"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

At best, then, the bar seems to serve as one more exotic L.A. location for Chandler, yet in a sense it is not even that. Significantly, this scene is virtually the only time a black location appears in one of Raymond Chandler's novels, and so it barely contributes to what Liahna Babener terms Chandler's "geographic imagery," what she calls "the pasteboard culture [of Los Angeles] where fakery prevails in both the man-made and the natural landscape" (115). Rather, it functions only on the level of plot, merely as a way to get the novel started - to connect Marlowe and Molloy, and thus to begin another investigation in the mean streets of Los Angeles. Though the presence of African Americans was dramatically increasing in 1940s' and eventually 1950s' L.A., as Marlowe inadvertently notes regarding the changing character of Central Avenue, blacks have virtually no presence in Chandler's L.A. novels.(3)

Now compare Chandler's opening scene with the first paragraph from Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress:

I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar. It's not just that he was white but he wore an off-white linen suit and shirt with a Panama straw hat and bone shoes over flashing white silk socks. His skin was smooth and pale with just a few freckles. One lick of strawberry-blond hair escaped the band of his hat. He stopped in the doorway, filling it with his large frame, and surveyed the room with pale eyes; not a color I'd ever seen in a man's eyes. When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly because I was used to white people by 1948. (1)

This is a somewhat similar scene - a white man enters a black bar during the 1940s (here, in 1948 as opposed to 1942) - but, of course, we are seeing the scene from the opposite point of view. The white man - a gangster, significantly named Albright - gets the attention of Mosley's black detective narrator, Easy Rawlins. But Rawlins is not immediately hostile to Albright. Nor, as we soon discover, does anyone else stop chattering and chanting. Rawlins even notices Albright's eyes, but they are marked by their lack of color, a whiteness that matches the rest of his excessively white costume. Ultimately, Rawlins admits to feeling fear, but this momentary reaction dissipates, because his experience as a soldier in World War II, in which he fought and killed white German soldiers, has changed his attitude toward whites in general.

Clearly, if we can use these two scenes as representative, Walter Mosley's L.A. detective novels seem to rewrite the hardboiled tradition, especially the novels of Raymond Chandler. For Mosley, South Central L.A. is not merely an exotic location - or, worse, a plot device to begin a novel. Rather, it is the community where Mosley's novels are set. In a sense, Mosley elevates black L.A. in his novels into a significant location. If L.A. embodies, as Gerald Clarke suggests, an "enigmatic otherness . . . a city of dramatic extremes which remains untouchable and insubstantial" (126), then black L.A. is - to borrow a phrase from Christopher Miller - the other's other, a photographic negative of a photographic negative, a hidden supplement of what already seems superfluous. One can hardly imagine New York without Harlem, or Chicago without its black South Side, but in L.A. (at least until the Rodney King incident, and perhaps not even after that) the black section has seemed barely to register in the American cultural imagination. As Mike Davis points out in his cultural history of L.A., City of Quartz, David Fine's recent anthology Los Angeles in Fiction mentions no black writers and no black locations. So, in a very real sense, one of Mosley's projects is to give black L.A. (Watts, South Central) a discursive presence both in L.A. literature and in the American cultural imagination.