DENNIS WHEATLEY – The Devil Rides Out. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1935. Bantam, US, pb, 1967. Many other reprint editions.

Filmed as The Devil’s Bride. Hammer Films, 1968. Released as The Devil Rides Out in the UK. Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Nike Arrighi, Leon Greene, Patrick Mower, Richard Eddington. Screenplay: Richard Matheson. Directed by Terence Fisher.

   With sales topping sixty million copies (that’s sales, not in print) Dennis Wheatley was one of the best selling writers of the 20th Century. His long list of books vary from mystery, to thriller, to spy novels, to historical adventure, to the occult, to lost worlds, and science fiction.

   His long running series include tales of secret agent Gregory Sallust; Napoleonic era secret agent Roger Brook; Monte Cristo-like Julian Day; and the tales of Duc de Richleau and his team of modern musketeers: American Rex Van Ryn, Englishman Richard Easton and his wife Mary, and Simon Aron, a young wealthy Jewish adventurer.

   The Devil Rides Out is a tale of de Richleau and his friends, and the first of Wheatley’s occult thrillers. It may also be his finest achievement in that genre. Simon Aron has fallen in with the mysterious cult leader known as Mocata, and de Richleau suspects something is wrong. When he confronts Simon, he discovers Mocata has the youth under his hypnotic spell and has drawn the young man into a demonic cult.

   De Richleau recognizes a dangerous enemy in Mocata and summons his friends Rex Van Ryn and Richard Easton to aide in rescuing Simon. Not surprisingly Rex also finds a young woman under Mocata’s rule and sets out to save her after he and de Richleau crash a Black Mass to perform a daring rescue of their friend.

   Now hiding Simon and the unwilling girl at Easton’s country home, they find themselves under siege by Mocata’s occult powers, climaxing in a night long battle of wills between de Richleau and Mocata, with our heroes within a protective pentagram and under attack by Death himself, mounted on a monstrous black stallion, who once summoned never leaves without a victim.

   When Richard and Mary’s daughter is kidnapped by Mocata as a sacrifice to open the very gateway to Hell it is time for a final battle between good and evil.

   I know a good many readers of this blog have little patience with the occult and the supernatural, but despite Wheatley’s sometimes awkward prose and mannerisms he had a real gift for both. (He himself didn’t believe in the supernatural but often wrote about its psychological dangers.)

   Several of his books in the field were classics, among them The Haunting of Toby Jugg, The Ka of Gifford Hillary (something of a tour de force since it is narrated by the hero from a state of suspended animation in his tomb), To the Devil a Daughter, and They Used Dark Forces, a Gregory Sallust WW II spy novel about Nazi attempts to use the occult as a weapon in WW II. Despite these books, he only wrote ten occult thrillers, a small portion of his output.

   Wheatley based Mocata on Alister Crowley, the self styled Satanic mage and Anti-Christ, who was also the basis for Somerset Maugham’s Oliver Haddo in The Magician, and James Bond’s arch enemy Ernst Stavro Blofield. Only a few years later during WW II Wheatley and Fleming would attempt to use Crowley’s occult contacts among the Nazi’s to infiltrate the party hierarchy while they both served in British intelligence.

   Crowley’s real life, mostly spent dodging the law and creditors, was a good deal less dramatic than that of his fictional counterparts. Still, he had a fairly good run as one of the great con men and frauds of the 20th Century, rubbing shoulders with the great and near great from poets like William Butler Yeats and fellow members of the prestigious Golden Dawn, to one of men who built the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos.

   The Devil Rides Out came to the big screen as Hammer Studios The Devil’s Bride with Christopher Lee ideally cast as de Richilieu and Charles Gray as Mocata. (Ironically Gray also played Blofield in the Bond film Diamonds Are Forever.)

   The Richard Matheson screenplay is faithful to the novel and the night long battle with Death mounted on a great black horse a memorable bit of cinematic horror. It’s a first class film, handsome to look at, and played to full effect by a fine cast.

   Despite his best selling status, Wheatley was likely best known in this country for the series of books he did in the 1930’s in the File series (File on Robert Prentice, File on Bolitho Blane), in which he provided the characters and crime and a complete set of clues, from lipstick-stained cigarettes to diagrams of the murder scene for the reader to solve.

