Bad Boy Brawly Brown: Easy Rawlins 7 (Easy Rawlins mysteries)

I have now read all the Easy Rawlins novels and although they are rather depressing in the hopelessness they portray, it is precisely this which makes them so good. WHat is so special is that not only can you identfy with Easy and his life, you start questioning your own place in our world, even though, as a white middle aged man in 2017, one would think that was impossible. A great great series and I wish there were more

I have loved every novel from the easy Rawlins series.I found this one interesting reading due to the current situation in the usa.walter mosleys twists and turns are brilliant and you cant predict them. the characters remain iconic and edgy.

Another impeccable Easy Rawlins novel

Great selection

Excellent read.

Amazing as ever. Poetry and danger and an incredible sense of place

Set in Los Angeles in 1964, this book addresses the issue of Black political consciousness through Easy Rawlins’ involvement with members of the Urban Revolutionary Party, aka the First Men, a fictional movement based on the Black Panthers.Rawlins, now working as the senior janitor in a large public school, is asked by an old friend to find his stepson who has become involved with the movement. He is reluctant to do so as he has settled into a rather comfortable domestic life with his adopted children, Feather and Jesus, and his partner, the airline cabin attendant Bonnie Shay, but decides to do a little digging, not least because of the guilt that he feels over the death of his close friend, the thuggish Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander [‘He was a lover and a killer and one of the best storytellers you ever heard'].In earlier books, Mouse was such a dominant presence that his complete absence from this book would have left a serious gap. Getting involved in the investigation helps Rawlins to forget about Mouse but at night he finds the dead man invading his dreams. However, his attitude [‘Where I come from they don't have dark-skinned private detectives. If a man needs a helpin' hand he goes to someone who does it on the side. I'm that man’] precludes him from being paid for his work.The plotting and characterisation of the male characters is excellent and the reader is made aware of the seething injustices of the time in a particularly forceful way. The panic of the authorities to the ‘communist’ threat is very well described. In contrast, I found it difficult to distinguish between the various female characters, none of whom were particularly convincing [this is my reason for the four star rating]. The attitude of the male characters to almost all of the women is typical of the period. The family exchanges rang very true with his Jesus struggling to articulate his reasons for wanting the leave school and Rawlins, rather than his partner, being the more understanding and accommodating. His age is catching up with him as he restricts his drinking and smoking in order to be able to run faster than all those chasing him.The eponymous Brawly Brown is almost unseen and the reader forms an opinion of him through the very different perceptions of the other characters. The individuals at the heart of the First Men movement were slightly formulaic and included the intensely committed social reformer, the corrupt and an infiltrator. Although Rawlins is black, he is not trusted by the political agitators and so finds himself caught between them and the secret police unit determined to stop their activities, ideally by violent means. Rawlins’ perspectives toward both groups allow the reader to appreciate the difficulties of the vast majority of people occupying the middle ground.Talking about a friend, Rawlins sums up the prevailing situation facing the black community, ‘In his restaurant he was the king. But on the street he was just another guy, a frightened black man in a world where being black put you below the lowest rung of white society. There were no black men in tuxedos playing the violin at the symphony or elected to the Senate or at the heads of corporations. There were no black men on the board of directors representing our interests in Africa, and very few cruising up and down Central Avenue in police cars. Black men, as a rule, were not scientists or doctors or professors in college’. The reader is invited to consider the situation today in L. A, America and Britain.This is a very engaging L. A. noir story that also offers valuable insights into the political and social situation of the time, elements of which are very evident today.

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.