Customer Reviews

The Long Fall

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

THE LONG FALL is the first book in Walter Mosley's new noir-ish series featuring the fiftysomething New York City private investigator, Leonid Trotter McGill ("LT"). Like other Mosley protagonists, LT is a smart, reflective observer, complex in his ethics and relationships in ways that intrigue readers and make them care deeply. He's a boxer with a Buddhist philosophy -- "Throwing a punch is the yang of a boxer's life. The yin is being able to avoid getting hit" -- and admits to having thrown enough yang that he's now changed his life "from crooked to only slightly bent."

The novel opens as LT seemingly nears completion of his current case -- locating four men who knew each other as boys -- but when accumulating troubles start to test his yin, the story takes off. Unfortunately, it took off without me, as I became lost in unfamiliar minor characters and could only half-follow the storyline. I finally stopped to re-read the first five chapters and discovered why: nearly 40 characters are introduced in those 30 pages, but few are adequately unpacked.

Still, I read Mosley for his settings and main characters, and the ones here have terrific series potential -- people and places that are unlike me in the ways that intrigue ... and deeply familiar in the ways that matter.

Walter Mosley's The Long Fall is a mystery novel set in New York. The main character and narrator, Leonid, is perfection. A private investigator trying to balance what he believes is right and what is necessary to pay his rent and provide for his family. When he ignores his gut and takes the wrong case; inadvertently assisting in murder, he finds himself fighting for his life. Which is only the beginning of his problems, as his youngest son is also plotting a murder. There is a lot of back story and compelling family drama intermixed with the front burner story line--the book is obviously a series launch.

The plot is very intricate (sometimes predictable), but the structure and pace become consuming. I had some difficulty understanding how Leonid came up with some of his conclusions, but it could be that I was racing through the pages.

When I wasn't reading this book, I wanted to be reading this book. The Long Fall is as near a perfect mystery as I have read lately. I am looking forward to the next installment of the series.

Love the Mosley books. The Long Fall's protagonist, Leonid, is a tough likable detective. He is trying to change from a predator who makes a living off the stupidity of humanity to one who now through self awareness chooses to help them. Leonid's problems are many; he is attached to his wife but they are not in love, and yet cannot leave his wife for a mistress that he does love, his children are troublesome, and his job demands violence and mayhem which he is beginning to find repulsive. What I particularly like is the honesty of Leonid. His stream of consciousness revelations are startling. His relationship with his three interesting children allows the reader to see how the affection for his children affects how he deals with his clients whom he is trying, together with himself, to navigate to safety. What is gripping is some of Leonids plans will not work. He is not in control of other people and their violence will cause him to protect himself by being hard nosed and if necessary violent. Leonid's confusion and doubts about his job but never about protecting his family resonates with me.
I like the way Mosley builds his book. The answers to the many questions begin to resolve only towards the end of the book. Keeping me interested right to the the finish. Nicely done Mr. Mosley.

Walter Mosley took the mystery genre by storm in 1990 when he introduced a mystery series set in post-World War II Los Angeles starring a black detective named Easy Rawlins. Here was a detective who worked in the same town as Raymond Chandler's Marlowe but walked on far different mean streets. It was a significant breakthrough in the world of mystery writing.

There have been nine Rawlins novels since then, and Mosley has gone on to write everything from serious fiction to science fiction to politics to even a book on how to write books. He is one of our most prolific authors. But he has never written a contemporary mystery. And he has never attempted, in his own words, "a classic noire suspense story."

Until now THE LONG FALL is a new private eye series set in contemporary New York City. Mosley expects to write a total of 10 books following the adventures of private eye Leonid McGill. And longtime fans of both Mosley and mysteries will not be disappointed. This is an important and exciting arrival in the book world, perhaps every bit as significant as the start of the Easy Rawlins series.

Mosley reinvents the PI genre in THE LONG FALL. McGill has little in common with great PIs of the past. Unlike Hammett's Spade and Chandler's Marlowe, McGill is not the type to sit around his office, waiting for the femme fatale to come through the door with her mysterious problem. Nor is he a knight errant like Robert B. Parker's Spenser.

McGill is dirty, plain and simple. He has made his living as a fixer for the mob and others. He does "piecework for killers and thieves." If you want a politician caught in a hotel room with a $2,000-a-night hooker, McGill is your guy. He tells us early on: "I had no problem bringing people down, even framing them with false evidence if that was what the client paid for. I didn't mind sending innocent men and women to prison because I didn't believe in innocent --- and virtue didn't pay the bills." Here is a man existentially ready for the fall.

