Invisible Detection: The Case of Walter Mosley

In the years since Chester Himes's success in the 1950s and 60s, there has been a comparative dearth of African American detective fiction. The genre was once perceived by African Americans as trivial or, given its primarily white focus, irrelevant. Recently, however, the tide has turned, as writers have started to emerge who have glimpsed, not only the possibilities of the genre for the expression of the African American experience, but also, more importantly, the ways in which it is perfectly designed for the purpose. The most prominent of these writers (who include Barbara Neely, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Penny Mickelbury, and Gary Phillips) is Walter Mosley, who follows Himes in choosing to work within the hard-boiled variant of the genre: his novels are in fact set in the same period in which Himes was writing, although the locale is 1950s and 60s South Central Los Angeles rather than Harlem. Given the turbulent and often violent nature of the times, the reasons a writer might choose to reflect them through the medium of hard-boiled detective fiction might seem self-evident. But Mosley's work has made the point increasingly explicit that there is more to his authorial decision than simply zeitgeist. More important is his perception that the narrative principles and the mores of the hard-boiled detective story, especially as they pertain to the investigative figure and his methods of operation, have a resonance that transcends the formula of the genre when the detective in question is African American. Mosley's Easy Rawlins, it transpires, is a lot more than simply a darker-skinned version of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. The world of the hard-boiled detective story, popularized in the 1930s and 40s by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, is essentially one of urban societal corruption and moral ambiguity. Rather than working to preserve social standards and values, as a detective does in a traditional mystery, the hard-boiled detective fights a lone battle against them while struggling to prevent himself from being infected by the corruption on which they are based. This struggle is additionally complicated by his constant immersion in the criminal milieu since an essential tool of his trade is his intimate knowledge and understanding of the criminal psyche: his ability not just to penetrate it, but, when necessary, to identify his own psyche with its corruption. The hard-boiled detective's task, then, is "not simply a matter of determining who the guilty party is but of defining his own moral position ... [in] a complex process of changing implications" (Cawelti 146). These implications require the detective to redefine continually even such apparently basic terms as criminality: if a crime is a disruption or transgression of an established social order, for example, what constitutes criminal behavior in a society governed by moral chaos? The detective figure in the hard-boiled story, then, operates in a frequently murky borderland between good and evil, where he can never be sure at any given time which is which. He is thus an essentially liminal figure, with a foot in both camps, struggling to preserve the distinction between them, even if he is often unable, given the odds, to cause the good to prevail. The ambivalence and duality necessarily inherent in such a detective's perception both of society and of himself take on a more profound significance in Walter Mosley's novels, where they become a powerful metaphor for the African American experience of "double-consciousness" (in W. E. B. Du Bois's phrase), especially in the urban America of the period. The "changing implications" of the investigative process become infinitely more complex, and painful to negotiate, when a black detective finds himself haunting an additional borderland, that where the interests of his own community and those of the broader, predominantly white, society uneasily co-exist and frequently collide. Mosley's protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is in fact characterized and motivated most centrally by his experience of duality and by a resultant ambiguity of attitude toward the cases he investigates, often reluctantly. …