   The books had a brief vogue, but ultimately it proved more fun to read about detectives than try to play one — not to mention the tendency to lose the enclosed clues.

   Despite his many flaws as a writer (he once said he never knew a best selling writer who knew the meaning of the word syntax) Wheatley knew how to spin a tale, and like his great literary hero Alexandre Dumas, his books are often highly readable and entertaining once you get into them. A number of his books were filmed, including Forbidden Territory, The Eunuch of Stamboul (as The Spy in White), To the Devil a Daughter, and Uncharted Seas (as The Lost Continent).

   Even absolute howlers like the stand alone Star of Ill Omen, where a British secret agent is kidnapped by Martians in a UFO and foils a Martian/Commie plot to destroy London (and believe me I’m making it sound saner than it reads), have a sort of goofy charm.

   His historical novels about Roger Brook, secret agent to William Pitt, probably received the most critical acclaim. Dark Secret of Josephine, in which Napoleon’s first wife reveals her ties to voodoo in her Hatian homeland, is likely the most successful blend of his chief interests; history, espionage, and the occult.

   But The Devil Rides Out is a first class thriller in the classic form. If you only read one Wheatley novel, this should be the one. The shootout at a Black Mass is worth the price of admission alone, and the siege within the pentagram guaranteed to raise the hackles of the most jaded horror fan. It’s a grand example of the occult thriller at its best.

THE BODY SNATCHER. RKO, 1945. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater, Russell Wade, Rita Corday. Based on the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Screenplay: Philip MacDonald & Val Lewton (as Carlos Keith). Director: Robert Wise.

   Compared to the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, reviewed not so long ago here, RKO treated Stevenson rather more faithfully in The Body Snatcher (1945), one of their string of quality “B”s produced by the redoubtable Val Lewton.

   This was directed by Robert Wise in his pre-bomb period, and allegedly written by Philip MacDonald, though he said someplace that Lewton re-wrote the whole thing under the name Carlos Keith.

   Well, it’s a fine job regardless of whodunit; not a really scary pitchur as much as a brooding one, with characters a bit more complex than you usually find in a monster movie.

   Karloff is at his nastiest in the title role, killing blind women and puppies with scarcely a qualm, yet he’s kind to his horse and positively dotes on the little crippled girl at the center of the story.

   Opposite him is the surgeon forced into using the services of a resurrection man to help the little girl walk again, played by Henry Daniell, as cold and constipated as ever. Daniell was one of those actors (like Laurence Harvey. or Dan Duryea) who never made any claim on audience sympathy, and maybe that’s why I like him so much.

   He does nothing very sinister here, yet his palpable heartlessness puts him instantly in the same camp as the Mad Scientists who typically run amok in this sort of thing.

   And when the running comes, it is indeed amok. Body Snatcher is one of those rare horror films with sense enough to save the scariest part for the climax, and ends with a burst of creepy action followed by a grim coda that leaves us feeling we’ve just seen some sobering lesson — even if we can’t say quite what it was.

SAN ANTONIO ROSE. Universal, 1941. Robert Paige, Eve Arden, Jane Frazee, Lon Chaney, Jr., Shemp Howard, Luis Alberni, Richard Lane, and The Merry Macs (Mary Lou Cook, Joe McMichael, Ted McMichael, Judd McMichael). Director: Charles Lamont. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Eve Arden and Jane Frazee are out-of-work performers who arrive at a supper club on the night it’s forced to close by a rival who hopes to revive his own dying club with his competition shut down.

   With no place to go (and no money), the two stay on in the abandoned club, and when a band headed by Robert Paige (less than memorable as the somnambulistic non-dead male lead of Son of Dracula) shows up to fulfill an engagement, the girls propose their version of “Let’s put on a show” by reopening the club.

   Chaney and Howard, dim-bulb minions of the rival club owner, are sent in to sabotage the opening. However, their attempts at sabotage are turned into unintentional parts of the floor show by the enterprising new owners and the boys are soon sent flying through a window.

   A bright 63 minute effort with the audience particularly enjoying the smooth singing of the once popular Merry Macs (with surviving relatives in the audience). Chaney and Howard make a fine comedy team and this was a tuneful and entertaining complement to the more ambitious (and no more entertaining) Crosby vehicle seen (and reviewed) just before.

ROBERT KYLE – Blackmail, Inc.

