Walter Mosley: Fearless Jones

By NORMAN BILBROUGH

An American reviewer boasts that the men in this novel are tough, the women are tougher, and everybody drives around in the coolest cars. So is the reader in for some hip, 1950s film-noir type thriller?

Nothing like it. As I recall, those cars were gas-guzzling tanks, and the men and women in this story are brutalised and desperate. Sure, it's set in the 1950s, but it's in Watts, Los Angeles, where life for a black was just survival.

Walter Mosley is/was Bill Clinton's favourite crime writer, but the crime narrative is the brutal icing on the cake. The real story is found in the layers of angst - in a story where black people try to escape their bitter lives and to uphold their dignity at the same time.

Mosley captures this everyday desperation superbly. He doesn't labour it - it's simply acutely observed. By the middle of the tale, I was fearing for the protagonists' day-to-day survival.

Paris Minton owns a bookshop, selling rejects from LA libraries. The cops are even suspicious of that - "Where did you get all these books, son?" they ask. As well as being an inveterate reader, Paris is proud of his bookshop. It's an honourable business.

But big trouble arrives one day when the beautiful Elana Love walks through his door. She's looking for a local preacher, and a big hood called Leon is looking for her. Both are after a bond Leon was once given as payment for a spot of protection work in jail.

Elana hides, Leon beats up Paris, and a gun-fight ensues. Paris is seduced by Elana, wakes in a deserted motel, sans cash and car, and finds that his shop is burned down. There's only one thing for it: pay $500 to get his friend Fearless Jones out of jail.

Fearless, a kind a black Lone Ranger, rises to the occasion. Charming and opportunistic, he never backs down. He has a soldier's sense of honour and no illusions. After all, he's an ex-con living in a city where a black man is pulled over by the cops if a white woman is riding in his car.

This is gutsy, sad - and riveting. And forget the silly words on the cover. They do the raw material inside an injustice.

Duffy and Snellgrove

$24.95

* Norman Bilbrough is a Wellington writer.