedy ``science-detective'' stories of Arthur B. Reeve. Class-activist FDR preferred the mannered Philo Vance murder cases of ``S.S. Van Dine,'' the pseudonym of art critic Willard Huntington Wright. Intellectual chameleon JFK admired the urbane James Bond sexploits of Ian Fleming.
And sociology student Bill Clinton favors the street-smart Ezekiel ``Easy'' Rawlins mysteries of Walter Mosley, whose new one, Black Betty (Norton, 255 pp., $19.95), is just out.
Rawlins, like his creator, is black. His perspective is black. His tough inner-city L.A. turf is black, though he makes frequent incursions into hostile white territory.
``Poor men are always ready to die,'' says Rawlins. ``We always expect that there's somebody out there who wants to kill us. That's why I never questioned that a white man would pull his gun when he saw a Negro coming.
``That's just the way it is in America.''
Mosley has turned a new corner on old turf. He is working in a terse hard-boiled tradition that refined itself in the late 1920s and early '30s with Dashiell Hammett but was first critically identified in 1939 by Raymond Chandler, who created private eye Philip Marlowe. In his seminal essay ``The Simple Art of Murder,'' Chandler wrote of the modern detective protagonist as urban knight:
``He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
``He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.''
Easy Rawlins fills the bill. Square dealing has brought him close to financial bankruptcy. Middle-aging, he is divorced and has lost a daughter to an ex-wife ``somewhere down in Mississippi,'' but he willingly raises other people's kids.
``I seemed to collect children in my line of work,'' he notes, ``doing `favors' for people. I took Jesus out of a life of child prostitution before he was three. I'd caught the murderer of Feather's grandfather, who had killed his own daughter for bearing a black child.''
In Black Betty, Rawlins is hired to find a missing Beverly Hills housekeeper and encounters more than he bargained for, including sudden death, crooked cops and bodily harm. ``I been beaten and threatened,'' he complains at one point to a friend, ``the police are after me, and now I been stabbed.''
That's part of the familiar formula, but what Mosley adds is a certain authenticity of experience. He understands '60s Los Angeles, heating up on the cusp of a civil rights movement that will not provide the Promised Land. Typical of Rawlins' rugged wisdom is an encounter with a smirking street tough named Spider:
``His grin came off easy. I'm sure his father would have been upset to see Spider smoking a cigarette. Yes, Mr. Hoag would have come after his son, with a gun if he had to, to make sure that his boy grew up to be a right man.
``But Mr. Hoag was in state prison for shooting his wife's lover, Sam Fixx, who was also said to be Spider's real father.''
One admires Rawlins' stubborn decency, which ultimately transcends race. Early in the book, he peruses a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, wondering at the liberal libraries and school systems that wanted to ban it. He regards Jim and Huck as friends on the river; ``I could have been either one of them,'' he says.
``Mr. Clemens,'' Rawlins adds, ``knew that all men were ignorant and he wasn't afraid to say so.''
Neither is Mosley. By the end of Black Betty, Rawlins and a white P.I. named Saul Lynx are saving each other's lives. The steaming asphalt is their river, mutual sacrifice their raft.
``Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,'' Chandler wrote, ``who is neither tarnished nor afraid.''
Rawlins would probably say he is tarnished enough to empathize and only a fool isn't afraid. But he would probably also say the work suits him. And he would keep at it because there are people who depend on him. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
PETER SERLING
Walter Mosley's ``Black Betty'' is his latest mystery featuring
Ezekiel ``Easy'' Rawlins.
by CNB