Dell First Edition A155; 1st printing, February 1958. Cover art: Victor Kalin. Second printing: Dell 0577, March 1967.

   If it matters, and inquiring minds always need to know, Robert Kyle was in reality Robert Terrall, and the latter wrote nine books as Kyle, all paperback originals from Dell. Of the nine, five chronicled the adventures of New York City private eye Ben Gates, of which this was the first. The fifth and final one, Ben Gates Is Hot, appeared in 1964.

   Terrall wrote only a bare handful of books under his own name; starting in 1965, he essentially took over as the primary writer of Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne books, beginning, with Nice Fillies Finish Last. (He’d also written one of the hardcover Shayne’s, Murder In Haste, back in 1961.)

   But Fillies was the first of the Mike Shayne books to be published as a paperback original, again by Dell, and except for reprints like Blackmail, Inc., Ben Gates was dropped, never to be heard from again.

   But as I say, this is the first Ben Gates book, and with it, there’s quite a bit of back story that needs to be filled in for him along the way.

   It seems he’s just lost his license, he’s out of work and he can’t find a job. He’s about to take a security position on some oil field along the Persian Gulf when he decides to take a last-minute offer to work for the publisher of Authentic, “the biggest and the meanest of all the scandal magazines.” The man and the magazines are both leery of lawsuits, and Gates is just the man to give them a hand.

   Roland Van Nuys does not seem to be the kind of man anyone would care to work for, but then again, three grand for one month’s work is not poultry feed. And add the fact that scummy private eye Rupert Weil is same guy who (a) submitted the story Van Nuys is worried about, and who (b) was pretty much the one single guy responsible for getting Gates’s license lost.

   But when a glamorous movie star like Sally Spaine comes along, who thinks Van Nuys is going to be doing a story on her next, and offers Gates $4000 to work for her instead, he turns her down. To me, it doesn’t make sense, but you figure Gates knows what he’s doing. On the other hand, page 23, he says, “Someone was being conned around here, and it could be me.”

   Or, if I may, here’s a longer quote from page 31:

   The writing is sometimes phrased not as smoothly as I might have wished, but mixed in with it are some decent PI-style metaphors and similes. Gates is a dues-paying member of the hard-boiled school, telling his own story, and not much caring if anyone thinks he’s a knight in shining armor or not.

   If the plot becomes somewhat muddled, after a firecracker couple of opening chapters, it’s made up for, and then some, by some closing theatrics that make the long and rather ordinary middle section worth the slog it takes to get through it.

   There are also some subtle and later not-so-subtle homophobic nuances scattered throughout the book; I was going to say they were incidental and not relevant to the solution to the mystery — Rupert Weil is the one who’s murdered, if I didn’t mention it, and I don’t think I did, and Gates is the number one suspect — but on second thought, for what it’s worth, maybe Kyle (Terrall) did mean them be more than incidental.

   For the reprint edition, there’s also a very nice painting of a nearly nude seductress on the front cover, and I’m really really sorry that at the moment, I don’t have a scan of it to show you. It’s by McDermott (no first name given) and she does have her shoes on.

[UPDATE] 11-17-09. I don’t remember details of plots. Never have and I probably never will. I began writing reviews to amuse myself and to help me remember what I read. But when I started writing reviews for other venues, I couldn’t be as specific as to the finer details as I was before.

   Therefore, all I can tell you about the paragraph one before the last is exactly what’s there, nothing more and nothing less.

   As for the last paragraph, I have a copy of the second printing, and I know what box it’s in, but where the box is, I can narrow it down to a three mile radius. I’m as tantalized by what the cover might display as you are, and maybe even more so. (Anyone who can help me out on this, please do!)

   And as for Robert Terrall himself, I reviewed Sand Dollars, one of the mystery thrillers he wrote under his own name, several months ago here on this blog. I also added some additional bibliographic information about him, along with a few additional covers, which are always nice to have when I can find them.

E. X. FERRARS – Frog in the Throat. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1980. US paperback edition: Bantam, 1981. British edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1980.

   Virginia Freer, heroine of Frog in the Throat, is staying with craftsmen friends Helen and Andrew Boscott (he’s a furniture restorer, she’s a weaver and tapestry worker) for a much-needed holiday.

