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

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

Mosley's perspective on Los Angeles policemen is dead on. In fact, A Red Death reconstructs Mosley's own 1950s boyhood abusive encounters with L. A. police. In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man" Henry L. Gates, Jr. quotes Mosley bitterly recollecting: "When I was a kid in Los Angeles, they used to stop me all the time, beat on me, follow me around, tell me I was stealing things" (Butler qtd. 691). Though compounded by blackness, such maltreatment was not always race-based, of course. Ray Bradbury recalls a stroll he took in 1950s Mid-Wilshire. The white friends were walking and conversing when a police car stopped ahead of them and an officer emerged and asked them what they were doing. Bradbury replied that they were "breathing the air, talking, conversing, walking." "Walking, eh? Just walking? Well, don't do it again!" ("Burning Bright" 13-14). In 1943 when Mexican youths were stripped and beaten by mobs of white Angelenos, ostensibly on suspicion of having assaulted soldiers and sailors, local police did not intervene. Mexicans were decried as "genetically prone to crime and vice," and then Chief of Police Horall agreed (205). No wonder Mosley deliberately situated Easy Rawlins's experience of police brutality in A Red Death in the same year that an experimental program found so many L. A. recruits psychologically unfit for police duty that psychiatric examinations were again made "an integral part of the induction process" (229). Ironically, in 1950 new Chief of Police William H. Parker described Los Angeles as "The White Spot of America" (227).

In a 1992 book co-authored by a former L. A. police detective, Mike Rothmiller claimed that the department's Organized Crime Intelligence Division kept records of, among other activities, the harassment of minorities (Melanson 103-4). The Christopher Commission's inquiry into police behavior, prompted by the infamous beating of Rodney King, found that only 44 "readily identifiable" officers had drawn exceedingly high rates of citizen complaints, and none received any meaningful discipline (Harris 198). The Commission also unearthed an ugly record of racism in written police computer communications. In one, police officers bragged about being ready to shoot. Wrote one, "A full moon and a full gun makes for a night of fun." Another officer suggested, "Everybody you kill in the line of duty becomes a slave in the afterlife." Still another was pleased to be assigned to the housing projects to earn his salary by "pissing off the natives" and fantasizing drives down Slauson with a flame thrower to "have a barbeque" (Shipler 391).

Cousin to these real-life cops, a rogue IRS agent stands behind all the mischief in A Red Death. From 1956 to 1968 the real IRS colluded with the FBI in perpetrating widespread criminal mischief. Between those years the FBI's infamous Counterintelligence Program (or COINELPRO) enlisted the IRS in investigating American Communist Party members--folks like one friend of Easy's in A Red Death, an FBI target who is actually a harmless party member. During the 12 and a half years that the Bureau had "unlimited informal access to IRS data," the IRS never asked why the Bureau wanted certain returns (Davis 36). A 1961 Bureau memorandum now discloses that Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover, unsupported by logic or proof, promulgated a connection between militant black leaders and white Communists (Rowan 281).