black betty easy rawlins 4 walter mosley

He keeps reminding himself that he ought to give up this line of work and get a regular job to support himself and his two children-but at present he needs the money that Saul Lynx is paying him to find Black Betty. When he is in the streets searching for Black Betty, an assignment offered him by Saul Lynx, a white private detective of suspicious honesty (who thinks Rawlins can get more information than he in black South Central L.A.), then Easy Rawlins can be as tough with the bad guys as he is tender with his children who are always on his mind. Easy is originally from the South and he cooks his children scrambled eggs, grits and bacon for breakfast, and hamburgers at night-when he is at home. The writer and his private eye are tough, shrewd, and knowledgeable about their cities, and they know the things, the good and the bad, that makes those cities move.Įasy Rawlins is raising two adopted children-Jesus, a little Mexican boy he rescued from a brothel, and Feather, a little girl of mixed black and white parentage, and Easy is doing all he can as a single parent to bring them up well. I mention Chandler and Hammett and their private detectives, Marlowe and Spade, because I think Mosley and Rawlins fit that mold.

“Black Betty” is Walter Mosley’s latest novel, and Easy Rawlins is his private eye, just as Phillip Marlowe was alter ego for Raymond Chandler in that same city, and Sam Spade served that purpose for Dashiell Hammet four hundred and some miles farther north in San Francisco.

Kennedy was president of the United States, Martin Luther King was leading civil rights demonstrators in Alabama and Georgia, and Easy Rawlins was searching for Black Betty out of South Central Los Angeles.

Black betty easy rawlins 4 walter mosley