On a quiet afternoon, in walks the big mistake of Virginia’s life — Felix Freer, her estranged husband. Felix is one of those charming people who have few scruples and an overwhelming capacity for lying — even when he thinks he’s telling the truth. He is now lying about his reasons for dropping in at the Boscott house, and Virginia wonders why.

   The events of the evening only complicate matters. At a neighbor’s cocktail party, novelist Carleen Fyffe (half of a famous sister team of historical-romance writers) announces her engagement to poet Basil Deering (whom Felix has expressed an interest in meeting).

   Shortly after the Freers and Boscotts return home, Olivia Fyffe arrives, saying she has found her sister on the floor of their den, murdered.

   When they all go to the Fyffe cottage, however, there is no body. Almost everyone thinks Olivia is being dramatic for some reason of her own, or perhaps hysterical. It takes a second body and the discovery of her sister’s corpse to prove otherwise, and a certain amount of detection on Virginia’s part to determine Felix’s connection with the murders.

   The pace of this novel is slow, with good characterization of all participants except the heroine. The plot unfolds in the best tradition of the British country-house mystery, with plenty of suspicion and all ends tied up nicely at the conclusion.

   One wishes, however, that Virginia Freer were as well characterized as her enigmatic and complex husband and hosts. It is a little hard to care what happens to any of them when the viewpoint character is so lacking in substance.

   Ferrars has been writing mysteries for over forty years; many of her tales are set in such locales as Greece, Africa, Mexico, and Australia, as well as in England. Other notable titles include Give the Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Hunt the Tortoise (1950), The Busy Body (1962), The Seven Sleepers (1970), The Cup and the Lip (1976), and Crime and the Crystal (1985).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

E. X. FERRARS – Alive and Dead. New York: Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1975. Paperback reprint: Bantam, 1982. British edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1974. Hardcover reprint: Constable, UK, 1989 (shown). (Note that the author’s usual byline in the UK was Elizabeth Ferrars.)

   The novels of E. X. Ferrars (a pseudonym of Morna Brown, who also writes under the name of Elizabeth Ferrars) are best described as quiet and polite.

   The characters are usually normal middle-class British people — which is not to say they are dull; many are writers or artists or engaged in otherwise unusual professions; the women are independent and strong. But they are people to whom violence seldom happens; and when it does, they are shocked, but willingly take charge and get to the bottom of these unexpected happenings.

   Martha Crayle is a typical Ferrars heroine. Middle-aged and twice divorced, she has struggled to raise two sons while caring for an invalid aunt and running a rooming house. When the aunt dies and leaves her an unexpected legacy, she moves out all her boarders except the reserved and stem Mr. Syme (who has become her confidant and, when crime strikes, a sort of Watson) and takes up volunteer work for the National Guild for the Welfare of Unmarried Mothers.

   It is at their offices that she meets Amanda Hassall, a young pregnant woman who claims she has been deserted by her husband and impregnated by the man she is living with. Amanda does not wish to marry the baby’s father, nor does she want to put the child up for adoption as her parents have suggested. Martha takes the girl home, and a day later takes in another pregnant woman, Sandra Aspinall.

   As Mr. Syme has darkly hinted, Martha should not have given refuge to these total strangers. Before Amanda has spent two nights in the house, a murdered man turns up in a local hotel, and she is reported to have been on the scene.

   Amanda insists the victim is her estranged husband, but her parents — who appeared shortly before the body was discovered — claim the husband died in an airplane crash the year before. In addition to the parents, the boyfriends of both young women arrive, and by the time murder is done twice, Martha thoroughly regrets her involvement and wishes she had listened to Mr. Syme.

   The plot twists and turns (with plenty of surprises) all the way to the very end. Ferrars writes well and creates characters that are sure to enlist her readers’ sympathies. This novel is one of her best.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

E. X. FERRARS – Murder of a Suicide. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprint: Curtis Books, no date. British edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1941, as Death in Botanist’s Bay, as by Elizabeth Ferrars (her standard byline in the UK).

   Edgar Prees, director of the Botanical Gardens In Asslington, is a man of such regular habits that when he is two hours late coming home one evening his daughter becomes quite alarmed. And rightly so, for Prees has, or so It seems, tried to commit suicide by trying to throw himself off a cliff.

   He is stopped, but the next morning, even as he still seems to be thinking about killing himself, he is murdered. Or does he kill himself?

