Customer Reviews

Bad Boy Brawly Brown (Walker Large Print Books)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mouse is not dead. In "Bad Boy Brawly Brown" Mouse's spirit pervades nearly every page, certainly every chapter and, ultimately, Mr. Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins finds that, whether dead or alive, Mouse has given him the solution to the problem of Brawly Brown. And Walter Mosley offers a solid hint that Easy's quest to purge himself of his guilt over Mouse's death will be continued in the next installment in the series.

I can't believe that I'm saying this: This book was worth every day I've waited for it over the past six years. After completing the book moments ago, even as a dedicated Mosley fan I was struck numb by the power of his words and his vision here. Other reviewers have commented on that already. But because Mosley is writing about a now well-documented period of history and my life when secret police "intelligence" units along with the FBI ant others were concocting provocations and committing extra-judicial murders much as Mosley describes them in his novel, perhaps it resonated with me more than it might with other readers, or at least resonated differently. I knew people such as Mosley describes in this novel in the late '60s and early '70s, people filled with the desperate passions of revolutionaries and dreams of a greater freedom for their humanity. Mosley honors the memories of many members of a generation that struggled and dreamed by allowing their many voices to speak through his characters with all their flaws and strengths.

The brightest threads of Mosley's multi-textured and intertwining plots are those which reveal Rawlins, the man, unobstructed by the ferocious shadow of Mouse, and the torture of human relationships, especially those of family. One reviewer commented that this novel did not provide the action and thrills (s)he expected from a mystery novel. Mosley's novels are not thrill-a-minute rides any more than James Lee Burkes'. They are stories of the human condition and how it traps us, for better or worse, into behaving in ways that we would prefer to avoid but cannot because of duty or honor or responsibility or love or obligation or fear. Seen in this perspective, Mosley does not write mystery novels,he writes literature. And the fact that he so captures and exposes elements of African-American culture and experience and history places him as a writer in the first rank of ethnic spokespersons, in the company of Chester Himes, John A. Williams, James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, and many other men and women who seek to celebrate triumph over suffering even when that triumph is celebrated by simply returning home, alive, and wiser.

I have heard that Mosley is working on the next Easy Rawlins experience and that we will not be required to wait another six years to savor the words that describe them. I fervently hope that this is true. In the meantime, I will ponder what I have read today and I will remember when so much of it was life and not fiction. Bravo, Mr. Mosley. And thank you.

This is the first book I've read in the "Easy Rawlins" series of detective novels. I heard Mosely speak once in a panel discussion of the legacy of Raymond Chandler, and since then I've been looking for an opportunity to read his stuff. Chandler wrote novels about corruption, about institutions that you expect to be stalwart and only gradually find out are corrupt to the core. In Mosely's books, the corruption is taken for granted up front. This is a book about relationships, about the ad-hoc institutions and problem-solving methods people put together by themselves when they KNOW the legitimate system is crooked. Easy Rawlins isn't a paid detective; he's a problem-solver doing a favor for a friend. This puts a fresh new face on the detective genre. I've never read the first Rawlins book, Devil in a Blue Dress, but I think that I'll be looking for a copy soon.

The mystery in "Bad Boy Brawly Brown" serves as a device through which the black perspectives of the 60's civil rights' movement are explored. The people in this story ranged the full spectrum of attitudes, from the apathy of the older generation through noble ideals to the militant actions of youth. Never once does the narrative avoid the honesty of portraying the times. In the midst of all this, Easy Rawlins strives to rescue Brawly Brown from the troubles of the times.

While still coming to terms with the death of his best friend, Mouse, Easy Rawlins accepts a request to find Brawly Brown and help him. Easy's long time friend, John, asks him to find his girlfriend's boy, Brawly, whom John had hired on at his construction site. Since becoming involved with the Urban Revolutionary Party, Brawly had dropped out of touch with his family. His mother was scared that he might be in serious trouble. For the fee of one home cooked meal, Easy agreed to look into it.

