Weidenfeld £12.99 pp306

Walter Mosley’s excellent new Easy Rawlins novel is set in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, in which more than 30 people died. A black woman called Nola Payne, nicknamed Little Scarlet, has been raped and strangled, and the LAPD ask Rawlins to make discreet efforts to find out who killed her. They are anxious to keep the murder secret in case reports or rumours of it restart the violence. Payne’s married white lover is in the frame, but his obvious distress on learning of her death convinces the black amateur sleuth of his innocence. Only the latter’s vast, diverse social network and facility for acquiring new friends make possible the identification and tracing of the real killer, whose name first surfaces in the chatter of a young woman intent on seducing him.

When not operating as covert homicide detective or relaxing with his lover and adopted children, Rawlins helps people out of trouble: preventing his combustible former sidekick Mouse from getting arrested for selling looted goods; saving Mouse’s girlfriend’s life; restoring the fortunes of a bright, ambitious couple down on their luck; and enabling a high-school dropout to complete her studies. When you add clearing Payne’s lover and freeing from jail men wrongly convicted of murders also committed by her killer, this amounts to a secular, unorthodox version of sainthood. And, as if to underline the point, Rawlins undergoes saint-like trials and ordeals — verbal humiliations, sexual temptations, a beating-up that nearly destroys him.

Mosley’s recent novels, with datelines inching forwards towards the heart of the 1960s with a slowness suggesting a preference for less turbulent times, have often felt oddly tranquil. Landmark political developments such as civil rights marches and legislation figure, if at all, only as newspaper headlines, and are hardly ever discussed by characters who have other preoccupations. This approach is implicitly underpinned by a desire to reflect the multiplicity of those bundled together as “black” and counter the media-shaped received notion of a community consisting only of activists, entertainers, athletes and criminals.

However, that focus on the near at hand has come to seem a little too comfortable, licensing offerings in which the same characters and situations reappear each time in slightly different configurations and nothing ever changes. And the fiction’s disconnection from the era’s politics has meanwhile been thrown into relief by two white writers. James Ellroy’s work portrays the LAPD in the 1950s and 1960s as a criminal gang in uniform. The latest novel by George Pelecanos depicts the Washington riots of 1968, three years after Watts exploded.

Whether or not he was provoked into a rethink by their arrival on his 1960s turf, Little Scarlet (which, interestingly, has been warmly praised by Pelecanos) conveys a sense of Mosley consciously raising his game. It’s a game still played by the same rules, with no artificial dragging-in of events in distant places — his characters do not suddenly take to discussing Martin Luther King or the Vietnam war at the diners and roadside coffee stalls Rawlins frequents. But the riots affect them directly, wrecking their neighbourhood and altering every black-white encounter, mostly adding extra tension.

Rawlins is a supremely alert observer of these repercussions, which for him are largely favourable; the LAPD’s need for his help means he’s treated with unusual respect and is amazed to find one cop even bringing him doughnuts. Rarely given to pondering racial issues in the author’s earlier fiction, he now regularly offers opinions on the riots. While viewing the destruction as madness, he describes it as an expression of the secret rage lodged in “every black man, woman and child” by racism: “This riot was sayin’ it out loud for the first time. Now it’s said and nothing will ever be the same. That’s good for us, no matter what we lost.”

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