This first novel in the Easy Rawlins detective series so perfectly captures L.A. noir in the late 1940s that every carefully depicted scene can only be envisioned in black and white. Walter Mosley wrote the novel in the 1990's, however, so two crimes are at play at the same time. In the first, Easy Rawlins has just lost his job at an L.A. factory and is drinking in Joppy's bar among other African Americans when a white man, a gangster, of course, comes in searching for Daphne Monet -- could she be named anything else? -- a curvaceous, alluring white woman. Easy, in need of money, takes the job of hunting for Daphne (you can hear tenor saxophones moaning in the background whenever her name is mentioned) and finds himself traveling through guns and knives off the highways of postwar Los Angeles. The jazz clubs, black neighborhoods, and rich vernacular of black women and men recently arrived from the south are homey and inviting. But there is a second crime: unmitigated racism dispensed by police, landlords, and white employers. Easy Rawlins takes his lumps, stands up as a man, solves a dastardly murder, and discovers he is going to be a detective about to be chronicled in Walter Mosley's series.
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