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Blonde Faith ? An Easy Rawlins Mystery
Walter Mosley
Little, Brown and Company 2007
307 pages Hardcover
Easy Rawlins tends to wallow in self pity and woe is me moments and I like my detectives hard-boiled and not … over Easy. Perhaps this is why I can never get into a Walter Mosley mystery. It could also be because the names of some of his secondary characters: Chevette, Easter Dawn, Feather (all women) and Christmas are right out of a Black stand-up comic's routine on silly Black names and it's hard to take anything else seriously enough to get interested. In Blonde Faith, Rawlins is really wallowing after his girlfriend left him and is going to marry another man and this really gets annoying.
In the tenth Walter Mosley Easy Rawlins mystery, Blonde Faith, Easy is out to save two of his friends: Christmas Black and Mouse Alexander. Christmas is on the lam after killing a man and perhaps because the army is looking for him for some soon partly revealed reason. Mouse has also disappeared after supposedly killing a man.
Once I got past the wallowing stuff Blonde Faith proved to be an interesting if complicated read. Mosley sets his Easy Rawlins mystery novels in America of the sixties and this give the story a tone few other detective novels have. Easy is an angry Black man in what is still a white world. I had difficulty keeping track of which characters belonged to the sections where Rawlins is looking for Mouse and which belonged to the looking for Christmas sections.
There is also a surreal environment in which Easy Rawlins lives and operates that is populated by people and circumstances that stretched my willing suspension of disbelief without quite breaking it. A couple of minor details and one large coincidence did bring on disbelief however.
Blonde Faith will probably be the only Walter Mosley Easy Rawlins mystery I ever managed to get through. I can easily see why the series and author are so popular but like I said, I do not like my detectives … over easy.