   Officially, Inspector Tingey investigates. Tingey “liked simple virtues and was sympathetic to a few simple vices. He liked to be thought a simple man who believed what people told him.”

   Unofficially, Toby Dyke and his rather odd companion George, of apparently fixed abode but no last name, both of whom had aided in keeping Prees from hurling himself off the cliff, try to help Prees’s daughter, who is a possible suspect.

   Most of the characters, with the possible exception of Prees’s neurotic former secretary, are believable, including Gerald Hyland, an author who achieves a reasonable Income by writing about “sex and religion in the desert” and who is the complete faddist.

   There are wheels within wheels here. A plausible solution is offered at the end, and then it is overridden by an even more plausible solution.

   For reasons that I cannot recall, I had thought that Ferrars was essentially a suspense writer. This, however, is a fair-play mystery.

Bibliographic Data: I believe Bill Deeck’s assertion to be correct. Between 1940 and 1995 E. X. Ferrars wrote over 70 detective and mystery novels or story collections, and my impression is also that those written toward the end of her career were more inclined to be romantic suspense in nature than they were “traditional” detective fiction.

   But in each of the first five books she wrote, her leading character was the same Toby Dyke as in Murder of a Suicide; and I have a strong feeling that in these books, as was common for most detective fiction in the early 1940s, “fair play” deduction was the order of the day.

TOBY DYKE. [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

       Give a Corpse a Bad Name (n.) Hodder 1940. [No US edition.]
       Remove the Bodies (n.) Hodder 1940. [US title: Rehearsals for Murder, Doubleday, 1941.
       Death in Botanist’s Bay (n.) Hodder 1941. [US title: Murder of a Suicide, Doubleday, 1941]
       Don’t Monkey with Murder (n.) Hodder 1942 [US title: The Shape of a Stain, Doubleday, 1942]

       Your Neck in a Noose (n.) Hodder 1942. [US title: Neck in a Noose, Doubleday, 1943]

PETE HAMILL – Dirty Laundry. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1978.

   The first in a planned series of at least three Sam Briscoe adventures, and if this one is any example of the books to follow, it is indeed a welcome addition to the roster of private eye like novels.

   Technically, Briscoe is not a private eye, but instead a freelance journalist. No matter. His actions are very private eye like. He’s a Charlie Parker fan, an ex-art student and a damn mean customer. Dirty Laundry shows its linen right from the start, gets it out quick and the action rolls.

   Briscoe’s ex-girlfriend, Anne Fletcher, calls him greatly in need of his help, but refuses to explain over the telephone for fear of bugs. He agrees to meet her and talk, but his feelings are mixed. He still carries a torch for her but feels like the whole thing should stay finished.

   He need not have worried. She’s killed in a car accident Or is it an accident? .

   Briscoe’s investigation of her death leads him to a very Chandler-like woman named Moya Vargas. (Compare Dolores Gonzales right down to the wide, white part in the middle of her scalp.) From there, it’s involvement with the now classical, fumbling F.B.I. man.

   Of course, Briscoe outwits him at every turn. But what’s the stake so important that the F.B.I. is interested? Could it be Anne’s past interest in Cuban affairs, her involvement in the revolution?

   So Briscoe is off and running, or rather flying, to Mexico. His descriptions of Mexico are so full of vivid detail you can almost smell the city streets. Having never been to Mexico City, I can only guess at how accurate Briscoe (Hamill) is, but it certainly has a realistic feel.

   Actually, at this point there is little detection left. The novel falls more correctly into the suspense category, but there are still very obvious “Chandler” highlights. There’s the body in the bath tub; Briscoe is as given corpses to the descriptions of corpses and the finding of corpses, as Chandler.

   Briscoe immediately surmises, and correctly, that he has been set up to take a murder rap, if for no other reason than to get him off the case. Like any good private eye or private eye type, that’s merely incentive to lock in with the jaws and bulldog it out to the end.

   And what an end! Full of surprises — Hamill twists the tail of the genre a bit. Not so much as to upset a staunch traditionalist, but enough to keep from making it all seem old hat.

   Nice climax. Nice atmosphere. Nice debut.

   Looking forward to more Briscoe adventures. According to the little note in the back of the book, the next Sam Briscoe adventure is scheduled for early in ’79.

