Mosley is also good at pacing Easy’s recovery. There are also interesting digressions (increasingly, Mosley has Easy reflecting, as if viewing the events from far in the future) on everything from feminism and politics to hairstyles, fashion trends and literature.
Along the way, Easy faces aggressive racism at the hands of cops and bureaucrats alike (Mosley is on particularly good form when Easy is swallowing his natural instinct to break heads) and also starts to take in the way in which the 60s is changing the world he grew up in. Easy is pretty much out for the count, relying on an old friend who has a sideline in various homegrown concoctions to whistle him up a narcotic cocktail or two to power him through proceedings. This being the 60s now, Little Green went out to score some tail, ingested some acid on the end of a pretty young girl’s tongue and then ended up in a motel room on a bed covered in blood and greenbacks. This time around, his dangerous compatriot Mouse has a case for him, finding a young man nicknamed Little Green, the son of a neighbour who hates his guts. Of course, Mosley, like Nesbo, knows which side his bread is buttered on and so Easy has been resuscitated for the 12th outing, Little Green. I ended up nodding away to myself, as I am wont to do, thinking ‘full credit to you, Mosley, a stunt like that takes balls’. At the time, I remember being stopped in my tracks, re-reading the entire last chapter before heading online to make sure that, yes, Mosley had in fact killed off his most successful character. We last saw Easy, drunk and heartbroken, careening off the edge of a cliff at the end of Blonde Faith.
These days, no sooner is one charismatic hero dispatched – Easy Rawlins in Walter Mosley’s case (although the same could be said for Harry Hole, no sooner left for dead with a bullet in his head at the end of Phantom than Nesbo rolls him out again in Police) – than he is brought back as if nothing happened. Once upon a time, if the hero of a popular crime series was killed off, it took a concerted effort on the part of the reading public – consider all of the letters that came Conan Doyle’s way, for instance – to ensure a resurrection took place.
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