BOOK REVIEW - Gray Dawn
GRAY DAWN
Walter Mosley
Little, Brown & Co. 319pp.
I may have said this before, but I am a big fan of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mysteries. Mosley is the recipient of the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America Society and has sold over five million copies of his Rawlins series alone. Gray Dawn is his seventeenth novel with this detective, and it’s the busiest one yet. This one may feel like a series finale (Mosley is seventy-four) as he’s trotted out pretty much all of his vast cast of supporting players: Mouse, Charcoal Joe, Fearless Jones, Jackson Blue and Jewelle, Mama Jo, his kids, his lovers, the cops downtown who either despise or begrudgingly admire him. But Mosley has tried to end this series once before (in Blonde Faith) and ended up bringing him back for an encore, no doubt at the urging of his legion of fans.
This particular tale starts as so many do: a poor soul walks into his office looking for a relation who’s gone missing. But things quickly unravel, and nothing is as it first appears. Along the way, multiple other plot lines wind their way through the pages: B stories, C stories, and D and E. Easy runs the gamut of obstacles, with his kids in trouble, old lovers reappearing, young protégés to be mentored, dead bodies piling up, trips to jail, bargains to be made, and secrets kept. Easy Rawlins has come a long way from the dead-broke, unemployed mechanic just trying to survive who first appeared in 1990. Now he is a well-known, successful, and secretly wealthy detective endeavoring to protect family and community in his fortress-like home. Mosley is coy about how well-off Rawlins is, but if wealth is measured by life-long friends and favors owed, Easy is better off than most.
Mosley’s prose is well regarded for showing the underside of Los Angeles society from a black man’s point of view, the insults, the outrage, the injustices, great and small. But through the course of these many books, the racism, though still present, has become more subtle, guarded, less in-your-face as Easy’s interactions with white society reveal. Still, it is a rich tapestry of culture and community that we are invited to watch, and it is always satisfying.
