Mystery Review: A Little Yellow Dog is the fifth installment in the always reliable Easy Rawlins franchise, and reveals some big changes in his life. It's 1963, he has a straight job as a school custodian, has started dressing better ("I'd had enough years of shabby jeans and work shirts"), is on the wagon, and is living with his motherless children in West Los Angeles. The story starts racy, gets serious, and the tangles begin. A complicated plot is enriched by complex characters and Easy causes half of his problems himself. Beyond always being readable and handy on the bus, at the beach, or to fill a few hours, this series of mystery novels is enriched by its socially redeeming value. In each of the Easy Rawlins novels Walter Mosley explicitly and bluntly details the fraught relationship between African Americans and the police, clearly showing that citizens have reason to be worried in such interactions. In A Little Yellow Dog Mosley notes that "innocence was a term for white people." This is just one part of the larger picture presented in the series. Beginning in 1948, the novels are the story of a black man living in L.A., but in a sense they're also a history of race in post-War America. African Americans are always aware that they're black, in the same sense that white people don't always have to think about being white. Mosley gives us an array of characters showing what daily life was like for African Americans in those times. As when a trumpet player's music is "cheered ... for remembering the pain of police sticks and low pay and no face in the mirror of the times." The events of the time, presidential assassinations, play in the background. Easy Rawlins fits neatly into the lineage of L.A. detectives begun by Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and followed by Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer. That's excellent company and with A Little Yellow Dog Walter Mosley pulls it off again. [3½★]
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