McGill is not a killer, at least not a triggerman. He worked on the edges of the law, often resorting to barter that was little more than extortion/blackmail. So, for example, he is able to rent his office in an Art Deco midtown skyscraper for $1,800 a month when the market value of the space is $11,000 a month. McGill knows how to trade.

But at 53, his past has finally caught up with him, leaving him trapped in what he calls an "impossible life." He has "decided to go from crooked to slightly bent" and has managed to stay straight for a year and a half. His personal life is a disaster. He has not loved his wife for a dozen years. She ran off with another guy, and then when that imploded, she came back to him. He is father to three kids, two of them not his own. And one, his 16-year-old stepson, is heading right off the deep end and is about to become a criminal himself, unless McGill can save him.

McGill is a black man in a world where, as he points out, "It wasn't 2008 everywhere in America." The America of 2008 might have elected an African American president, but the past is never past, as Faulkner supposedly said. Mosley has always been a writer with a voice and social consciousness. And he has not lost it here. For example, he writes, "The scenario is simple, it just didn't make sense; like a cat sealed in a glass globe or the United States declaring peace."

McGill is a man haunted by his past, and he soon learns what Al Pacino's character learned in The Godfather: Part III: it is not so easy leaving the life. At one point he meets with a 70-year-old mobster to tell him he is out. Mosley writes, "The fit septuagenarian allowed another hint of mirth to flit across his lips. No one gets out, his smile said, unless it is on his back."

So McGill takes a job that smells bad to him from the start. An Albany PI pays him $12,000 for the whereabouts of four young black men. It is simple trafficking in information, something he has done a thousand times before. So despite his misgivings, he takes the money. McGill says, "And, anyway, I was broke and the rent was due."

In that sentence, Mosley creates a PI for our time, capturing perfectly the financial moral relativism of the past 30 years that has brought our entire economic system to the brink of the abyss. People are soon dying as a result of McGill's betrayal, and McGill might join them. And even if a killer does not get him, the aging private eye is getting himself. He says, "...I had the sensation of slipping further down into the sandpit of my own sins."

Mosley has written a true noir novel here. Take this passage for instance: "One thing I had learned in fifty-three hard years of living is that there's a different kind of death waiting for each and every one of us --- each and every day of our lives. There's drunk drivers behind the wheels of cars, subways, trains, planes, and boats; there's banana peels, diseases and the cockeyed medicines that supposedly cure them; you got airborne viruses, indestructible microbes in the food you eat, jealous husbands and wives, and just plain bad luck."

Mosley has also given us a character who, despite his dark past, has a basically good heart and is decent enough to seek redemption. We can't help but root for Leonid McGill, which will make this an interesting series to watch develop over the next decade. Will McGill find his redemption, or is it too late for a character so bad?

THE LONG FALL title is a deliberate echo of the past and Chandler's THE LONG GOODBYE. But Walter Mosley is too great a writer to just recycle the classic PI novel. This is a PI novel for the early 21st century, and the title refers not just to the fate of one man but perhaps an entire nation as well.

Some of the reviews said this book starts a little slow and when compared to the Easy Rollins novels--which I love--that is true. There are more characters and more subplots but very few red herrings. I am not a regular reader of detective fiction and the Easy novels drew me in with the central character and his experience of LA. This one is set in New York City and while it lacks the visceral sense of landscape in the earlier novels, it's character development and narrative range go far deeper. Leonid is a great character but two months later I can still remember the qualities and nature of 20-25 other characters quite clearly. The plotting is dense and since I listened to the excellent audio book version, I occasionally wished I had the book to review a character but the gist was clear and the maze of plots did come clear at the end in a manner that was satisfying but not tidy. Mosley is working on a more ambitious canvas than ever and his confidence and trust in his readers allow him to tell his tale with patience and conviction. Can't wait for more LT.

" . . . that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love." 2 Peter 1:4-7 (NKJV)

Walter Mosley knows how to establish a character with just a few words. Consider these:

"I didn't mind sending an innocent man, or woman, to prison because I didn't believe in innocence--and virtue didn't pay the bills. That was before my past caught up with me and died, spitting blood and curses on the rug. I still had a family that looked to me for their sustenance. My wife didn't love me and two out of three grown and nearly grown children were not of my blood. But none of that mattered. I had a job to do, and more than one debt to pay."

In some ways Leonid McGill is a lot like Easy Rawlins, a black man with the deck stacked against him who must look out for himself . . . and those he cares about. But on closer examination, the differences are much wider than from Watts to Manhattan. Easy has a better sense of who he is, has evolved more as a human being, and is a lot like Don Quixote. Leonid is near the beginning of a journey back from a brink where he didn't want to be.

