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Feb. 16th, 2010 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI am still reading my way through Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins series; I read Black Betty towards the end of last year, and A Little Yellow Dog last week, which puts me at halfway through (I think there are ten books total.)
The plots of these books really don't actually stick in my mind that well - mostly because, like many noirs, they are crazy convoluted and involve about six double-crosses per book. Black Betty is the one that is actually most super-classical-noir, with a Very Complicated Family that has Very Complicated Family Secrets and Secret Parentage (I think there might even be a decoy daughter!) and so on; A Little Yellow Dog has petty schoolhouse theft and identical twins and a sinister toy croquet set. (Seriously, that is all of the plot I remember and I read it last week.) What does stick in my mind is how carefully Mosley ages up Easy, and actually moves him through the timeline. The concerns of the books set in the forties and the fifties and the sixties are different. In A Little Yellow Dog, which is set in the sixties, no one is worrying about COMMUNISTS like they were three books back, they are worrying about drugs. From what I understand the next book in the timeline follows the LA race riots. Easy ages, too, and his family grows - in five books, he's accidentally (and kind of hilariously) acquired two adopted kids and a dog, all of which are relevant to and ground his life.
Basically, I have some problems with Easy as a character, and some problems with the books' treatment of women (that I tend to trace back to Easy as a character, rather than Mosley), but all this is interesting and unique enough that I keep reading. I can't think of any other mystery series that jumps from decade to decade so quickly and grounds its concerns in different eras so precisely. Then again, I certainly have not read all that many mystery series - can you guys think of any?
The plots of these books really don't actually stick in my mind that well - mostly because, like many noirs, they are crazy convoluted and involve about six double-crosses per book. Black Betty is the one that is actually most super-classical-noir, with a Very Complicated Family that has Very Complicated Family Secrets and Secret Parentage (I think there might even be a decoy daughter!) and so on; A Little Yellow Dog has petty schoolhouse theft and identical twins and a sinister toy croquet set. (Seriously, that is all of the plot I remember and I read it last week.) What does stick in my mind is how carefully Mosley ages up Easy, and actually moves him through the timeline. The concerns of the books set in the forties and the fifties and the sixties are different. In A Little Yellow Dog, which is set in the sixties, no one is worrying about COMMUNISTS like they were three books back, they are worrying about drugs. From what I understand the next book in the timeline follows the LA race riots. Easy ages, too, and his family grows - in five books, he's accidentally (and kind of hilariously) acquired two adopted kids and a dog, all of which are relevant to and ground his life.
Basically, I have some problems with Easy as a character, and some problems with the books' treatment of women (that I tend to trace back to Easy as a character, rather than Mosley), but all this is interesting and unique enough that I keep reading. I can't think of any other mystery series that jumps from decade to decade so quickly and grounds its concerns in different eras so precisely. Then again, I certainly have not read all that many mystery series - can you guys think of any?
