Sat 14 Nov 2009
A Review by Steven Steinbock: WALTER MOSLEY – Little Scarlet.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[6] Comments
STEVEN STEINBOCK:
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.
November 14th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Mosley is a fine author.
However I am no more comfortable with his antipathy for whites than I was comfortable with Chandler’s explicit racism toward African-Americans in the opening scenes of “Farewell My Lovely”. So I have never reread “Farewell My Lovely” and I do not read Mosley anymore.
One of Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels is introduced with the following quote:
“Daddy, why do black men kill other black men?”
“Practice, son….practice.”
Easy explicitly says in one of the early-ish books that he didn’t want his neighbors to learn that he was an owner of neighborhood rental units he had bought and fixed up lest they think he was exploiting blacks as the white man did.
I think Mosley (and Easy) absolutely WOULD say the looting and arson were justified given the oppression of the community by the White Man. And that Easy had wised up after fighting in WW II for an hateful society that had no respect for him.
But black-on-white racism is as ugly as any other kind.
November 15th, 2009 at 1:47 am
Whatever Mosely’s political or racial views I don’t think he could portray Rawlins any other way and stay true to the character. That’s a little different than the racism of the Chandler book which in turn is at least just realistic compared to Spillane’s “they’re all right if they know their place” attitude in earlier Mike Hammer books.
I felt the Rawlins books fell in line with more or less realistic attitudes of Chester Himes, Ernest Tidyman, or Donald Goines books, than out right racism. But that was just my take on it.
Still the race thing has been hashed and rehashed here and elsewhere, and sad to say if you are going to read popular fiction set in an earlier era or written in that era you are going to have to deal with race as it was viewed at the time. I chafe at the scene in Farewell My Lovely too, but I’m not giving up one of the masterpieces of the genre because it makes me uncomfortable. Chandler’s attitude toward women and homosexuals wasn’t exactly enlightened either.
It would be nice if all the great (and not so great) writers had been models of tolerance and good will toward their fellow men, but sadly books — even great books — are written by fallible human beings. That isn’t to say we have to like it, but perhaps we do need to recognize it.
That isn’t to suggest we have to embrace it when it bothers us, but I do think it does no good to claim some high moral ground because we object to it. In both the case of Chandler and Mosely the scenes in question are relatively realistic to the time and place they occur in, and no more vicious or cruel than called for.
Maybe we can take some credit because they do make us uncomfortable rather than our just accepting them, but I think we need to be careful whose work we discard in our quest for an easy conscience.
Racism is ugly in any form, but I’m not sure it is always racist to portray it realistically — even when it is uncomfortable to for some of us to read. I’m not sure in the case of Mosely or Chandler that they were making a racial statement so much as reflecting the world their characters move and function in.
Anyway I’m not ready to discard Mosely or Chandler (or Spillane for that matter) in the name of political correctness, so long as I know what I believe and how I feel about the subject. But that said, I want to be clear that I don’t judge others who do. I think in this case both points of view are valid.
November 15th, 2009 at 2:37 am
I’m not defending my dislike. But I would add that Chandler’s racism is a thoughtless unexamined racism. And for that reason I can read and reread any of Raymond Chandler’s works other than FML with admiration and pleasure.
Interviews with Mosley often seem to indicate that his convictions about racial politics are not thoughtless at all, but he believes them thoughtful, well-considered, and justified.
I wish I could look past that. Mosley’s work is important and often movingly told.
November 15th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Rick
I understand where you are coming from and what you have to say about Chandler, but I would still argue the scene in FML is largely realistic, and in that sense less offensive than say a more positive scene portraying blacks as comic stereotypes or the like.
I do think his attacks on women and homosexuals are more vicious and a bigger problem for modern readers, but then Hammett isn’t free of some racial problems too, though most of them fall into the category of realism.
Truth is save for a bit of somewhat positive racial portraits in the Van Dine school (Mike Grost has a good piece on this in his blog) the hard-boiled school was one of the few to deal with race at all beyond simple stereotype.
Since it was reflecting a more or less lower middle class working man’s view and attempting a sort of romantic realism it often sounds — or is — racist. But it is racism as a reflection of actual experience, not for a political agenda.
In the case of Mosely and Easy Rawlins I’ve always felt he was doing us a service by presenting us with a hero who was human and flawed. In a sense he is telling us he trusts us enough to tell his perception of the truth. I think if he had made Rawlins a sort of liberal paragon of PC values and thought that the books would not entertain half so well or be half as important.
We’ve come a long way from Octavius Roy Cohen and Florian Slappy, and along the way made some notable stops from John Ball and Ed Lacy (both white men) writing about black protagonists to Chester Himes and Digger and Coffin Ed to Parker’s Hawk and Easy Rawlins. There is a long way still to go, but I think we are at a point now where embracing a certain honesty is more important than political correctness, but that said the line that divides what seems honest to one reader and racist to another is a fine one.
But in all honesty being made uncomfortable isn’t always a bad thing even in popular fiction. And maybe it is just as important that what was once largely un-commented upon in Chandler (or others) in general now disturbs us a causes us to think. The same may be true of Mosely in the long run.
You wish you could get past it, I wish we could face it and deal with our differences. In both cases I think there is a recognition that whatever is said the mere fact of the dialogue is important.
Just the fact that you and I (and others) are having this conversation says something in the favor of Mosely and Chandler. Lesser works that bothered us we would likely have just tossed aside without comment.
November 15th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Ditto on your last sentence, David.
I’ve been away all day since posting this review of Steve’s late last night, and I have to say that I appreciate every bit of the two part conversation that’s gone on in my absence, as close to the edge as it might have become.
Rick and David — and I hope this isn’t too hard to believe — but I can also honesty say that I agree with both of you, and I thank you.
November 15th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
I think my problem when you get down to it is that if I only read writers I agreed with I wouldn’t have much to read. That isn’t to suggest good writing in anyway means you should ignore hateful speech by any writer, but I do think we have to guard against over sensitivity too.
I don’t disagree with Rick’s opinion of Chandler or Mosely, I just come to a different place about how I feel about it. In Chandler’s case the casual racism of the scene feels to me more an attempt at a more or less realistic milieu than a statement about race, while in the case of Mosely I think he is reflecting some accurate feelings that we are better off to acknowledge than to hide from.
But I agree with Rick too that Chandler’s scene is the product of unexamined even casual attitudes of his time while Mosely is making a statement. I just think both writers are too important to dismiss because they make us uncomfortable at times.