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Walter Mosley hit the ground running with his first published Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins novel, Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990, and hasn’t stopped since. Mosley’s series of mysteries featuring Rawlins—almost all with a color in the title—are much more than simple whodunits. The novels take place in the black ghetto of East Los Angeles during the middle decades of the last century, against the background of the great black migration north in the 1940s to the riots in Watts in the 1960s.

Rawlins, divorced, father to two unofficially adopted kids, is always (though usually reluctantly) drawn into solving crimes within the black community. Mosley offers readers a unique “everyman” view of the black experience as experienced from Rawlins’s perspective. In Mosley’s tight, lucid descriptions, realistic dialogue, and uncanny ability to immediately draw readers into the world he’s created, his writing is not unlike that of Raymond Chandler’s novels about Philip Marlowe.

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In addition to the fine quality of Mosley’s writing, what I most admire about his books is that he’s impossible to pigeonhole as this or that kind of writer: in the last decade and a half he’s written mysteries, literary fiction, and science fiction (Blue Light).



Here are the Easy Rawlins books, in the order in which you should read them:

Devil in a Blue Dress
A Red Death
White Butterfly
Black Betty
A Little Yellow Dog
Gone Fishin’ (the prequel to the series)
Bad Boy Brawly Brown
Six Easy Pieces: Easy Rawlins Stories
Little Scarlet

Mosley has another series too, about a black bookstore owner in 1950s Los Angeles who is writing about the exploits of his best friend, Fearless Jones:

Fearless Jones
Fear Itself

Then there are his stand-alone collections of stories and novels:

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
Blue Light
The Man in My Basement
R L’s Dream (which received the 1996 Literary Award for Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association)

[Excerpted from More Book Lust]