Walter Mosley’s Cinammon Kiss
Mosley’s considerable talents lie in fluidity and natural timing. Max Roach’s drumming, Coleman Hawkins’ saxophone trills, Thelonious Monk’s skipped notes, but that melody is always there; this is stark naked be-bop: In contemporary fiction, Easy Rawlins is the not just the perfect fictional mouthpiece for the fractured race relations in South Central Los Angeles between the 1940s to the mid-’60s, for American history’s betrayals, he is the voice. The casual reader may only want the bog standard hard-boiled fare of indiscriminate dead dupes and dames delecti (and there’s plenty on offer here), but, by the end of these gritty, take-no-prisoners, take-no-shit novels, is offered something much more. Not just the end, but the very last lines shake the earth of the dream – a dream that is both fictional and American.
Sure, these novels are soaked in plot and that’s nothing to scoff at (serious novels don’t all have to be Candide or, ahem, The Shaving of Shagpat). Each page drips with forward thrust and white heat, which might be criticized as hack writing. It’s not. I was immediately reminded of an article The New York Times Book Review ran on Kurt Vonnegut, quoting from his collection of essays, Palm Sunday: “It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a like laziness and childishness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for themâÂ?¦something they knew all the time.” Exactly. Mosley has created in his Easy Rawlins series not only a sui generis, but has also rejuvenated the literary tradition of the historical novel that even the hardest of whisker-rubbing, wooly-bullies could only dream to achieve.
Perhaps the greatest literary misnomer since Stephen Dedalus (come on, the guy’s only great skill is confusion), the now middle-aged Easy Rawlins is always in a jam. Nothin’s ever easy. “I was an accident waiting to happen,” he states less than ten pages in. This time the compromising situation is his adoptive daughter’s blood disorder: He needs money – $50,000 to be exact – and he needs it fast to get Feather the treatment in Switzerland to save her life. His lifelong friend, the psychotic Mouse (“He could kill a man and then go take a catnap.”), has organized a sure bet in the form of a bank heist in Texas, but Easy’s uncomfortable with the idea. Very conveniently (to suspend disbelief in the hard-boilers, the trope of casual convenience must be accepted), a high-paying case lands in Easy’s lap. The case involves a missing lawyer, his missing assistant Cinnamon, and a missing suitcase that the lawyer has stolen; however, many of the supposed upstanding characters (read: prominent white lawyers) involved the case are more criminal than the killer Mouse:
This was a white man whom other white men feared. He was wealthy and powerful. He was used to getting his way. Maybe if I hadn’t been fighting for my daughter’s life I would have felt the weight of that stare. But as it was I felt safe from any threat he could make. My greatest fear flowed in a little girl’s veins.
As the case progresses, Easy’s problems only worsen: There’s a cold-blooded assassin cleaning heads and it looks as if Easy’s next on the list – perhaps even his family; there’s the matter with his girlfriend Bonnie, perhaps the only woman he’s ever trusted, and his fears that she’s stepping out with an ambassador from Ghana; there’s evidence that the case is tied to Nazis (never a good sign); there’s concentration problems (particularly, driving on the road); there’s psychological turmoil (“‘You the son of a fool and the father of nothing,’ the voice that had abandoned me for so many years said.”); there’s the run-ins with untrusting cops who only serve to slow the private eye’s headway; there’s the dangerous women who speak very little, but who know the answer before the question smacks the table; there’s the man who hired him for the job, the “eccentric” millionaire, oddly named Robert E. Lee, who not very oddly collects miniatures of Civil War infantrymen and officers; there’s Lee’s assistant Maya who seems know more about the suitcase, the lawyer, and Cinnamon than both her boss or Easy combined. There’s also the problem with socio-economics. Racism. Poverty. Crime. All around Easy Rawlins is desperation:
The [Watts] riots had shut down South Central L.A. like a coffin. White businesses had fled and black-owned stores flickered in and out of existence on a weekly basis. All we had left were liquor stores for solace and check-cashing storefronts in place of banks. The few stores that had survived were gated with steel bars that protected armed clerks.
And always, always, is the problem of identity. Easy Rawlins is a smart man, an intellectual who reads Magic Mountain, The Native Son, The Invisible Man (Ellison, not Wells, we’re told pointedly), and Das Kapital. He’s also painfully aware of his origins. An exchange with Robert E. Lee’s assistant is particularly revealing:
“Where are you from?”
“A deep dark humanity down in Louisiana, a place where we never knew there was a depression because we never had the jobs to lose.”
That’s enough of the summarizing. Too often book reviewers, in their praise or their disdain or their utter conceit and arrogant lack of decorum, will rush through the first two hundred pages, not realizing that every twist, every turn, has been spoiled. And Cinnamon Kiss is very much a novel that puts the reader’s fingers to work: Several points during this page-turner, you’ll find yourself covering the right-hand side with your hand so nothing is given away. Each chapter, each page, every line is a series and thensâÂ?¦ And thenâÂ?¦ And thenâÂ?¦And Then!
There’s also insight, pure historical gathering. Fast and delightful, Mosley posits Easy as a stranger in strange land: Berkeley. The Love Generation is beginning, flower power, and hippie driftdom:
The houses had gone from the standard white and green, blue and yellow to a wide range of pastels. Pinks, aquas, violets, and fiery oranges. Even the cars were painted like rainbows or with rude images or long speeches etched by madmen. Music of every kind poured from open windows. Some women wore long tie-dyed gowns like fair princesses and others wore nearly nothing at all. Half of the men were shirtless and almost all of them had long hair like women. Their beards were untrimmed� Many of the women carried babies� It was the most integrated neighborhood I had ever seen.
Mosley is much like Hemingway, not only with word choice (le mot juste) but also with character revelation via clipped and precise dialogue, or through what is not said. The reader can glimpse into Easy’s psyche by the manner in which he speaks. And Easy has three voices: The professional, licensed private-eye voice; the slangy hustler’s voice; and the grim, hard-boiled voice – the man who’s seen it all, heard it all. Through dialogue, Mosley hat tricks scene, summary, and identity all at once – without a whiff of overworked compartmentalizing.
Perhaps because he is a writer’s writer that it all reads so natural, so easy. And that is exactly the mark of a master. In his essay for the New York Times, “For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day,” Mosley explains his theory on craft: “Writing a novel is gathering smoke. It’s an excursion into the ether of ideas. There’s no time to waste. You must work with that idea as well as you can, jotting down notes and dialogue.”
