In a heated conversation, Rawlings says to her: "'Vic, it seems to me you guard everything you do like you were protecting baby Moses from the Pharaoh, and when I learn of it by accident you grudgingly hand me a bulrush or two. I think the truth is you like to fly solo, girl. If someone's in your wing, even if it's a friendly plane, you'll shoot it down.'"
If you can get past Peretsky's political correctness, the V.I. Warshawski series is plenty of fun.
Walter Mosley and James Lee Burke may be the most literary writers of the genre. They have certainly created the most complicated protagonists. Bill Clinton says Mosley is his favorite detective writer, but that shouldn't dissuade you from getting to know Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins.
Rawlins is a World War II veteran who has settled in South-Central L.A. Over a few years he has amassed a small fortune in real estate, both residential and commercial. Yet he portrays himself as a common laborer, an errand-runner for Mofass, an older black man who dresses sharply, talks smoothly, and can impress white power-brokers more convincingly than the youthful, hot-headed Rawlins. Mofass is in truth Easy's employee, but they're the only ones who know it.
In White Butterfly, the third Rawlins novel, set in 1956, Easy's lies start to catch up with him. Easy's wife takes their daughter and leaves L.A. because he refuses to tell her how he earns his supposedly meager living. When Black Betty opens, it's five years later, and Easy is living with his adopted Mexican son Jesus, and Feather, the infant girl left orphaned by the murder victim in White Butterfly.
Living in South Central was no picnic, even 30 years ago. As Rawlins searches for a woman he hasn't seen in three decades, he's beaten by a Beverly Hills policeman, incarcerated without being charged with a crime, and stabbed with an ice pick by an unknown assailant.
Mosley pulls no punches: "John's bar didn't open until noon but I would have found him there if we hadn't had that appointment. Men like John and me didn't have lives like the white men on TV had. We didn't roll out of bed for an eight-hour day job and then come home in the evening for The Honeymooners and a beer.
"We didn't do one thing at a time.
"We were men who came from poor stock. We had to be cooks and tailors and plumbers and electricians. We had to be our own cops and our own counsel because there wasn't anything for us down at City Hall.
"We worked until the job was done or until we couldn't work anymore. And even when we'd done everything we could, that didn't mean we'd get a paycheck or a vacation. It didn't mean a damn thing."
Unfortunately, Mosley views everything through a racial prism. Although at that time people with the wrong skin color were no doubt treated by "proper society" as inferior, Los Angeles wasn't the Jim Crow South. Even so, Rawlins treats all white people with equal contempt. And Mosley offers only one sympathetic white character -- a man with a black wife.
The cheerless environment Rawlins inhabits imparts a mood to these novels that resembles Hammett's world more than Chandler's. Rawlins possesses more integrity than anyone around him, but he refuses to trust anyone and has no problem deceiving his wife and his few friends. The hard-boiled hero, to use a cliché, must be the sort of person you would want to be trapped with in a fox hole. I'm not sure Easy Rawlins meets that standard.
James Lee Burke writes from the Louisiana bayou, in an atmosphere that is often as foreboding as Easy Rawlins's Los Angeles. And his protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, is a recovering alcoholic and former New Orleans homicide cop.
Robicheaux would be happy to spend all his time running the bait shop and fishing dock he owns in New Iberia. But he continually runs into mobsters, drug lords, and, in this instance, neo-Nazis. His single-minded pursuits of justice often place his family at great peril. While on a drunken binge in Heaven's Prisoners, an early Robicheaux novel, Dave lets a group of thugs break into his house and brutally murder his wife. Nonetheless, Robicheaux somehow overcomes his personal demons to be the most inspiring character of the contemporary hard-boiled school.
Burke adores the Louisiana landscape, and his descriptions of it are a recurring delight: "As the late red sun seemed to collapse and melt into a single burning ember on the horizon, you could see the neon glow of New Orleans gradually replace the daylight and spread across the darkening sky. The clouds were black-green and low over the city, dancing with veins of lightning, roiling from Barataria all the way out to Lake Pontchartrain, and you knew that in a short while torrents of rain would blow through the streets, thrash the palm trees on the esplanades, overrun the gutters in the Quarter, fill the tunnel of oak trees on St. Charles with a gray mist through which the old iron, green-painted streetcars would make their way along the tracks like emissaries from the year 1910.
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