Throughout the novel, black culture is presented in all its colors. Dialogue varies with the education level and social status. "'I'm no cop brother. I heard about this place down at Hambones. They said you guys do a lot a talkin' and I decided to come on down and hear you out.' My diction and grammar slid into the form I wanted junior to hear."

Status is determined as much by the shade of skin color as well as well. The darker a black person's skin is, the more African he is, and the more trusted he is within the black community. Those with paler skin are shunned for betraying their race by the accident of birth. Filled with distinct characters, there is no room in "Bad Boy Brawly Brown" for stereotypes.

If there is any weak aspect of "Bad Boy Brawly Brown," it is that the cast of characters is simply too large. Even though all the characters have distinct voices, many of them are not heard enough to leave a lasting impression. Beyond Easy, the most memorable character never actually appears in the course of the events of the story.

Raymond "Mouse" Alexendar, Easy's lethal sidekick through six previous books died three months before the events of "Bad Boy Brawly Brown." Easy's guilt and an unreasonable glimmer of hope (since when has hope ever been a product of reason?) breathe vitality into his living memory of Mouse. At every turn, Mouse's voice whispers violent solutions to every difficult situation in which Easy becomes enmeshed.

Easy bounces from one situation to another as the plot meanders along. Several times the story threatens to stall as Easy talks to yet another person about Brawly's past, present and uncertain future. Many times Brawly's personal situation is less compelling than the evolution of the Urban Revolutionary Party. These glimpses of the individual emotions and actions behind the civil rights movement hold the power of living history.

"Bad Boy Brawly Brown" is a compelling tale more because of the insight it offers into the civil rights activities of the '60's in the Watts district than as a murder mystery. With vibrant dialogue and vivid descriptions, this episode of Easy's life is still a richly rewarding tale.

It's been years since I've read an Easy Rawlings novel and I haven't a clue why. Walter Mosley manages to create one of the most interesting and fascinating characters in modern mysteries today. The series have become atmospheric time pieces that sear into the heart of what it is to be black in America, this time in the turbulant sixties. Mouse dead, Easy has become domesticated, living with his girlfriend Bonnie and his children Feather and Jesus. Asked by his freind John to find a missing boy, Brawly Brown, Easy takes up the task and finds himself in water much deeper than he could of ever imagined. Told with his characteristic direct and honest prose, it's another great book to savor in one of the best series out there.

It seems more often than not that the heroes of the mystery genre are white. So for many of us to go back into a racially subjugated time, here in the early sixties, we may realize that we never heard the other side of the story. We missed the other background. No longer with Walter Mosely.

Mr. Mosely brings us back to the past, the very recent past, where the black detective really had all the problems the white detective had, i.e. the bad guys would attempt to put him in harms way, plus the subjugation of the (for the most part) white police force.

So it would be a mistake for us to say that Mr. Mosely brings a "refreshing" view. Painful, perhaps. Unfortunate, certainly. But always very well written.

Here Ezekial Rawlins is asked by his friend, John, to help his girlfriend Alva's son stay out of the limelight or rather, the searchlights of the police department. Brawly has been influenced by a Black Group named the First Men. Whether they truly seek only the leverage and subsequent parity that equal education can bring (the 1960's in Los Angeles was only a few years after Brown vs. Board of Education) or as the police believe, they were but a front for gun running, bank robbery and revolution, is denied to us as it has been in the last 40 years.

However, Mosely doesn't pass judgment on this. Who's to say that in some arenas of social justice the end . . . But we're not asked to go there. We follow Easy, troubled by a violent past he cannot avoid, haunted by the sins of omission and commission, as the bodies turn up. Easy is a noble man who struggles, like Marlowe before him, Spenser and Cole, to maintain his own sense of integrity. Like some of the music of that time, "(you) who are on the road, must have a code, that you can live by."

And Easy has that code, not always accepted by the people who love him or even by himself. But the code works and Mosely has another winner on his hands. John, the friend who first asked Easy Rawlins to help, says at the end that he is grateful for Easy's help in sorting out justice and greed, insult and victory, but all the while John wouldn't mind if he never saw Easy again. And it makes sense.

