Easy’s blues

FOR two decades, Easy Rawlins has walked the streets of Los Angeles, and the city has given him everything: friends, family, two homes, three apartment buildings, a dog and any number of people willing to pay him to fix their broken lives. Yet something’s gone wrong. Two years after the riots, Watts smolders, Vietnam rages and Easy is losing it. He knows it. His friends know it. And, of course, Walter Mosley knows it.

The 10th Easy Rawlins novel is unlike any we’ve read. “I lit a Camel,” Easy tells us early in the book, “thought about the taste of sour mash . . . and climbed out of the car like Bela Lugosi from his coffin.” Gone is the man once happy to own a home with an avocado tree in his frontyard. Gone is the man content to nurse a drink and a smoke in a bar like Joppy’s. Gone is the man whose dalliances in bed were his most reliable and consistent solace. Still the tough-minded, tough-hearted private detective of earlier novels, the Easy of “Blonde Faith” is haunted and more vulnerable, trying to atone for his mistakes, find love and acceptance and make it through to the next day.

This dark turn is all the darker given Mosley’s considerable achievement over the years. When he introduced Easy in 1990, Mosley captured a time and place in Los Angeles’ history that few writers dared imagine. It was 1948. African American migration from the South to California was at its peak. Black nightclubs, newspapers, hotels and churches, hemmed in by the city’s withering segregation policies and housing covenants, thrived on Central Avenue. The joint was jumping, and ready to blow. Since then, we’ve watched Easy grow from the 26-year-old sharecropper’s son to a seasoned regular on the street, and we’ve seen how the street entered his blood. “As I got older, my profession began to take center stage in my life,” he says. “I wanted to know why things happened, but not like when I was a young man. In my early life, I wanted money and women, success and respect, not for what I did but for who I was.”

This evolution -- this attempt to understand the why -- has given the Rawlins novels their cumulative edge, yet it has never seemed enough for Mosley. In science fiction, political essays and literary fiction, he has pushed his boundaries as a writer, with significant or marginal success. Still, he kept returning to Easy. Although “Blonde Faith” does not have the force of “Little Scarlet,” perhaps the greatest novel in the series, it is indispensable as a portrait of this “unwilling detective.” That’s what Easy’s mentor, Saul Lynx, calls him: “You’re out there to help people because you hate what’s happened. But really you’d rather be reading a book.”

Of course, Easy doesn’t have that luxury, and hating what’s happened has taken a toll. Righteousness and indignation have driven him from the outset and ultimately led to the breakup with his girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, in the previous novel. The memory is raw, impossible to disentangle from that tale’s circumstances: his adopted daughter’s illness, his struggle to pay for her care, the stranger -- Bonnie’s new man -- who did and Easy’s wounded pride. “I love you but I got to let you go,” he tells her on the last page of “Cinnamon Kiss,” a decision he will live to regret, and in that instant the woman who so anchored his heart -- who in “A Little Yellow Dog” pulled him so alluringly like “some new gravity into a cold clean darkness” -- is gone, leaving him to come crashing to Earth.

In “Blonde Faith,” there’s no escaping the wreckage. Forget that two of his friends have gone missing. Forget that a dead man is hidden in a crate in a backyard shed, that rogue military officials are dealing drugs, and that there is a woman -- no, two women -- catching Easy’s eye. Rescuing women and dealing with fools and thugs is a story Mosley’s written before.

What’s new is Easy’s turmoil. It’s his chafed nerves that propel the plot, so that one death reminds him of the “whole mountain of dead people” he has seen, from Louisiana to Dachau, and one armed guard brings to life all the white people who’ve tried to keep him down. When his home gets broken into, it shatters “every covenant the civilized world lived by.” When he saves a friend’s daughter from a pimp near a back alley in Watts, he struggles “to imagine how I could see myself as that child saw me: a hero filled with power and certainty.”

It can be said that Mosley lays on this angst too heavily. Nonetheless, Easy’s memories make his ache for Bonnie all the more poignant. As he tries to replace her, emotionally and sexually, he comes across as a man lost in this world yet begging to be found. When he breaks into someone’s apartment, he stays there well beyond safety, confessing his life story to a new girlfriend over the phone, and in time it becomes clear that he’s mourning the loss not just of Bonnie but of other women in his life, especially his mother, who died when he was a child.

But does Easy’s despair come from a broken heart alone? Mosley has always linked his hero’s fate with that of Los Angeles and painted a broader picture of race in America, so you have to wonder what’s changed in this city in 20 years that has made Easy’s surroundings so inimical to him. Clues are everywhere.

Walking into a bank on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica, Easy ponders the change: “In 1964, I would have been an anomaly walking in there, obviously far from home. . . . But in 1967, two years after the Watts riots, I was no longer a mere abnormality but a threat.” Watching two old men play checkers in the shadow of the Watts Towers, Easy feels “as if I were witnessing the devolution of a culture. The decrepit park, the shabby clothes Blix and Timor wore, even Otis Redding moaning about the dock of the bay on tinny but loud speakers, spoke of a world that was grinding to a halt.”

Mosley’s picture of Los Angeles after the Watts riots is as troubling as anything we saw before them. With the city lurching toward integration, with institutional racism slowly crumbling, what’s left is the reason for its existence: hatred and suspicion based on the color of your skin. For Easy, society is less the culprit than the hearts of men, which can render any stride toward integration mere lip service.

But it’s too simple to say that a more integrated Los Angeles has stolen Easy’s will, any more than a segregated Los Angeles gave him the will to survive. Mosley is digging deeper. Easy, in the end, is his own man. His fate lies beyond the polemics, the racial fury, the inequity of this city. His fate -- lonely, broken-hearted and hopeless -- is in his own hands.

As surely as he found material success in Los Angeles, Easy has lost his soul. It’s a dangerous turn, but in “Blonde Faith” Mosley seems to suggest that life’s greatest mystery is hidden inside us rather than on the city’s streets. By novel’s end, when Easy is driving north on Pacific Coast Highway with a pint of cognac between his legs and a cigarette between his fingers, you know this is one case he won’t solve. *