Killing Johnny Fry by Walter Mosley

Bloomsbury, £10.99

IF THERE IS A quintessential writer of holiday reads, it has to be Walter Mosley. His are books that you are not ashamed to be seen with at the airport, far more flattering to the intellect than the usual shiny paperbacks and far more likely to come home read than literary doorsteps by writers such as Thomas Pynchon.

From the first Easy Rawlins novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, through to the recent, underrated Fortunate Son, Mosley has established a voice that is immediate and elegant, twisted in its outlook even as it cleaves to the classic themes of the Southern crime novel.

Mosley is the Billie Holiday of writing, passing off the small lives of oversexed and understimulated people as if they were the last word in sophistication. Now in Johnny Fry, he has gone from implying hot sex in dark places to showing it in the open with full lights blazing – a transformation from Billie Holiday to Christina Aguilera, if you will.

When the mild-mannered hero, Cordell Carmel, discovers his girlfriend Joelle’s betrayal, he turns from sexual door-mat into sexual aggressor, seeking out the sort of thrills that rarely come free, apart from in the Bigg Market in Newcastle of a Saturday night. After a lifetime of comformity, a man deserves a little time off. So this is what Cordell does. He has sex – lots of it – in ways that would get a woman writer burnt at the stake but would cause Philip Roth only the most momentary blush.

The plot veers past incest and watersports via pain, blow-jobs and a trip to the Museum of Natural History. Disappointingly, his woman accomplices are stock noir characters: Joelle’s duplicity and promiscuity are the result of abuse, the big-boned neighbour is predictably kinky, the chastely cool blonde a raging sex bomb.

Mosley does a great job writing about black men, but what he doesn’t know about women would fill a library. Sometimes we get a break from carnality as Cordell pontificates on submission, solitude and death. It is all a meandering build-up to his real goal, and that is Johnny Fry.

Fry is not just the man who was spied sodomising Cordell’s girl, he is also a symbol of sexual envy and fantasies of miscegenation. A white guy with a red condom? You might as well go the whole hog and call him Jimmy Hat. This book is not a man’s search for himself through sex, but an arms race between Cordell and the overendowed Johnny.

Just as fashion is about women dressing for other women, this type of sexual display is not for his woman partners. The homoerotic undertone – and payoff – cannot be ignored. Mosley is gifted, especially when setting a gritty scene, but reading about Cordell it feels as if the author is breaking out of years of habit and still trying to find his way. It’s a daring book, but nowhere near his best, and probably not destined for most air travellers’ carry-on bags.

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