"The Black Dick": race, sexuality, and discourse in the L.A. novels of Walter Mosley - African American detective novels

African American Review, Summer, 1997 by Roger A. Berger

This large man, Moose Molloy, is, as Marlowe comments, "worth looking at" mainly because of his size and conspicuous dress:

He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he really didn't need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. (143)

It is odd that Marlowe - who usually comments negatively on ostentatious dress and behavior, inasmuch as they are coded in Chandler's novels for fraud and fakery - finds very little wrong with Molloy. His signature excessive simile - the tarantula on the angel food (something black on white) - also seems oddly inappropriate. Nonetheless, Molloy stands out, even on Central Avenue, where the inhabitants are usually dressed in a lively way. Marlowe then watches Molloy go into the bar, and after seeing "a thin, narrow shouldered brown youth" get thrown out of the bar door, Marlowe takes an interest and follows after Molloy.

Marlowe soon discovers that Molloy has just gotten out of jail after eight years and is looking for his girlfriend, Little Velma, who worked at the bar. Now, however, Marlowe tries to explain to Molloy, the bar is black. Molloy doesn't listen to him and moves on into the bar itself, as Marlowe narrates:

Two more swing doors closed off the head of the stairs from whatever was beyond. The big man pushed them open lightly with his thumbs and we went into the room. It was a long narrow room, not very clean, not very bright, not very cheerful. In the corner a group of Negroes chanted and chattered in the cone of light over a crap table. There was a bar against the right hand wall. The rest of the room was mostly small round tables. There were a few customers, men and women, all Negroes.

The chanting at the crap table stopped dead and the light over it jerked out. There was a sudden silence as heavy as a waterlogged boat. Eyes looked at us, chestnut colored eyes, set in faces that ranged from gray to deep black. Heads turned slowly and the eyes in them glistened and stared in the dead alien silence of another race. (Omnibus 145)

Any number of observations could be made about this scene. First, the bar, unlike many of the locations that Chandler codes for L.A. hypocrisy and fraudulence, is not a pretentious place. This bar, and the people inside of it, doesn't really contribute to Chandler's sense of a mythic L.A. At the same time, Chandler imagines the blacks ambiguously - as either hostile or fearful, for no other reason than that their turf is being invaded. That is to say, this scene records yet one more racialized, cross-cultural encounter - a familiar moment in the archive of Western meetings with and representations of the Other. Marlowe might as well be exploring a discursively constructed Africa. The blacks in the bar, in Chandler's racialized imagination, stereotypically chatter and chant; and they are metonymically reduced to their eyes, glistening and staring at the whites in the dark. But the most important observation to be made about this scene is that it has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the novel. No one, of course, knows about Velma, and a frustrated Molloy soon beats up the bouncer and then kills the owner of the bar. And while the police assigned to the case dismiss it as just another "shine killing," Molloy's attack triggers an investigation - what Fredric Jameson terms a search, not a murder mystery (645). The novel does not return to this location, and indeed the killing in the bar is merely a prelude to the series of murders that occur later on in the book.