Outside of George Pelecanos, few tackle the task of racial injustice but more, the painful "getting along" in the novel genre as a background to murder and the mystery. Highly recommended stuff.

Easy Rawlins is back with a vengeance. He is not the same person though; he has lost his closest friend and feels that he will never recover from the hurt. Easy has settled into life as a family man, with a normal 9-5 job and a paycheck at the end of the week. In his opinion, his days as the unconventional private detective Easy Rawlins are well behind him.

One day out of the blue Easy gets a call from his old friend John, it turns out that John's stepson Brawley Brown has disappeared and is running with members of a radical political group. Brawley's parents feel that he is entangled in a web of violence and will be harmed in the process. John has always helped Easy without question, so even though Easy doesn't want to look for Brawley, he does.

As Easy begins his investigation, he finds himself in the midst of danger. He also discovers that this case is about much more than locating Brawley and returning him home. People in this novel are not always who or what they portray themselves to be.

Life for Easy goes beyond being a private detective. In addition to the difficult case, he is dealing with potential problems brewing at home concerning his children. Also the loss of his best friend is on Easy's mind daily and sometimes overwhelms him.

Bad Boy Brawley Brown is an intriguing mystery that keeps you guessing. Just when you think you know who the villain is, author Walter Mosley throws a curve ball that will have you thinking otherwise, and in my opinion that makes for the best stories of mystery. I must confess this is my first Walter Mosley novel, but it will not be my last because I enjoyed it. I highly recommend this book.

Reviewed by Simone A. Hawks

The sixth installment of Mosley's LA-set series opens a few months after the traumatic events of Little Yellow Dog (including the apparent death of his best friend, Mouse). Easy Rawlins is trying to get his life back on track as the woman he met in that last adventure, Bonnie, has moved in with him and his children, Feather and Jesus. However, his old friend John, who did him a few favors in that last book, calls upon Easy for help. John's stepson Brawly seems to have fallen in with a bad crowd of black revolutionaries and John wants Easy to extricate him before anything bad happens. There's a nice subplot about Jesus wanting to drop out of high school, and how Easy deals with that, which ties into the father/son theme that runs strongly throughout the entire series.

But this relatively simple favor gets quickly complicated as Brawly proves hard to find and Easy stumbles across yet another dead body (it would be interesting to go through the series and tally up how many times Easy has come across a corpse). Soon he is digging into Brawly's family history, as well as attempting to meet members of the Urban Revolutionary Party. This allows Mosley to show the state of the civil rights movement, which is shown in all shades of gray--from militant, to earnest, to misguided, to naive, to indifferent, and everything in between. It also allows him to highlight the dirty tricks of the FBI and police, who had special clandestine units set up to monitor and sabotage groups like the fictional Urban Revolutionary Party. One minor flaw in the book is the generic feel of this group, they come across as a small collection of earnest, but vaguely naive and misguided people.

As usual in the Easy Rawlins series, as he drives around town poking around, lots of characters are introduced--many of which are more interesting than the main characters. Also as usual, what should be relatively straightforward is awfully complicated, and of course the racist police are just waiting to crack some heads. Fortunately for Easy, he keeps hearing the dead Mouse's voice in his head, dispensing advice when things get tough. This device gets pretty cheesy after a while, and one keeps waiting for Mouse to arise from the dead and walk into the story at a crucial point. Another minor flaw with the book is that almost the entire book passes with little information about Brawly, there's little reason for the reader to care about whether Easy rescues him or not. Even Easy starts questioning just how deep he's going to get into the matter, and whether Brawly is worth it. The ultimate solution at the end is rather a neat one, and on the whole, the book is one of the stronger in the series.

Note: At one point in the book, Easy makes the angry point that there are no black Ambassadors representing his country. While is is certainly true that America's diplomatic corps has been largely white until the 1970s, in point of fact, the first black Ambassador was appointed in 1948 as envoy to Liberia. His name was Edward Dudley, and his story and that of other early black diplomats is detailed in the book Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945-1969.

I picked this up just to have a look and after the first page I couldn't put it down, reading from early evening until about 3 A.M. I finished it the following morning. That, in itself, says something.

