Author Of ‚Little Green‘ And ‚Devil In A Blue Dress‘
Walter Mosley fooled us: We thought he’d killed off Easy Rawlins, the protagonist buy canada goose jacket of his much loved series. But it turned out Mosley just needed a break from the work a long break. Six years later, in May, he came back with Little Green, possibly the best Easy Rawlins to date. Like the rest of the books in the series, it’s strongly influenced by Los Angeles, the city that helped shape Mosley himself.
More From NPR’s Crime In The City Series
canada goose coats on sale When Easy first reappears in Little Green, it’s 1967 and he has recently driven off a Malibu cliff. His violence prone best friend, Raymond Alexander (Mosley fans know him as Mouse), brought him back, barely alive. Once the detective hero has partially recovered, Mouse asks him for a favor: canada goose store He wants Easy to find a kid named Evander Noon, aka Little Green, who left home to hang out with some hippie kids and hasn’t been seen since. canada goose coats on sale
Easy meets up with Evander’s worried mother, Timbale, in a scene that’s classic Mosley: „Her eyes were wide and her fists trembling. Timbale wore a shapeless purple dress that had probably been stitched in Mexico, smuggled into Southern California and sold downtown replete with fake tags.“ With just a few words, canada goose Mosley shows that Timbale has little cheap Canada Goose money and even less time for fashion. She’s wearing a badly constructed knockoff dress that’s been made by one set of poor people across the border, and sold by another set in Los Angeles.
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buy canada goose jacket cheap Heading east from his hotel in the Westwood neighborhood, toward Easy’s part of town, Mosley explains that the Easy Rawlins books are set in Los Angeles because, at the time, black people looking for work could find it in Southern California. buy canada goose jacket cheap
Mosley did just the opposite: He was born in Los Angeles, but left the city decades ago for New York. And while he and Easy may have gone in different directions, the character and his creator each wanted the same thing more freedom and more opportunity to live his life as he saw fit.
„One of the reasons that I left Los Angeles is because I was oppressed by the feeling that how I lived who I lived with, where was going to define my entire life,“ Mosley says.
canada goose coats Mosley and Easy also see the city through the same lens, as a place that’s constantly filtering and separating the vast majority of the have nots from the slim number of haves. Mosley says LA’s topography reinforces that separation, keeping poor and working class neighborhoods isolated canada goose coats on sale from better off parts of town. The boom years that put so many shiny, high rise offices and apartments on the city’s Westside didn’t touch the parts of town Mosley and Easy know best, like canada goose clearance sale South LA. In buy canada goose jacket cheap fact, Mosley says, „A lot of LA hasn’t changed at all.“ canada goose coats
canada goose clearance At least, not outwardly. The small houses and businesses in South Central LA canada goose clearance and in neighboring Watts look very much as they did when Easy first arrives in the 1940s, back when the city’s black community was thriving. What’s changed, Mosley says, is who lives inside, thanks to a racial and ethnic turnover canada goose deals that is quintessentially Los Canada Goose online Angeles: canada goose clearance
Canada Goose online „My understanding of LA has always been like this: Even if you don’t move out of your house, everybody around you will have moved within three years. And in essence, you have moved, because you’re not in the same neighborhood, because you’re not around canada goose coats the same people.“ Canada Goose online
And that’s not the only thing that’s changed. Mosley doesn’t usually have use for a car in New York, but he remembers how good it felt to drive in LA. at night, back in the sixties was a wonderful place to drive. There were lots of people but it wasn’t overcrowded. The avenues and boulevards were wide and open to free flowing traffic.“
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Mosley still knows LA’s streets well enough to act as a flesh and blood GPS. He heads to the middle of the 1300 block of Genesee Avenue, just north of Pico Boulevard. Genesee is a quiet street, shaded by big trees. Mosley pushes back his straw fedora, spreads his arms wide and breathes in the fragrance of freshly cut grass.
Canada Goose sale Just a block away, Pico Boulevard is noisy, painfully sunny and scented with exhaust from the buses rumbling past. „When I was a kid in the ’60s up until the ’70s. gooseoutletvip.com Pico was the dividing line,“ Mosley explains. „Mostly, black people didn’t live above it and, like, a good percentage of black people lived below canada goose outlet it.“ Canada Goose sale
canada goose Some of the landmarks here show up in his books, like a working oil well disguised behind the facade of a high rise office building. „This is that giant oil well that Easy is always talking about,“ Mosley says. „It’s been here since I was about 14.“ canada goose
This part of the city is criss crossed with unnamed alleys, one of which Mosley uses as the location of Cox Bar, an illegal drinking establishment in Canada Goose sale his novels
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Canada Goose Outlet There’s a lot of LA in Little Green, from the street carnival that was Sunset Boulevard during the mid ’60s to a forested lot in Compton, behind which is the carefully hidden home of a root working healer named Mama Jo. (Her concoction gave Easy the strength to hunt for Little Green.) Canada Goose Outlet
Mosley has walked a couple of miles now on a lot of the streets he knew intimately as a teenage boy. He prepares to leave, but before he goes, there’s a little surprise: He stops in front of a pink fourplex with fancy, diamond paned windows.
canada goose black friday sale „This is the house my parents owned, the front and the back,“ he explains. „We lived in the back. It’s a great place I love it!“ canada goose black friday sale
And it’s just around the corner from Easy’s canada goose black friday sale house. Once again, Easy Rawlins and Walter Mosley intersect. If you ask Mosley how much he and Easy have Canada Goose Parka in common, he pauses before answering, „Other than Los Angeles, I don’t really know.“
canada goose uk black friday But it’s no mystery to this reporter: Walter Mosley and Easy Rawlins share a passion for social justice and a plain spoken eloquence that makes people pay close attention to what each man is saying canada goose uk black friday.