Charcoal Joe

Review by New York Times Review

I'D KNOW THAT VOICE anywhere. It's the seductive drawl and lowdown dirty laugh of Walter Mosley's mellow private eye, Easy Rawlins. And he's talking his way through another case in CHARCOAL JOE (Doubleday, $26.95), purely as a favor to his fearsome friend, Mouse, who's "mostly evil and definitely a killer," but dangerously attractive for all that. In passing this job along to Easy, Mouse is doing a favor of his own for Charcoal Joe, a criminal legend who wants Easy to exonerate a young black university professor accused of murder by finding the real killer of two white men in a beach house in Malibu. It's May 1968, nearly three years after the Watts riots, but black neighborhoods are still simmering with rage. "Life was like a bruise for us," Easy says about a nasty flare-up in an otherwise peaceful barber shop. "We examine every action for potential threats, insults and cheats." That's why it's such a joy to hang around with Easy, who is ... easy. No furies in his brain, no fires in his gut, just an unquenchable curiosity about people and their personal dramas. Following the meandering plot is beside the point once Mosley starts bringing on his familiar characters for Easy to chat up. It's tempting to pick favorites. There's Jackson Blue, "an odd product of the American ghetto," who used his formidable intellect to make his private fortune but couldn't outrun the fears imprinted by his impoverished background. And here comes Fearless Jones, the amiable strongman with fists like hams and a baby's pure heart. Easy's lady friends, like Mama Jo, the "backwoods witch," and the "beautiful and stormy and self-assured" Coco Ray, are vibrant creatures all. And they seem to end every interview with sexual favors. None of this should imply that Easy is a pushover. As the awesome Mouse once told him: "I couldn't live like you, Brother Easy, uniform bangin' on the front do' and a cougar lurkin' out back." Easy is a brave man, it's true, not just because he'll do battle with bruisers twice his size, but because he isn't ashamed to declare himself "a man of strategy" - a man unafraid to lower his fists and use his brain. "THERE ARE NO churches in Willnot," James Sallis assures us in WILLNOT (Bloomsbury, $26). This quirky Virginia town also has "no Walmart, no chain grocery or pharmacy, discount or big-box stores. No billboards, no street advertising, plain storefronts." Given all this, who would even bat an eye when Tom Bales's hunting dog, Mattie, sniffs out several bodies scattered in quicklime? Willnot may have no use for conformity, but it's surprisingly tolerant of rebels, radicals, conspiracy theorists and plain old oddballs. That pretty much covers the entire populace, from feisty Miss Ellie ("You can't fix stupid. And you sure as hell can't kill it") to brooding Bobby Lowndes, a former Marine sniper who's being stalked by another marksman. Even Dr. Lamar Hale, the personable and presumably square narrator of the story, once fell into a mysterious yearlong coma and felt his body become host to the spirits of the living and the dead. (Dr. Hale's father, a "literary outrider and trickster," wrote a novel with a similar plot.) A worthy mouthpiece for Sallis's melodic cadences, Dr. Hale is goodness personified, a sweet and caring man who doesn't need to inhabit his patients' bodies to understand their lives. WHO WOULDN'T LOVE to catch a glimpse of a favorite sleuth as a blundering amateur? Cara Black lets us do just that in MURDER ON THE QUAI (Soho Crime, $27.95), which reveals how Aimée Leduc, her fashionable Parisian private investigator, joined the business founded by her father and grandfather. It's November 1989, an exciting time for Aimée. The Berlin Wall has fallen, young people are beginning to connect on giant cellphones, and Leduc père is busy elsewhere, leaving her alone to work her first case. In investigating the murder of a distant relative's father, Aimée is drawn into the secretive wartime past of a provincial village. The case is engrossing, complete with Vichy flashbacks, but the most fun are the scenes where Aimée meets her future partners and acquires Miles Davis, her beloved bichon frisé. One caveat: For such a clotheshorse, Aimée doesn't do nearly enough shopping. BOB REYNOLDS, who calls himself "a dyspeptic poet with a little family money," is a stranger in town, and Doker, Ark., is the kind of town that doesn't take kindly to strangers. In CB McKenzie's outsider regional mystery BURN WHAT WILL BURN (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $24.99), Reynolds rashly makes a play for the local beauty, Tammy Fay Smith, ignoring the prior claim of Sam Baxter, High Sheriff of Poe County, who also happens to be the county's High Drug Lord. Under these awkward circumstances, Reynolds has a hard time convincing the sheriff that he saw a dead man in a red shirt floating in the Little Piney Creek, especially when the body disappears. A poet is no match for the crackers in this backwoods barrel, and although Reynolds is fascinated by the casual violence that governs Poe County's customs, he finally gets the message. "In strange lands, foreigners reach the limits of their Local Knowledge only as allowed by Locals and that is why foreigners are called Foreign and locals are called Local," he observes - on his way out of town.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 19, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

