Hard-boiled black easy: genre conventions in A Red Death

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by W. Russel Gray

Given the social milieu of A Red Death, Rawlins calls on no well-off Pasadena widows, as Marlowe does. Nonetheless, Easy's broad sympathy connects him with Chicano, black, young, and Jewish acquaintances across his largely Watts/South Central environs. After saving one black fugitive from both the wrath of a cuckolded husband and a joint aircraft company/FBI frame-up, Rawlins arranges to hide him, his common-law wife, and their infant. And to the dismay of his real estate manager, he proposes forgiving the rent of an ailing tenant. During a placid interlude, Mosley depicts Easy's friendship with a Chicano and his black spouse. In their multiethnic home he reconnects with his godson, a traumatized abuse victim whom he has rescued in a previous case. Easy is also honorary uncle to the son of stone killer Mouse Raymond, who lacks respectable parenting skills and values Easy's tips on fatherhood.

Despite the white bigotry he endures, Rawlins does not succumb to counterprejudice. He is moved by the pathetic state of the apparently abused wife and the bed-ridden son of his IRS nemesis. And out of respect for a Jewish World War II resistance fighter and current labor activist, Easy procrastinates and ultimately avoids having to set him up for the FBI. And when he is slain, Rawlins comforts and arranges clandestine living quarters for Chaim's daughter.

In short, Mosley carefully inscribes in A Red Death a deep knowledge of white bigotry and racist victimization of blacks from the 1950s to the 1990s. The 1991 depiction of racism and other systemic social ills in A Red Death accentuates the limited range of awareness in white-authored detective novels like Chandler's 1942 The High Window, which features few African Americans. Still, the Marlowe of The High Window improves on the hero's earlier racist condescension and derogatory discourse.

Perhaps Chandler represents the many Americans who would likely have accepted General Mark Clark's publicly expressed opinion that the worst troops he commanded in World War II were an all-black unit (Collier-Thomas and Franklin 46). Blacks' heroic combat achievements were severely underreported, so generally speaking, whites could not heed the extraordinary service of blacks, segregated military units notwithstanding. Most whites assumed black servicemen most effective in noncombatant functions, for even individual blacks assigned to white combat units were restricted to noncombatant roles. (4) Nevertheless, by war's end decorated noncombatants would include Navy Cross and Silver Star recipients in the Navy, and among segregated combat units the illustrious Tuskegee airmen earned 88 Distinguished Flying Crosses while the 332nd Fighter Group and the 99th Pursuit Squadron together received a presidential citation and 800 medals (Adams, January 17).

Within this historical context, Mosley registers the irony of a black combat veteran's experiences with Jim Crow back home in Los Angeles. A volunteer in General Patton's death camp liberation thrust as well as the Battle of the Bulge, Easy is denied admission to the satirically named Adolph's Lounge until an FBI agent gets him across the color line. George M. Frederickson has pointed out that the term racism "first came into common usage in the 1930s when a new word was required to describe the theories on which the Nazis based their persecution of the Jews" (5). At Adolph's Lounge, Easy learns that racism is still alive and well in the 1940s.