Miscounts, Loopholes, and Flashbacks: Strategic Evasion in Walter Mosley's Detective Fiction

There's one story too many in Six Easy Pieces, the latest installment of Walter Mosley's "Easy Rawlins" series of detective novels, which are set over two decades in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. Six Easy Pieces is a collection of short stories that were originally published individually in Washington Square Press reissues of the series' previous six novels. But the book consists of seven stories: a new one was written for the collected edition. While the stories unfold more or less chronologically and take place within a unified stretch of time, the seventh story seems in notable ways to exempt itself from the collectivity of Six Easy Pieces. The collection's penultimate story, "Gray-eyed Death," recounts the reappearance of Easy's presumed-dead alter ego, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander (Mouse has been "dead" for the length of one novel and five stories). After Mouse's resurrection, the seventh and last story seems to return to business as usual, freeing Easy from the guilt and hallucinations he's endured since Mouse's death on one of Easy's missions (without his accustomed backup from Mouse, Easy has been forced to conjure his friend's aid in dreams and in moments of crisis).¹ With Mouse again by his side, Easy returns to the familiar task of solving murders in "Amber Gate," Six Easy Pieces' seventh story—but with a signal difference: this story contains none of the flashbacks to a Southern childhood or to earlier urban adventures with Mouse that readers of the series have come to expect. There are no apparitions of "The Voice," an inner survivalist that has come to Easy's aid in the past and none of the usual sexual temptation (Easy sleeps with—or refuses the advances of—multiple women in each of the novels preceding Six Easy Pieces), and there is very little mention of his family (usually a chief preoccupation) until the story's perfunctory final paragraph ("I still . . . see Raymond now and then. Bonnie and I are still together" [278]). All these devices, extraneous to the strictly investigative narrative thrust of the books, have helped distinguish Mosley's detective novels from their hardened predecessors, providing contemplative spaces for meditations on race in modern society or adding texture to the character of the (traditionally deadpan) hard-boiled hero by granting readers access to his fears, his compunctions, and his personal preoccupations. Stripped of these trappings, Easy goes about his job doggedly, ultimately stumbling upon a murderer with virtually no motive who disappears into thin air the moment he is identified. It's as if Mosley is both refusing us the social texture that has distinguished this series and minimizing the satisfactions of the traditional detective tale's neat closure. By the end of its latest installment, the series seems to have exhausted itself, to have discovered the futility of all the devices it has employed to grant dignity and depth to the compromised figure of the detective, and community and continuity to the world in which he operates.

In order to try to understand this exhaustion, I want to consider the premises and the techniques of the series as a whole, which has unfolded amid much popular acclaim and substantial critical attention. Literary critics have tended to probe the Easy Rawlins novels for signs that they're subverting or (post)modernizing the hard-boiled genre from which they spring.² Exemplifying the possibilities and the limitations of this form of analysis, Roger A. Berger concludes his essay "'The Black Dick': Race, Sexuality, and Discourse in the L.A. Novels of Walter Mosley," which attempts to discover whether Mosley's racialized take on the genre pioneered by Hammett and Chandler represents a subversive countertext or merely a reiteration of the early hard-boiled writers' conservative populism, with a resounding "a little of both." Berger applauds Mosley's novels for dealing explicitly with the latent racial subtexts of the...