Talk:Walter Mosley

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[edit] Hard boiled?

Someone define "hard-boiled" for me? Easy Rawlins is just a man trying to come up from out under. He can't trade wisecracks with the police because they will beat the shit out of him or kill him. He can't seduce beautiful blondes because he'll get lynched - officially or unofficially. He doesn't have a detective's license and he doesn't dabble in crime for the fun of it.

He is however a worthy successor to Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe because of the beautiful and deeply felt emotional texture of his narration. But that doesn't make him "hard boiled", even if he kills more people. Mosley the writer is also like Chandler in that he make the city of Los Angeles a living breathing presence in his stories, in all it's imagined feel and texture.

But he is unlike Chandler in that while the Marlowe stories are just a peg to hang, in Chandler's words "certain experiments in dramatic dialogue", the Rawlins stories attempt to express the quality of what it is, or was, like to be a Black in the openly oppressive society of those times, or to be an underdog of any kind.