THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608230243
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DOUGLAS G. GREENE
LENGTH: 70 lines
A LITTLE YELLOW DOG
WALTER MOSLEY
W.W. Norton. 300 pp. $23.
Now that Walter Mosley has published his fifth mystery novel about Easy Rawlins, it is probably time to make an assessment of his accomplishments.
The first successful series about an African-American detective, the Easy Rawlins books began in 1990 with Devil in a Blue Dress, which received an Edgar nomination for ``Best First Novel.'' In 1995, the book was made into a motion picture featuring Denzel Washington.
The later books have reached the best-seller list, and the current novel, A Little Yellow Dog, is a selection of two major book clubs. Mosley himself is immediate past president of the Mystery Writers of America, and the critics are starting to take notice. The American Library Association Booklist, for example, describes A Little Yellow Dog as ``a superb novel in a superb series.''
But in looking over the five Easy Rawlins books, I see that Mosley's strength is not in the mystery.
In A Little Yellow Dog, Rawlins has sex (described in detail) almost immediately with a beautiful teacher at a junior high school where he is custodian. He agrees to take charge of her dog, which hates him, and soon bodies abound. The teacher's husband, his twin brother, and then finally the teacher herself are murdered. And that's just the start.
Rawlins' investigation is of the rudimentary interview-them-and-threaten-them sort, and because he can usually tell automatically if the suspect is telling the truth, he begins to discover what happened.
Most of Rawlins' deductions are questionable, based on the conclusion that only one of the suspects could have known a key fact. But Rawlins never ``closes the circle'' - makes certain that only a limited number of people could have committed the crimes - so he doesn't really prove anything. The final solution, with far too many people involved, is messy.
Nor do I think that Mosley's strength is in characterization - at least not in the subsidiary characters. They are indistinctively drawn, and too many are introduced without making clear who is who. At times, I yearned for an old-fashioned character list at the beginning of the book.
Mosley tells his story almost entirely in dialogue, for which he has an excellent ear, and only occasionally in setting or physical description.
What then is the main strength of Mosley's books? Why have they become so successful with the critics and the public? One strength of A Little Yellow Dog is the character of Easy Rawlins himself.
Streetwise, sensitive, compassionate yet still concerned primarily about himself, Rawlins is a vivid character, through whose eyes (as with Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer) the reader comes to understand a time and a place - in this book, Los Angeles at the time of John F. Kennedy's assassination.
The relationship between African Americans and the police, the sometimes conscious but just as often unconscious racism of the white community, the complicated associations within the black community, especially between the sexes - all this emerges with a depth that is rare in contemporary fiction.
Within the carnage of Mosley's books are the stories of how people survive - the compromises they have to make, the integrity that may get chipped but stays fundamentally solid, the wisdom that comes from taking action, the importance of building human relationships.
In light of all this, Mosley's failure to devise strong plots fades to insignificance - after all, Chandler wasn't much at plotting either. He is a chronicler of what it means to be human, and few authors can aspire to that. MEMO: Douglas G. Greene is director of the Institute of Humanities at
Old Dominion University in Norfolk. by CNB