BOOK REVIEW - Farwell, Amethystine
FAREWELL, AMETHYSTINE
By Walter Mosley
Little, Brown & Co., 325p.
Walter Mosley is one of my favorite authors. If you’re not familiar with him, you should check him out. A best-selling mystery writer, Mosley has published over fifty novels, mostly, but not all, in the crime-solving detective genre. His best-known series is the Easy Rawlins tales, of which Farewell, Amethystine is the sixteenth.
From his humble beginning as a young black man from Texas who landed in post-war Los Angeles as a battle-hardened vet, the recently unemployed Rawlins takes on a job tracking down a girl in a blue dress, and a detective is born. Over the next dozen-plus novels, Easy builds a network of friends, criminals, associates, and favors traded. Some of these people are wily, others dangerous, and all of them are rich and complex characters.
Farewell, Amethystine begins in classic fashion: a beautiful woman appears at his office looking for her missing husband. Easy takes the case and soon discovers that his best ally in the police department has also mysteriously gone missing. As he begins connecting the dots, moving relentlessly forward in his hunt, a familiar cast of characters makes their appearance along the way: Jewel, Mouse, Fearless, and others. As always, the path becomes perilous, and the bodies start to pile up. Easy gets shot at, beaten, and drugged in no particular order.
What sets Mosley’s work apart from other noir writers is his social observations. It’s one thing to comment on the political climate or the cultural vibe of the times, but Mosley pulls back the curtain a little and lets you peek behind and get a glimpse of what it means to be Black in America; the slights, the slurs, the boundaries. But it’s not all sinister race relations. He paints the vibrancy of a diverse community: the home environment, the nicknames, the slang, and the food. It’s like a travelogue to a foreign country.
And then there’s the character of Easy Rawlins. Where Philip Marlowe is a cipher, an avatar for the reader, Easy’s soul is raw and laid bare. Every painful decision, and there are many, is wrapped in self-doubt and recrimination. His courage wins out, though, and that wins the battle.
It’s not hard to become addicted to this man and his life. Mosley tried to wrap up the series once. No doubt readers’ passion convinced him to resurrect the man. Thanks for that.
