4 June, 2003
Black Betty, Walter Mosley (255 pp, HC, 1994).
Book 4 in the Easy Rawlins series. As with most series, if you like the previous books, you'll like this one; if you didn't, you won't; if you haven't read any of the series, this isn't the place to start.
This one takes place in 1961, some years after White Butterfly. Easy now lives in West L.A. (my area!), with his two adopted children, Jesus (age 15) and Feather (age 5, or maybe 6). He's unemployed, and his real estate business is doing poorly, so when white private eye Saul Lynx offers him $400 to find a woman, he takes the job. The woman in question is Elizabeth Eady, a.k.a. "Black Betty," who was a housekeeper for a wealthy Beverly Hills family and who disappeared shortly after the family's patriarch died.
I said that White Butterfly read like Easy Rawlins finding himself in a Ross Macdonald plot. Black Betty reads like Easy Rawlins in a Raymond Chandler plot, what with investigating corruption and dark secrets among upper-class Angelenos, and all. Saul Lynx even has a little bit of a Marlowe vibe going-- a somewhat seedy PI who has a deep-seated sense of honor and right.
Easy still doesn't properly respect women, but at least he admits it. And, his sexual exploits are much more palatable here, than in the previous books where he was either screwing his friends' women, or cheating on his wife. Perhaps there's hope for him, yet. He does seem to be a pretty good dad, for a protagonist in a hard-boiled detective series.