Easy Rawlins, star of Mosley's celebrated series, has found success and satisfaction with the detective agency he recently formed with two equally adept PIs, but the bottom drops out when he discovers that his true love, Bonnie Shay, has secretly married the African prince she left Easy for in Blonde Faith (2007). Easy's best friend, Mouse, offers an opportune distraction: ruthless local crime boss Charcoal Joe wants Easy to investigate the recent murders of two gangsters. Seymour Braithwaite, son of a friend of Joe's and a young physics prodigy, was arrested at the scene despite his protests that he'd just found the bodies, and Charcoal Joe wants him exonerated. Easy's investigation turns up a money-laundering scheme and a host of killers, from the Cincinnati Mob to Joe's backstabbing conspirators, who are hunting for the dirty cash that went missing after the murders. The shifting tangle of similarly motivated mobsters requires some dedicated focus, but this series' army of followers will happily recognize the case as the mere backdrop for Easy's emotionally charged story, insightful lens into L.A.'s 1960s streets, and always-impressive mental acrobatics.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

MWA Grand Master Mosley's 14th Easy Rawlins mystery finds the unconventional, now middle-aged PI at the tail end of L.A.'s Swinging 60s, struggling with a broken heart (his wife-to-be opts for a return to her former partner), racist cops, crooked cops, murderous mobsters, deceitful informants, and a number of beautiful women eager to seduce him. Lucky for Easy, the author's other series character, Fearless Jones, arrives to assist with charm and smooth efficiency. Reader Boatman, no stranger to Easy's attitude-knowing, wry, and just a bit shy of sarcastic-adds that and more to the sleuth's first-person narration. His Fearless has the lift of joyous optimism that comes from being able to accomplish just about any task. Mosley's plot is more complex than Raymond Chandler at his most perplexing, but, as in Chandler's books, there are enough unique characters and entertaining scenes to compensate for that. Boatman's well-planned voices, pacing, and cool delivery make this a must for Easy fans. A Doubleday hardcover. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In his 14th Easy Rawlins mystery (after Rose Gold), Mosley returns to L.A. in the late 1960s, with its racial unrest and discrimination. Easy has opened a detective agency with partners Saul Lynx and Tinsford "Whisper" Natly. A case with lots of racially charged motives lands in Easy's lap when he befriends Rufus Tyler, aka -"Charcoal Joe," who knows a top-notch student from Stanford who's been arrested and charged with murdering a white man from Redondo Beach. Joe will pay Easy a generous sum to use his police connections and get the kid exonerated. However, the police found the student beside the victim's body. The story continues with more deception, murders, and violence. Like peeling an onion, Easy uncovers the truth one layer at a time. -VERDICT Mosley's exciting and profound mysteries with their poetic prose and historical clarity fascinate readers because Easy moves so smoothly among different worlds. His latest will please his many fans. [See Prepub Alert, 12/14/15.]-Jerry P. Miller, Cambridge, MA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Fasten your seat belts. It's time for another simmering tour of Los Angeles, this time in 1968, with Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins serving once more as the unwilling guide. Things are looking up for Easy. He's running WRENS-L, a licensed detective agency whose name combines his initials with those of his partners, Saul Lynx and Whisper Natly, and he's about to pop the question to his longtime girlfriend, Bonnie Shay. But things don't exactly work out as he expects. Bonnie's back together with tribal prince Joguye Cham, so instead of sending out wedding invitations, Easy reluctantly takes on a job for his boyhood friend Mouse Alexander's equally dangerous friend Rufus Tyler, aka Charcoal Joe. Dr. Seymour Brathwaite, a 22-year-old physicist whose father is one of Joe's many associates, has been found on the scene of a double murder, and the LAPD has him in custody. Joe, "a tombstone just waitin' for a name," who's already enjoying the county's hospitality on unrelated charges, wants Easy to find evidence that will get Seymour released, and it isn't long before Jasmine Palmas-Hardy, who was once Seymour's foster mother, offers Easy $18,000 to bail him out. That's ironic, since Seymour's less menacing than any of the low-level thugs, career criminals, ladies of the night, and police officers thronging the streets of Los Angeles and impeding Easy's path to anything like a simple solution. There'll be three more murders, if you don't count the deaths of two goons who make the mistake of attacking Easy and his capable friend Fearless Jones, and enough minor felonies to land the whole cast in jail forever. Less cluttered than Rose Gold (2014), though that's not saying much. But then you don't read Mosley for the throughline but for his matchless ability to present mosaic worlds in which even the most minor characters arrive burning with their own unquenchable stories. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 On Robertson Boulevard a block and a half north of Pico, just south of Whitworth Drive, on the eastern side of the street, there once stood a three-story turquoise building that had been a posh home in the thirties. But the owner died, leaving his real-estate-rich, cash-poor relatives to turn the domicile into a commercial property. By 1968 the first floor had become an antique-furniture shop where fifty-something Mrs. Ina Holloway sold old sofas, chairs, and dining tables of dubious pedigree to middle-aged women from Cheviot Hills--women who wanted to make their interior decorations equal in style, if not in value, to their wealthier counterparts' in nearby Beverly Hills. The second floor was occupied by an insurance brokerage firm owned and run by Harry (born Hiro) Harada. To hear him tell it, Harry sold insurance on everything from life expectancy to pet health and marriage vows. Harry's wife and daughter, son, and daughter-in-law all worked in his second-floor office. Only Harada's gaijin son-in- law no longer worked for the old man; this because he had been in prison for a crime he confessed to, embezzlement. He, Arnold "Sandy" Patterson, was convicted on evidence that was not vetted by the defense or the prosecution--evidence that would not have stood up under scrutiny. The police detective who interrogated Sandy accepted his confession of having stolen money that Harry's strawberry-farmer client, Gentaro Takeda, had entrusted to the company: $131,247.29. The money Gentaro gave had been in cash, and the day that everyone agreed that Sandy had taken it he was under the knife at Cedars of Lebanon for an emergency appendectomy. Indeed, it was Harry himself who had taken the money, believing that his client was senile and probably wouldn't remember anything about the transaction. So three days later, when the elderly Mr. Takeda returned with his son Ishi to ask for the money back, Harry felt that he was safe in saying he had never received the cash in question. Mr. Gentaro had once told him, Harry claimed, that he wanted to have Harry invest some money but he had never given him the cash. After the Takedas left, Mitsue, Harry's daughter, told him that the day after Gentaro had been there he returned saying that he had not gotten a receipt from her father. Harry was at a convention in San Diego so she looked up the transaction in his day journal, saw that no receipt had been issued, and had filled out one of the pre-signed receipts that Harry kept in the safe just in case the family had to do business in his absence. That right there was the moment of truth for Harry Harada. Gentaro didn't seem to remember any receipt and Ishi hadn't mentioned one. Harry's greed outweighed his morality; it convinced him that the dotty old man probably lost the voucher and that the money, all cash, could not be traced. He told his daughter to forget the receipt and the visit. When Ishi pressed charges in Gentaro's name, Harry stuck to his story. But, three months later, when the receipt Mitsue provided resurfaced, a warrant was issued for Harry's arrest. He had testified under oath that he never received monies from Gentaro and had therefore broken the law. Mitsue begged her husband to take the blame for the good of the family. Mitsue explained that even if the father was able to stay out of prison he'd lose his license and his customers, impoverishing the entire clan. And so stout-hearted Sandy confessed. There was no trial to speak of, so the elderly Gentaro, who was indeed senile and unreliable as a witness, was not required to appear in court. Sandy admitted telling Gentaro that he was Harry, and the confused old man believed him. Sandy explained about the pre-signed receipts in the safe, saying that he was trying to get enough money to start a business of his own.   Four months after Sandy was locked away I came to the building looking for office space. Harry managed the property but his wife, Kikuyo, did all the work. The handsome middle-aged mother-in-law did not seem very interested in me as a tenant, probably because of my skin color (which is a very dark brown); that is until I told her that I was a private detective. Upon hearing this she asked me if I could help an innocent man get out of prison.   It was a delicate operation. Gentaro Takeda's mental condition had declined further. By the time I became involved his testimony could no longer be trusted. When asked who he had given the money to he replied, "My son." The money had been returned and Kikuyo convinced Harry to give Ishi Takeda ten thousand dollars to forgo any further complaint. I went to the state's attorney with evidence that they had convicted and imprisoned an innocent man, and so Sandy was set free and thestate decided not to pursue further charges. Kikuyo, without telling her husband, gave my company, WRENS‑L Detective Agency, an unheard-of fifteen-year lease at a very reasonable rent. Harry thought I was overcompensated but he said so only once because, in spite of his dishonesty, he was a family man and freeing Mitsue's husband brought bliss to his home and his business.   