Leonid is further toward the pit than most fictional detectives, a distinction that makes him more interesting. But there's still a streak of responsibility, of decency, that draws the reader to him.

As the book opens, Leonid knows that he's taken on a fishy assignment, but he finishes it anyway. PIs are used to being lied to, as least in detective fiction. When the lies turn out to have implications beyond his conscience, Leonid jumps back in to see what he can do about it.

While that seems straightforward, the plot twists and turns like the most convoluted of the Raymond Chandler classics. For my taste, it took more than a little too long for the mystery to be solved. As a result, the story bogs down in places and never quite goes at full speed.

If you love character development, you'll be fond of this book. If you want a straightforward mystery, you'll wonder why this one heads off in so many directions (as the consciously and conspicuously story bows to many of the great pioneers of PI fiction writing and their classic tales). If The Big Sleep wasn't one of your favorite novels, this book won't appeal to you as much as it did to me.

I especially appreciated Mr. Mosley's love for the old hard-boiled detective stories, so thoughtfully reflected in this story. It's great when a wonderful genre is expanded into new and interesting directions. I look forward to future books in the series.

I just finished this story and have mixed feelings about the book.

First, the bad:

LT: I am not a fan of the flawless characters in stories. LT is one of those characters. He wins all fights, woos all women, outsmarts everyone and is two steps ahead of 99% of the human race. My opinion is that takes away from the story, and made me stop in several places and say "Oh my...skim skim skim."

Twill: LT's son, for the same reasons listed above, is not a character I found interesting.

Race/Color: The author for some reason feels compelled to give us the racial profile of every character in the book. Description is good, but this is overkill. Can't someone just be "the big, poorly dressed man got under my skin with his racial slurs"? Does he have to be "The big, poorly dressed man was Caucasian by most standards. His skin was a pale white and his use of racial slurs was getting under my skin."

The Good:

The premise: The series is interesting and I look forward to the next installment. I think the premise is original.

Boxing: I box a little, so the boxing references were cool.

4th wall: The book transcends the 4th wall, and references current pop culture.

Summary:

A good story, OK characters, told with good prose and interesting dialog. I would recommend it.

I've read Walter Mosley's novels over the years and always enjoyed them. I've also learned so much about what life must be like for real people who are like Mosley's fictional characters. I've learned understanding and now have more empathy. I'm writing this review because I feel like Walter Mosley is now a Lion in Fall (vs. "a lion in winter"). In his late middle-age, Mosley continues to blossom and further spread the diameter of his literary wingspan. What I mean is that the last two books, The Right Mistake and this one, The Long Fall, are excellent, on so many levels!!! Unlike many writers, Mosley just continues to get better with each project. I love that Mosley's novels are unpredictable and full of surprises. He has a firm, insightful grasp on human nature. Thanks for all your hard work Walter and for teaching me about my fellow man born into other circumstances than I. Brilliant writer...brilliant books!

Change is tough. When a favorite serial novelist introduces a new protagonist set in a different place, a reader departs from the familiar and either embraces or rejects the new character. I embraced Leonid McGill, the hero of Walter Mosley's new novel, The Long Fall. This 53-year-old former boxer is known as LT, and he is at a transforming period in his life: turning away from being a bad guy, and trying to become a good guy. The flawed hero provides ample opportunity for character development, and Mosley presents LT as the kind of complicated modern man formed by a past, and fighting to overcome that history and live better today. A police lieutenant works hard to put LT in jail; a teenage son, Twill, is on the verge of irreversible criminal acts; and he and his wife are in a loveless relationship. Following the successful completion of what seemed like a legitimate detecting assignment to find the identity and locale of four men, LT learns that he was used by somebody to exert revenge for something, and he became the unwitting accomplice to murder. Change is tough, and LT is a tough guy who readers will cheer on as he tries to change his life. As expected from Mosley, The Long Fall is well-written, and the characters are all memorable and come to life on every page.

Rating: Three-star (Recommended)

It is difficult for me to imagine there may never be another Easy Rawlins mystery written by Walter Mosley. But in fiction, like life, sometimes it is time to move on. Enter Leonid McGill, a hardboiled contemporary PI, who works the mean streets of New York City. He may be the antithesis of Easy Rawlins. He's not smooth and handsome, but older and rugged. Perhaps too short and overweight. He's a man with a bad past. Leonid's life predicament is revealed in the novel's title. He is a character in search of redemption. Another significant difference between this book and the previous ones is the absence of colors: no blue, black, cinammon, scarlet, etc. That took some getting use to. A new Walter Mosley novel is always a welcomed treat. Enjoy this new protagonist's tale.