The Easy Rawlings Novels by Walter Mosley

No other American writer...has successfully managed to mold the detective form into a historical serial of this sort, and one can only admire the fission behind the adventure. - San Francisco Chronicle

Blonde Faith
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Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (October 10, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316734594

Easy Rawlins, L.A.'s most reluctant detective, comes home one day to find Easter, the daughter of his friend Chrismas Black, left on his doorstep. Easy knows that this could only mean that the ex-marine Black is probably dead, or will be soon. Easter's appearance is only the beginning, as Easy is immersed in a sea of problems. The love of his life is marrying another man and his friend Mouse is wanted for the murder of a father of 12. As he's searching for a clue to Christmas Black's whereabouts, two suspicious MPs hire him to find his friend Black on behalf of the U.S. Army. Easy's investigation brings him to Faith Laneer, a blonde woman with a dark past. As Easy begins to put the pieces together, he realizes that Black's disappearance has its roots in Vietnam, and that Faith might be in a world of danger.

Cinnamon Kiss
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ISBN: 0786278552
Format: Hardcover, 444pp
Pub. Date: September 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Edition Description: Large Print Edition

New York Times bestseller Walter Mosley's sizzling new novel pits Easy Rawlins against his greatest challenge ever--a terrifying murder during the Summer of Love.

It is the Summer of Love as CINNAMON KISS opens, and Easy Rawlins is contemplating robbing an armored car. It's farther outside the law than Easy has ever traveled--but his daughter, Feather, needs a medical treatment that costs far more than Easy can earn or borrow in time. And his friend Mouse tells him it's a cinch.

Then another friend, Saul Lynx, offers a job that might solve Easy's problem without jail time. He has to track the disappearance of an eccentric prominent attorney. His assistant of sorts, the beautiful "Cinnamon" Cargill, is gone as well. Easy can tell there is much more than he is being told--Robert Lee, his new employer, is as suspect as the man who disappeared. But his need overcomes all concerns, and he plunges into unfamiliar territory, from the newfound hippie enclaves to a vicious plot that stretches back to the battlefields of Europe.

Little Scarlet: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
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Easy Rawlins returns to solve a mystery set amid the flames of the hottest summer L.A. has ever seen.

Just after devastating riots tear through Los Angeles in 1965 - when anger is high and fear still smolders everywhere - the police turn up at Easy Rawlins's doorstep. He expects the worst, as usual. But they've come to ask for his help.

A man was wrenched from his car by a mob at the riots' peak and escaped into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a redheaded woman known as Little Scarlet was found dead in that building - and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. But the man has vanished.

The police fear that their presence in certain neighborhoods could spark a new inferno, so they ask Easy Rawlins to see what he can discover. The vanished man is the key, but he is only the beginning. Easy enlists the help of his longtime friend Mouse to break through the shroud. And what Easy finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned in the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around deep-set passions - feelings echoed within Easy himself.

Mosley's lean and musical vernacular captures the heat and the rhythm of Los Angeles' heart, where danger is the common currency of everyday life. Little Scarlet is further proof that Mosley is "a master of mystery"
—New York Times Book Review.

Bad Boy Brawly Brown: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
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Format: Hardcover, 320pp.
ISBN: 0316073016
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Pub. Date: July  2002
Edition Desc: 1ST

"Easy Rawlins's old friend John shows up at his door one morning, looking for the kind of help only Easy can provide. John's stepson, Brawly Brown, has left home, and John has reason to think this well-meaning boy is caught up in a situation that's more dangerous than he knows. It doesn't take Easy long to find Brawly and learn that John is right - but getting Brawly to see things that way is another matter." "Brawly has joined a political group that he believes will make life better for the residents of Compton. With years of seeing how things really work, Easy recognizes that young Brawly is just a pawn in a battle between forces as old and hard as the city's streets." Through it all, Easy's old friend Mouse is there to help him - even though the last time Easy saw Mouse he was lying still and cold, and Easy is certain he's dead. Still, the memory and reputation of Mouse accompany Easy everywhere, earning him second looks from beautiful women and respect from hardened men. And in a world where logic is only a small element in life-or-death calculations, it is something Mouse once said to him that could help Easy save Brawly's life - without costing him his own.

Devil in a Blue Dress

Author:  Walter Mosley, Kevin Ryan (Editor)
Publisher:  Pocket Books
Date Published:  September 1995 (Reissue)
Format:  Mass Market Paperbound

"I read Devil in a Blue Dress. The year was anytime I wanted it to be. I was young and beautiful, with plenty of money, watching and listening as Bill Robinson tapdanced his way into my heart." —Maya Angelou

First book in the series

Already the object of a chorus of praise, Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley is the freshest new American crime novel in years. The time is 1948; the town is Los Angeles; the hero is Easy Rawlings, a tough black war veteran just out of a job at a defense plant. The mortgage payment's coming due, so Easy takes on some detective work from a silkily menacing white gangster, Dewitt Albright. The assignement: find the whereabout of blonde femme fatale Daphne Money, a singer known to frequent black jazz points not usuually hospitable to white patrons.

