Not a bad book, but I'd hoped for a better one. The milieu (1950s Los Angeles) is fascinating, but even after all was revealed I couldn't get all the intricacies of the solution straight, and while the characters were well drawn, they lack wit. Which leaves this a gray story in a gray time. ( )

Paris Minton ingeniously builds his used bookstore from discards and sales from local libraries. For a Negro to own his business in 1950s Watts, California, Minton knows he is an anomaly. What he also is, is unlucky. Soon after a beautiful woman in distress hides in his bookstore he is badly beaten and his store, burned to the ground. Who was the impossibly beautiful woman? Who would want to burn down his store and do that has anything to do with the men who beat him? There is only one thing to do, bail his good friend Fearless Jones out of prison and enlist him to solve the mystery. As Minton tells the story he builds the character of Fearless Jones through their friendship, setting up the character development in future stories.
When you read Walter Mosely expect crackling humor, fast paced action, racial truths, and lots of quick-jab violence. ( )

I'm sure at some point Mosley could run out of things to do with '50s LA, but frankly I'm just a sucker for his writing so I wouldn't even mind if he just kept repeating his old plots scene by scene. The plot in this one takes a while to make any sense, but it's mostly an excuse to set in motion some characters who are good to know, and to let you soak in Mosley's savory sense of life. He writes about a corrupt, unjust, violent world with a strange lack of cynicism: evil schemers may cause you grief, but the world is too interesting to despair.

The title character, a noble ass-kicker who doesn't think too hard and isn't afraid of anything, but who's happy to put the action on hold to adopt a dog or just drive around town with his girlfriend, is so idealized that the book shouldn't work at all; but it does because he's not the narrator-- the story is told by a guy with normal fears who thinks a lot. The contrast between these two, who still live in the same world and have a pure trust in each other, shakes up the familiar noir setup and makes it seem like anything is possible. The first scene they both appear in, where the narrator is picking up Fearless from jail, may be my favorite piece of writing by Mosley ever: a long passage of descending through the purgatory of the jailhouse, made only of descriptions of walls and doors and colors, until we meet the angry thugs who rule the place, but they're holding a man who's at peace. ( )

too much distraction from mystery

Last summer I read through the last three of the Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley. Apparently, Mosley has had second thoughts and has resuscitated Easy, but the new book isn't yet available on kindle. So, I figured why not try a different Mosley series, the one featuring Fearless Jones. This is the first of them in which we are introduced to the narrator, Paris Minton, a second-hand book seller who is in the business primarily because he gets to sit around all day reading books, and his friend Fearless Jones, an army-trained killer, who has a strong sense of honor, but who keeps getting into scrapes of one kind and another, and who seems always to enmesh poor Paris in his trials.

This book was fast-paced and interesting. It was set in 1954, and has much to say about the problems of racism. I think that might be one of my primary interests in reading Mosley, he's an acute observer of the problems and effects of racism. Basically, he is opening up a mostly unknown world to me despite my having been brought up in Baltimore before the Civil Rights era (believe it or not, I never knew about slavery in my home state until I read Frederick Douglass a few years ago. WTF?).

I found the story itself a bit convoluted and am not sure it makes a whole lot of sense, we have Nazis, Israeli spies, crooked cops, ambitions and wanton young women, crooked store-front preachers, etc. all involved in essentially the same scam. Whatever, Paris and Fearless eventually survive repeated attempts to kill them and more-or-less figure out the reasons they kept coming across dead bodies.
( )