Hard-boiled black easy: genre conventions in A Red Death

Few mystery aficionados would quarrel with Stephen F. Soitos's ranking of Walter Mosley as that genre's preeminent African American writer ("Black Detective" 1003). Mosley's reputation derives mainly from five L. A. novels that appeared between 1990 and 1996. (1) These popular works, all featuring colors in their titles, arguably established Easy Rawlins, an unlicensed Watts troubleshooter, as the most fascinating detective to debut in the nineties and made President Bill Clinton Mosley's number one fan. Emphatically Mosley has acknowledged his effort to construct a hero with biracial appeal, one who resembles traditional white detectives in "trying to live in a world where there is no law ... trying to impose some sense of justice in a world that has no sense of justice" (Coale 203). Furthermore, Mosley freely acknowledges his attempt to use not only Rawlins but a larger black community to give a "racial-political bent" to his mysteries (203). Thus, Mosley asserts, he uses "a wide range of black characters ... to reflect ... black life as if it were human life in America, [to take] the point of view that black people are insiders rather than standing on the outside looking in" (McCullough 67). By situating his hero in a "labyrinthine and loyalty bound black community" (Coale 179), Mosley follows earlier black mystery writers. Moreover, according to Stephen Soitos, he uses standard detective conventions to critique mainstream attitudes towards race, class, and blacks (Blues 52). In his Rawlins series in particular, Mosley revives an African American literary strategy of adapting popular cultural forms to critique racial hypocrisy.

Conspicuous in his artistic development and typical of his retrospective approach, Mosley's second Rawlins novel, A Red Death (1991), views the Red witch hunt of the early 1950s from the perspective of a black man who is "one-third street-wise survivor, one-third unwitting private investigator, and one-third Robin Hood" (Mitgang C16). (2) In A Red Death Mosley nuances conventions of the hard-boiled private eye genre to the milieu of an urban black protagonist and adheres to the genre's tradition of inner-directed honor-bound heroism.

Of the conventions Mosley tailored to Easy Rawlins, perhaps none is more prevalent in the genre than the hero's arsenal of ruses, a reflection of the self-reliant ingenuity of lone agents of natural justice in corrupt cities. John Cawelti and George Grella, whose commentaries constitute a virtual poetics of the genre, provide background for other conventions tapped by Mosley in A Red Death. For example, the hero's willingness to break laws for a just cause manifests what Cawelti identifies as the detective/hero's defining "his own concept of morality and justice, frequently in conflict with the social authority of the police" (143). Another genre staple, the hero's rapport with oppressed or otherwise marginalized figures, grows out of his replacing "the subtleties of the deductive method with a sure knowledge of his world and a keen moral sense" (Grella 414). Also, resourcefulness in holding authorities at bay stems from the hero's conventional self-control and physical toughness: Unlike the hero of the classic whodunit, he usually has to withstand intimidation (Cawelti 142). Not infrequently his physical sturdiness is tested, sometimes by pre-Miranda police officers, who are, as Grella notes, "incompetent, brutal, or corrupt" (414). And almost invariably he demonstrates a capacity for administering poetic justice, an aspect of his meting out what Cawelti calls "the just punishment that the law is too mechanical, unwieldy, or corrupt to achieve" (143).

To appreciate how rapidly Mosley mastered--and surpassed--his chosen genre, we have only to compare his ensemble use of the foregoing conventions in A Red Death to their respective individual deployment in later novels by genre maestros John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. While honoring the genre, Mosley enriched it: He made its conventions vibrate with the realities of black urban life.

To take one conventional example, the Travis McGee adventures, by John D. MacDonald, parallel Mosley's L. A. series in that they, too, feature a color in each title and are narrated by an unlicensed troubleshooter who maintains an innocuous cover occupation. In the thirteenth installment of the saga, "salvage expert" McGee leaves his houseboat to even the score for a wronged party who has no legal recourse. A Tan and Sandy Silence (1971) mines the familiar hard-boiled convention of ingenuity by the hero. McGee's calculatedly misleading persona of a Florida boat bum preludes his variety of ruses throughout the rest of the novel. By telephone, McGee twice impersonates others while tracking down a missing woman. Then, to spy on the enterprise of the suspiciously behaving husband, he poses as the friend of a prospective condo buyer. By claiming to have a (cleverly printed but bogus) check, he gains the confidence of the missing woman's neighbor, who gives him a valuable lead. Suspecting the worst, McGee flies to Grenada in the guise of a shady financial hustler. There he intimidates a woman impersonating the missing Mary into betraying her confederate-cousin, the sociopathic murderer. In his menacing cover identity, McGee coerces her cooperation with a bogus cautionary tale about once having had to murder a duplicitous blonde. After Mary's murderer brutally kills his cousin/accomplice and nearly liquidates McGee, Travis fakes his death at sea and covertly returns to Florida. To trace the financial moves that appropriated Mary's funds, McGee disguises himself as a tourist before accompanying his economist sidekick to a bank. The disguise serves him while extorting information from a bank officer, then he uses it to deceive his nemesis if he puts in a sudden appearance. Later, when McGee's ruse to expose the villain backfires and he is forced to bind himself with baling wire, MacDonald's resourceful hero leaves enough slack to bend and break the wire. The deception enables him to surprise and dispatch his captor.