A Red Death
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Author:  Walter Mosley
Publisher:  Norton,Ww
Date Published:  June 1991
Format:  Trade Cloth

It's 1953 in Red-baiting, blacklisting Los Angeles, a moral tar pit ready to swallow Easy Rawlins. Easy is out of "the hurting business" and into the housing (and the favor) business when a racist IRS agent nails him for tax evasion. FBI Special Agent Darryl T. Craxton offers to bail him out if he agrees to infiltrate the First African Baptist Church and spy on alleged communist union organizer Chaim Wenzler. That's when the murders begin...

White Butterfly
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Author:  Walter Mosley, Jane Chelius (Editor)
Publisher:  Simon & Schuster Trade
Date Published:  June 1993
Format:  Mass Market Paperbound

Andrew Vachss called Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley's debut mystery featuring Easy Rawlins, a tough black private detective in L.A.'s Watts section, "the most self-assured, uniquely-voiced first novel I've ever read." The Wall Street Journal said of its sequel, A Red Death: "Remarkable...proves Mr. Mosley's debut was no fluke." Readers and critics agree that Walter Mosley is writing novels fit to stand alongside the giants of the L.A. hardboiled tradition.

In Mosley's eagerly awaited new mystery, White Butterfly, the time is 1956 and, things being what they are, no one in official Los Angeles is much bothered as a serial killer proceeds to murder three black bar girls, leaving a distinctive mark each time. But when a white stripper, Cyndi Starr, aka "The White Butterfly" on stage, is similarly murdered - and she turns out to be a UCLA coed and the daughter of a politically powerful prosecutor - all hell breaks loose. The heat is finally on to find the killer.

Black Betty: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
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Author:  Walter Mosley
Publisher:  Simon & Schuster Trade
Date Published:  June 1995
Format:  Mass Market Paperbound

The New York Times Book Review ended its rave for White Butterfly, the most recent novel in Walter Mosley's acclaimed mystery series, by saying "I can't wait to see where Easy Rawlins turns up next. And when." Black Betty holds the sure-to-be-bestselling answer. The place is Los Angeles. The year is 1961, the dawn of a hopeful era for America's black citizens. Easy Rawlins's quiet real-estate empire is deep in the hole, so he must accept $200 from the oily white private eye Saul Lynx to track down one Elizabeth Eady, aka "Black Betty." From her native Houston's Fifth Ward to her position as housekeeper for the immensely wealthy Cain family of Beverly Hills, Betty's stunning beauty and raw sensuality have left a trail of chaos and mayhem in her wake. To compound Easy's troubles, his murderous sidekick Mouse is due out of jail, and he has bloody revenge on his mind. Entertainment Weekly has said that "[Easy] Rawlins isn't just the best new series detective around, he might be the best American character to appear in quite some time." Easy's murder-strewn search for "Black Betty" takes him into the depths of America's racial dilemmas and the mysteries of human character - and his creator, Walter Mosley, to even greater heights of achievement in the American novel. It is that rare novel that tells a gripping, fast-paced story while it grapples with the biggest questions that haunt American life.

ALittle Yellow Dog
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Author:  Walter Mosley
Publisher:  Simon & Schuster Trade
Date Published:  June 1997
Format:  Mass Market Paperbound

This is the fifth outing for Mosley's detective-hero, Easy Rawlins. In this installment, Easy has moved away from the street life that has alternately attracted and repelled him in the past; he's working as a building engineer at a Los Angeles junior high school, raising his two adopted children, and struggling to avoid the storm clouds of discontent that continue to gather both in the nation and in his South Central L.A. home as the 1960s grind on. Then an impulsive decision to help a beautiful school teacher hide her yapping dogfrom an angry husband threatens to jeopardize Easy's hard-won island of security. Soon he becomes a top suspect in two murders and must return to the street if he is to extricate himself from the mess.

Gone Fishin: An Easy Rawlins Novel
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Author:  Walter Mosley
Publisher:  Simon & Schuster Trade
Date Published:  January 1998
Format:  Trade Paper

This novel marks the first appearance of Mosley's detective-hero, EasyRawlins. "Written before the other Rawlins novels but never published, it takes Easy and his lethal friend Mouse back to Texas before World War II and their subsequent move to Los Angeles. The 19-year-old Easy . . . knows little ofthe larger world. His journey to awareness begins with a soul-changing road trip to the bayous of Pariah, Texas, where Mouse hopes to settle a score with his hated stepfather." (Booklist)

 

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