Walter Mosley's "Charcoal Joe": Comic Relief

Opening up Walter Mosley's Charcoal Joe (New York: Doubleday, 2016), you may feel a shock at the sheer number of colorful characters, their schemes and scams. Soon, though, you realize it's an L.A.-wide block party with crooks and cops, saps and sirens, black and white and brown. Our affable good-hearted host is detective Easy Rawlins.

[photo of Mosley by Ann Weathersby]

To be sure, Mosley doesn't stint on action. From a comfy cell in a resort-style prison, crime boss "Charcoal Joe" hires Easy to exonerate a young black professor charged with murder of two white men. Following leads, Easy gets in fist fights, battles armed home invaders, and hunts a killer in the killer's own house. In his time off, Easy helps his partners to trap a vile sexual predator.

But this novel brings out Mosley's playful side. When the novel starts, Easy's having a great day. Friends everywhere, each one a character. Lovers, too -- it's a running gag that every woman he encounters want to have his child. Then Mosley makes a kind of game - how many ways can Easy handle whites, cops and proprietors, who mean "You don't belong here" when they say, "Can I help you?"

Mosley plays meta-tricks, too. When Easy names his detective firm with his partners' initials, is it coincidence that WRENS-L rhymes with "Denzel," the actor who played Easy in The Devil in a Blue Dress? Easy makes an important choice on the basis of a slight detail he noticed several chapters before, a virtuoso bit of observation and deduction that might be a respectful nod to Sherlock Holmes.

I found a fun photo of Mosley by Ann Weathersby with an article "Free Radical" by Logan Hill in New York Magazine (Sept. 15, 2005). Hill makes an apt comparison to the plays of August Wilson. Like Mosley, Wilson explored black experience in America across decades through stories set in one city.

I had put Mosley's series aside for awhile, ground down a bit by the weight Easy had to carry. Then I picked up Charcoal Joe and it picked me up.

My Blog Posts of Related Interest I read the first several books pre-blog.

• Mosley's Cinnamon Kiss is part of my essay "Guilty Pleasure in Crime Fiction" (05/2006).
• In "Black, White, and Noire" (04/2009) I consider Mosley's Blonde Faith alongside The Ivory Grin ,written by Ross MacDonald in 1952.  This essay begins, "In one of the throw-away lines that make Walter Mosley's novels so rich, detective Easy Rawlins reflects that he is no more a private eye than . . . any soul sitting in that [black dive, ca. 1966]. Each and every one of us was examining and evaluating clues all the time, day and night (98)."
• "One Plot, Two Thrillers" (07/2013) finds one-to-one correspondence between two successful thrillers that are otherwise entirely different, Mosley's Little Green and Dean Koontz's Odd Hours.  This article quotes Mosley's striking insights on race in America and on 1967.
• August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (12/2020) was filmed, with Denzel Washington the producer. Wilson was influenced by the art of Romare Beardon. See Something Over Something Else
(01/2020).

See a curated list of links to my reflections on many other crime fiction authors.