So at 7:42 a.m. on the first Monday in May 1968, I stood out in front of the gaily colored plaster-encased building: a professional detective with a bright future and a dark past. Ten months earlier I had received a questionable windfall of one hundred thousand dollars in ransom money that no one wanted to claim. I used part of the money to start my own little detective agency with the two best detectives I knew--Saul Lynx and Tinsford "Whisper" Natly. Saul was a Jewish detective married to a black woman who had given him two sons. He was born and raised in L.A. and was accepted, more or less, in white circles. Whisper was a Negro from St. Louis who could find anyone, anywhere, given the time and resources. Saul, Whisper, and I were equal partners in the business and they were repaying the initial investment at three hundred dollars a month, each. I took in a deep breath through my nostrils and smiled, thinking that a poor black man from the deep South like myself was lucky not to be dead and buried, much less a living, breathing independent businessman. Our little agency had a separate entrance that opened onto a stairwell made only for us. I took the steps two at a time until I reached the third-floor doorway. There I stopped again, happy that I wasn't dead and that soon, if the sky didn't fall that day, I'd be engaged to the lovely Bonnie Shay.   "Good morning, Mr. Rawlins," Niska Redman greeted. She was our receptionist. Butter-skinned, biracial, and quite beautiful--Niska had worked for Whisper after he saved her father from false charges alleged by a business partner. She was twenty-four and filled with dreams of a world in which all humans were happy and well fed. "How you doin', Miss Redman?" "Great!" she exclaimed, showing wide eyes and lots of teeth. "I started practicing Transcendental Meditation. You know, only twenty minutes every morning and night and you have peace of mind all day long." "That's like prayer?" I asked. "More like yoga or hypnosis," she said. "How are you?" "Down to one cigarette a day and I walked to work this morning." "Good for you." "Whisper in?" Her nod was vigorous and certain. "Nobody with him," she added.   His door was open but I knocked anyway. "Come in, Easy," he said in a low tone. Whisper's face was medium brown with no marked features. You might overlook him even if he was standing right there in front of you. He wore short-brimmed hats of gray or brown without feathers or even a hatband. His clothes were not new or old, natty or disheveled. He only spoke in a low voice, not a whisper, and no one I knew had ever seen his apartment or house. There were some that believed he was married, and one woman I knew swore that she'd seen him sitting in the last pew at Lion's Den New Baptist Church. "How's it goin', Tinsford?" I asked, taking the straight-back pine visitor's chair set in front of his small, battered oak desk. Instead of answering he looked at me with dark brown eyes that contained a question. "What?" I replied to his unspoken inquiry. "Somethin' up?" "No. Why?" "Somethin' happy about you this morning." "How's that thing with, um, what's her name?" I asked, avoiding his question out of nothing but pure stubbornness. "Lolo Bowles," Whisper said, "Keisha Bowles's daughter." "You locate her yet?" "Not in the flesh but I got some leads. You know anybody run one of those clinics gets you off of drugs?" "Saul's got a guy." Whisper nodded and I stood up. It was often the case that we asked each other questions, most of which went unanswered. We were all private sort of men who gathered information rather than distributed it. Our corporation had been up and running for three months but it felt like years. I had never imagined that I'd enjoy working with partners, but just that one cryptic interchange between me and Whisper felt something like belonging.   My office was at the end of the hallway behind Niska's desk. It had been the master bedroom, making it the largest office with a nice view of a few green backyards. I would have preferred a smaller room but Saul and Whisper took those options before I finished signing the papers Kikuyo Harada had placed before me. My five-hundred-square-foot office had dark oak floors and a huge cherrywood desk given me by Jean-Paul Villard, president and CEO of P9, one of the largest insurance companies in the world. JP liked me and was my good friend Jackson Blue's boss. When Villard heard that I was going into business for myself, rather than taking the managerial security job he'd offered, he sent the desk over just to show me there were no hard feelings. I sat down in my padded mechanical chair, leaned back, and took out the little black velvet ring box that held a brilliant-cut half-carat diamond, set in platinum and gold. In the last year and a half I had been as close to death as a living being can get and climbed my way back up into a world that seemed new and hopeful. I had two great kids, a perfect island woman that I would soon propose to, a profession I was good at, friends that I liked, and access to powers that most people in Los Angeles (white or black) didn't even know existed. I had built the kind of life that I wanted, and once Bonnie said yes, everything would be perfect. The buzzer on my desk sounded. "Yes?" I said, pressing the button on the console. "Raymond Alexander for you, Mr. Rawlins," Niska said. "On the phone?" I asked, maybe a little hopefully. "No, dude," Mouse called from the background. I could hear him on the phone and through my open door. "I'm right here." "Send him on in," I said, thinking there was a reason that optimism didn't come naturally to people like me.   Excerpted from Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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