Walter Moseley - A Little Yellow Dog
Serpent's Tail
It’s November 1963 and Ezekiel (Easy) Porterhouse Rawlins has been on good behaviour for more than two years. He’s off the streets and holds down a reponsible job with the Los Angeles Board of Education as a senior school caretaker. "I took care of my kids, cashed my pay checks, stayed away from liquor. I steered clear of the wrong women too."
In this novel, Easy’s fifth colour-coded outing, virtue has its own rewards in the voluptuous shape of Mrs Idabell Turner, far and away the most gorgeous of the teachers at the Sojourner Truth High school. Idabell seduces him on a desk just before morning school. But there’s a price to pay: would Easy mind looking after her little yellow dog Pharoah, just for the day?
That’s when things start to go wrong. The dog takes a violent dislike to Easy. Idabell vanishes. A natty corpse in snakeskin shoes turns up in the school grounds. When Easy, hoping to return the little yellow dog, visits Idabell’s home, what should he find but another corpse, also dressed in snakeskin shoes? On the cheek of the second corpse is a big kiss in unusually dark lipstick.
All Easy wants is to get rid of that nasty little yellow dog. But in no time at all this innocent desire forces him to return to the life he thought he had left behind: to the gangsters and prostitutes and drug addicts that populate the steamy depths of the Los Angeles underworld.
The police, aware of his shady past, are gunning for him. The school principal wants to fire him. The body count rises relentlessly. The little yellow dog leaves turds on Easy’s bed. Raymond "Mouse" Alexander rolls through the plot like a grenade with its safety pin out. Mouse is Easy’s best friend and a wonderful ally in the battle of life; but the trouble with natural-born psychopaths is that you never quite know what they’re going to do next.
Mosley writes well, with excellent dialogue and a fine sense of time and place. On one level the book is classic noir crime fiction with violence lurking at every corner and a twisting plot which draws the reader through mean lives and mean streets. On another level, however, it is much more than this. It is typical of Mosley that he uses as the backdrop of this novel the assassination of JFK and with it the death of hope for the underprivileged of America. He constructs a moral universe seen from the perspective of the black urban poor. In doing so, he forces us to examine the underlying bias of our assumptions about justice and race. The important difference between Chandler’s Los Angeles and Mosley’s is this: Marlowe can afford to be a tourist in a world which grips Rawlins like a prison.
It is true that sometimes the tension slackens off - partly because of the large cast of characters and partly because of Mosley’s penchant for cumbersome flashbacks. And Easy Rawlins, like so many hardboiled, soft-centred P.I.s, occasionally puts an uncomfortable strain on the reader’s willingness to suspend belief. He is a single father with a painfully PC attitude towards his adopted kids (former victims of child abuse, naturally). He wins the respect of hardened gangsters, he’s a great lay, he’s a genius in the kitchen and he can make small talk about the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. A Little Yellow Dog is a first-rate crime novel, but perhaps its hero is a little too perfect for an imperfect world.
(Andrew Taylor)
