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Little Scarlet: An Easy Rawlins Mystery

by: Walter Mosley

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Binding: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Little, Brown And Company
Manufacturer: Little, Brown And Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: July 05, 2004
Publisher: Little, Brown And Company
Studio: Little, Brown And Company

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Editorial Review:
Los Angeles, 1965, right after the Watts Riots, six summer days of racial violence--burning, looting, and killing--that followed the routine arrest of a black motorist for drunken driving. Although custodian and unlicensed PI Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins stayed safely inside during the turmoil, as an African-American male he understands all too well what it was about. "It's hot and people are mad," he explains in Walter Mosley's Little Scarlet. "They've been mad since they were babies." Even with the rioting finally cooled, police remain on edge. So when a mid-30s, redheaded black woman named Nola Payne--aka "Little Scarlet"--turns up dead in her apartment, strangled and shot and showing signs of recent sexual contact, the cops are reluctant to storm L.A.'s minority community, looking for her murderer, especially since the culprit may well be an injured white man Payne had sheltered, and who's now disappeared. Instead, they ask Easy to see what he can find out about this crime.
The case forces Rawlins to address the ethnic tribulations of 1960s America, in microcosm, and his own discomfort with discrimination, in particular.

I spent my whole early life at the back of buses and in the segregated balconies at theaters. I had been arrested for walking in the wrong part of town and threatened for looking a man in the eye. And when I went to war to fight for freedom, I found myself in a segregated army, treated with less respect than they treated German POWs. I had seen people who looked like me jeered on TV and in the movies. I had had enough and I wasn't about to turn back, even though I wanted to.

But Easy can't tackle this investigation alone; assisting him are the casually homicidal Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, as well as a dogged white detective and a fetching younger woman, who threatens to overturn the settled life Easy has been working toward all these years. Nor can Rawlins wrap the case up easily. Harassed and attacked for his inquiries, he eventually connects Payne's slaying to a homeless man, allegedly responsible for killing as many as 21 black women, all of whom had the bad judgment to hook up with white men.
Little Scarlet, the eighth Rawlins novel (after Bad Boy Brawly Brown), is unusual for Mosley, because it focuses as much on the credible mechanics of crime-solving as it does on the exposition of character and the exploration of L.A.'s mid-20th-century black culture. Combined with the author's vigorous prose and prowess with dialogue, Easy's promotion to serious sleuth promises great things for what was already a standout series. --J. Kingston Pierce
For the huge audience that has always thought they should read Walter Mosley, he delivers at last the novel they've been waiting for-one so unstoppably dramatic that it will rank among the classic mysteries of our time. At the height of the devastating 1965 Watts riots, a white man is pulled from his car by a mob and escapes into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a red-headed woman known as Little Scarlet is found dead in that building-and the man who fled is the suspect. The police investigate, and what Easy finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned in the city, is intrinsically woven around race and passion.Rawlins's hunt for the killer will reveal a new city emerging from the ashes - and a new life for Easy and his friends. Mosley captures the heat and the rhythm of Los Angeles's heart, where danger is the common currency of everyday life.LITTLE SCARLET is further proof that Mosley is 'a master of mystery' (New York Times Book Review).
Easy Rawlins returns to solve a mystery set amid the flames of the hottest summer L.A. has ever seen.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating:

Rating:

- Easy Rawlins During the Watts Riots
Walter Mosley delivers crime fiction set during a turning point in America's racial history. His protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is a man who, more often than not, would like to be left alone--he just keeps getting caught up murders that require his special expertise in detection. The great pleasure of reading Mosley is the classic, sharp-paced action mixed with commentary on the problems of being African American in a racist society.

Rating:

- One of his best
Walter Mosley, in my opinion, is a good writer. Like most good writers, however, he has his strengths and weaknesses. I think that his weaknesses have at times been exaggerated in recent books that he's written. I don't think he's at his best when his books are solely about race and being black. I also think that when he writes a detective novel that has the *element* of race in it, but isn't completely built around it, he is one of the better detective novelists in the country. Little Scarlet marks ... Read More

Rating:

- pure Mosley- pure joy!
As the author of NATIVE INTELLIGENCE, Native Intelligence I am a big fan of mystery books. And I LOVE Walter Mosley. My biggest fear is that one day I will run out of his 'Easy Rawlins' mysteries. "LITTLE SCARLET" is one of his best. It grabs you from the first page, catapulting you back to the time of the Watts riots when tension between whites and Blacks was raw and constant. Walking the edgy line between the two, while trying to solve the murder of a beautiful Black woman, 'Easy' is once again on ... Read More

Rating:

- The Throes of Violence
Lucky Dime Liquors has been burned to the ground. Manny Massman, the owner, cries. National Guardsmen are present in Watts. Easy Rawlins has his office over the shop of a cobbler. He has kept himself inside, filled with pent-up rage.

Detective Melvin Suggs seeks him out. Rawlins fought in a segregated army. Now there is an angry voice in his heart. A white man may have choked and killed Nola Payne. Nola was trying to save him. He was being chased by rioters. Rawlins is starting ... Read More

Rating:

- buy this book...
W. Mosley is a solid writer who never seems to let me down. Anything with his name on it I'll read.

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