Bibliographic Update:   There were two additional Sam Briscoe novels by real-life journalist Pete Hamill, The Dirty Piece (Bantam, pbo, 1979), and The Guns of Heaven (Bantam, pbo, 1983, recently reprinted by Hard Case Crime in August 2006). Alas, there were no others.

MARGARET MILES –

   A Wicked Way to Burn. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, February 1998.
         [plus]
   Too Soon for Flowers. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1999.

    You’re probably like me and when a new author starts a new series with a new character, you miss the first two or three and pick up the fourth one as the first one to read. Not this time. Here are the first two in a sequence of mysteries taking place in colonial Massachusetts, and both are well worth reading. The town is Bracebridge, halfway between Boston and Worcester. Time: the fall of 1763 and the spring of 1764.

    Reading two in succession, rare for me, only builds to the sense of community the author definitely has in mind. Young widow Charlotte Willett does most of the detective work, plain in looks, but her inquisitive mind is far from simple.

    Her next-door neighbor, Richard Longfellow, is the village selectman and of a scientific bent. His sister Diana, whose visits from Boston are not uncommon, is a flirtful sort. Rounding out the list of major players is the enigmatic Captain Montagu, whose “duties and obligations [to the Crown were] not commonly understood.” He also seems to favor Diana.

    The incident that’s at the center of the first book is, by eyewitness account, that of spontaneous human combustion. Mrs. Willett is not so sure, and her instincts are quite correct. In the second novel, a young girl dies while being quarantined after being inoculated for smallpox, a deadly scourge at that time of the nation’s history.

    Oddly, the mystery is better handled in the first book, and matters of historical interest more capably in the second — even at times to making certainly sections too ‘talky’ in regard to current events, and waxing philosophical on matters of relationships between the sexes and the nature of death.

    While the first mystery is an excellent model of fair play detection, Miles allows the dead girl’s secret to be suspected by the reader far too early in the second, and too much coincidence is allowed to stick its nasty nose in.

    But by that time, we’ve also had a long opportunity to grow even more comfortable and at home with the various and sundry folks in colonial Bracebridge, and both books are very nearly equally enjoyable.

   Bibliographic data:

      The Bracebridge series:

    1. A Wicked Way to Burn (1998)
    2. Too Soon For Flowers (1999)
    3. No Rest For the Dove (2000)

    4. A Mischief in the Snow (2001)

    As for the author herself, “Margaret Miles” is too common a name to do much research on. Al Hubin has no information about her, and neither do I. As for the series of four novels, I have not read the 3rd nor the 4th, so I also cannot tell you whether all of the loose ends were tied up before the series ended, presumably caused by the usual insufficient (and falling) sales.

WALTER MOSLEY – Little Scarlet. Little Brown & Co., hardcover; first edition, July 2004. Paperback reprint: Vision, April 2005.

    It is the fall of 1965, a time when the crew of the Gemini 5 was preparing for takeoff, Martin Luther King was alive and preaching, and the soot, ashes, and broken glass of the Watts Riots had yet to settle in Los Angeles. Walter Mosley’s ninth novel to feature Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is set amidst the racial tensions in the aftermath of the riots that shook Los Angeles and the world for five days.

    In the opening chapter of Little Scarlet, Easy Rawlins is helping one of his tenants pick up the pieces of a torched and looted shoe repair shop. In walks Melvin Suggs, a white LAPD detective, asking Easy to assist the city on a delicate matter. A young black woman has been murdered, possibly by a white man. “If this proves to be true, and if the word “gets out on the street, the embers of the riot could easily reignite.

    In a style setting him squarely in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, Mosley brings the L.A. streets alive with greed, corruption, and jaded hopes. With Little Scarlet, he confronts the complexities of race relations, civil rights, and miscegenation…

    As an added bonus for Mosley fans, Little Scarlet includes a brief cameo appearance of Paris Minton, the Los Angeles bookstore owner of Mosley’s “Fearless Jones” series.

    The one problem I had with the book was Easy’s rationalization of the riots. Sure, he never out-and-out approved of the torching and looting, but he made it clear, repeatedly, that this was a provoked, natural, and understandable response to the White Man’s oppression.

    I don’t buy that argument, and I don’t think Easy Rawlins, a Black man who fought in WWII, would buy it either.