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At Home on “These Mean Streets”: Collaboration and Community in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Mystery Series
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
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109 At Home on “These Mean Streets” Collaboration and Community in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Mystery Series —Albert U. Turner, Jr. In the Easy Rawlins mystery series, Walter Mosley employs many devices common to conventional hard-boiled detective fiction. This nine-text series features trenchant autodiegetic narration, a forbidding and alienating cityscape, and a full complement of transgressive tough guys, femme fatales, crooked cops, and amoral elites. Furthermore, Mosley’s construction of Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins as a hard-boiled protagonist links detection and philosophical inquiry into the nature of human evil. At base, these elements of Mosley’s detective fiction evoke the hard-boiled writing of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and John D. MacDonald—authors Mosley identifies as significant influences on his early artistic efforts (Wilson 26). W. Russel Gray observes that Easy Rawlins’s interactions with members of marginalized social groups, his resistance to coercion by the authorities, and his contestatory use of extralegal tactics are consistent with hard-boiled convention (489–94). However, the presence of echoes of traditional hard-boiled narration, setting, characterization, and inquiry in the Easy Rawlins series is not a capitulation to convention, nor, as Roger Berger argues, an “uncritical use” of an ostensibly Chandlerian “L.A. detective fiction paradigm” (281). As much as Mosley references these generic elements, he also explodes the genre as the Easy Rawlins series is a site where epistemological inquiry emanates from Mosley’s pointed reconsideration of the convention of the aloof hero common to the genre. Mosley classifies hard-boiled heroism as the culmination of collaborative acts. He constructs Easy Rawlins and Raymond “Mouse” Alexander as African American co-protagonists. Consequently, the Easy Albert U. Turner, Jr. 110 Rawlins series is a direct challenge to the heroic loner prototype advanced by Raymond Chandler in his groundbreaking theoretical work, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950). In this essay, Chandler sharply calls for more realism in hard-boiled narrative, and provides a still influential delineation of the traits of the genre’s ideal hero. Chandler locates this figure in a forbidding cityscape—“these mean streets”— marked by a paucity of law and order (Chandler 17–18). As Chandler’s “mean streets” are an arena of façade, moral decay and contagion, they call for a specific type of hero. Chandler’s hard-boiled detective is an aloof individual who is “neither tarnished [by] nor afraid” of the city (18). Because of his outsider status, this hero is able to reify chivalric codes of conduct, identify transgressive actions and individuals, and master metaphorically dark urban territories.1 The method of this mastery is seen as Chandler avers that the ideal hard-boiled hero’s autodiegetic narrative reveals that “[t]he [successful detective] story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth” (18). Chandler suggests that epistemological inquiry is an individual rather than collaborative act. The narrative authority of Chandler’s ideal hero is the product of a textual valorization of alienation that places the “pure” autodiegetic narrator above his mainly “impure” narrative subjects and the dystopian urban worlds they inhabit.2 This problematic authority is evident as this figure’s relationally superior voice gives him the authority to define and promote a reality far removed from the discourses of the common people and, potentially, community. Charles Wilson, too, suggests that Mosley’s detective fiction addresses the problematic of the isolate hard-boiled hero. In particular, according to Wilson, Mosley’s detective fiction is a corrective to common depiction of hard-boiled detectives as “alienated from many of life’s humanizing elements in that they [have] no families, no friends, no stable home life or jobs” (26). Consequently, Easy’s achievement of heroic status is made possible through his acknowledging and embracing community membership. The detective hero of the Easy Rawlins series “is no longer the lone wolf whose personal life remains outside and distant from the criminal world he investigates. The mean streets he travels are his own” (Fine 147). Fine’s allusion to the Chandlerian hard-boiled detective hero is suggestive of the alternative Mosley provides to exclusionary, hard-boiled ideological discourses that bolster masculinist, bourgeois, white social order.3 Easy’s narrative discourse asserts the value of home, community, and collaboration. Accordingly, Easy functions as a detective because he “is implicated by everything he shares with his neighbors—race, language, poverty, a migrant history that began in the South, and the neighborhood itself” (Fine 147). Therefore, it is credible that Mosley’s particular...