tieresias@att.net wrote:
> > I haven't discovered a new American writer I've
been really excited about in
> > ten years (when I simultaneously happened upon
Cormac McCarthy and James
> > Ellroy). But, then again, if Leonard or Ellroy
don't deserve to win a
> >Nobel, who in America really does?
>
> Two words: Walter Moseley.
>
I haven't ventured too very deeply into his work. I read
"Devil in a Blue Dress" a long time ago because everyone
always crows about it, and then "A Red Death" shortly
afterward. I hated them both, though. Then I saw the movie
for "Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned," which I liked
better than the Rawlins stuff, mostly because it's not trying
too hard to be a mystery (I don't know how closely it follows
the book though; I hated the Denzel Washington "Devil").
About two months ago I figured I'd give Mosley another
shot--I'm generous that way--and try one of the later Easy
Rawlins books, so I read the short story collection, "Six
Easy Pieces." Surprise, surprise, I disliked that one too,
although I liked it better than either of the previous two
books of his that I'd read.
He'd be a much better writer if he stopped forcing mysteries
into his stories. He writes bad mysteries, I think, pretty
tepid stuff; the kind of painfully four-square Chandler
knockoffs that people have been doing to death (and doing it
better) for decades. What does interest me in his novels are
the oddly bourgeois dreams and aspirations Easy Rawlins has.
On the one hand, he's this negro counterculture type (not by
any kind of hippie-ness, but by virtue of his race in a
racist society), with the genre's requisite dislike for
authority...on the other hand all he really wants to do is
own property and be a landlord. That's something you don't
see in mysteries every day...or in "straight" fiction for
that matter.
My general take on him is that he's an ambitious (points
there) but not terribly talented writer who has some perverse
fascination for a genre that cripples everything that IS good
about his writing. I tend to think of him as part of that
wave of 1980s mystery/crime writers who got (and still get) a
lot of press as previously excluded minorities "redefining"
the genre (cf. Sara Paretsky, whom I like even less than
Mosley).
Also, like Sara P., I find Mosley gratingly, stupidly, almost
poisonously liberal. Paretsky's much worse with her dopey
diatribes, but Mosley is a pretty serious offender too. And
I'm one who considers himself pretty far on the left,
too.
David Moran
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