The book, a fast paced, many layered tale of an African-American with a day job as head janitor at a local school and an avocation for helping his friends in the ghetto world of mid-1960's Watts in L.A., highlights Walter Mosley's detective character, Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins, and brilliantly conjures up his world. Called in to help an old friend who's gone from bartender to real estate developer and whose girlfriend's stepson has gone missing, Easy soon stumbles on a complex web of murder and deceit as he begins digging into the Urban Revolutionary Party and the First Men (think Black Panthers here), a group of young black radicals intent on challenging the system they believe holds them down. No naif himself, Easy knows the system all too well, particularly when being rousted by racist cops or manipulated by a special squad, out to shortcircuit the perceived threat of the young revolutionaries. And then there's the set up, inevitable in a book like this. Never far from Easy's troubled mind is his pathologically violent best friend, Mouse, whose penchant for shooting his enemies with deadly accuracy has gotten Easy out of innumerable jams but who has recently been killed himself. Easy is wracked by guilt for his friend's death while worrying about being a father to the two children he's adopted and keeping the beautiful stewardess who has set up housekeeping with him.

Easy is juggling all these issues as he digs ever more deeply and somewhat reluctantly into the disappearance of his buddy's girl's son, an oversized, powerful and sometimes violent kid who has been ensnared by the glamor of the revolution and his need to do something important. The size of the kid, alone, makes Easy uneasy as to how he can stop him, once he makes contact, and leads to a remarkably logical if somewhat amoral solution. Meanwhile, Easy has to figure out who murdered whom and help the young idealists he encounters to avoid the snares of a cynical system that means to take them down.

The book is tight, the writing vital and fresh. I was sucked right in, enthralled by the easy style, the rich characters and the sleekly plotted tale. Think I'll pick up a few more from Mosley.

SWM

Walter Mosley has staked out an interesting patch for his books: a black detective who served in WWII. His picture of LA (and the US) 40-50 years ago is, I am sure, familiar to blacks my age, and likewise strangely foreign to whites. This came home to me when I read *Bad Boy*, which brings the time forward to my own adulthood.

I'm a contemporary of Brawly Brown, and as I read about Easy being rousted because he sat in a car too long for a couple of white cops' taste, his honest and hardworking friends scrabbling to keep a few steps ahead of poverty in a city that sounds like the first circle of Hell, all the intellectual platitudes of the Civil Rights Movement become vivid realities.

Mosley's corrupt, racist LA of the Sixties is no surprise. But he makes it real in a way coffehouse conversation can't, and he communicates his moral outrage the best way possible, by letting us do it for him.

It's an odd comparison, but Mosley reminds me of Tony Hillerman in his essentially moral perspective and his commitment to teaching in the attractive guise of adventure.

"Bad Boy Brawly Brown" features the long-anticipated return of one of mystery fiction's best characters, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, the hard-living amateur detective who was last seen in "A Little Yellow Dog" (1996). Easy has settled down, living with the woman he loves and his two adopted children, and making a comfortable living as a custodian at the Sojourner Truth Middle School. He doesn't need to do "favors" for friends from L.A.'s South Central community like he once did. But old habits are the hardest to break, and when his pal John comes to him for help, Easy can't resist.

John's stepson Brawly has gotten mixed up with a group of radical black activists who are determined to foment revolution - or maybe they're a gang of common criminals looking to make a big score. Either way, Easy knows the territory better than anybody else and is just the man to find out what's going on.

Mosley's books have never relied solely on their plots, as the main attraction has always been the sense of time, place, and character which the author so brilliantly weaves. In that sense, this book is no different. Even if the new, domesticated Easy isn't nearly as interesting as the old one - a point which isn't helped any by the absence of his old friend and partner, the murderous Mouse - he still remains a man who draws our fascination like few fictional creations can. Part of the allure of this series has always been the chance to view a troubled, ever-changing America through the eyes of this flawed, but noble black man. Even if the mystery of "Bad Boy Brawly Brown" fails to pique the reader's interest, it is still recommended as a social and historical gem.

Reviewed by David Montgomery...