Little Scarlet: An Easy Rawlins Mystery

by Walter Mosley

Hardcover, 2004

Call number

MYST MOS

Collection

Genres

Publication

Little, Brown and Company (2004), 306 pages

Description

Fiction. African American Fiction. Mystery. Historical Fiction. HTML: An irresistible story of love and death, this Easy Rawlins mystery takes place during the devastating 1965 Watts riots. Easy's hunt for a killer reveals a new city emerging from the ashes â?? and a new life for Easy and his friends.

Media reviews

Mosley juggles the disparate elements of his tale masterfully, avoiding the convoluted plotting that has occasionally made some of his other work a tough slog.
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"Little Scarlet" — most of the Easy Rawlins books, like "Devil in a Blue Dress," have colors in their titles — does a thoughtful, effective job of making that sense of racial outrage pivotal to its murder plot. As he did most recently in the non-Rawlins novel "The Man in My Basement," Mr.
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Mosley is able to show how extreme racial polarities can lead to situations that are in no way black and white.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member donaldgallinger
Walter Mosley delivers crime fiction set during a turning point in America's racial history. His protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is a man who, more often than not, would like to be left alone--he just keeps getting caught up murders that require his special expertise in detection. The great pleasure of
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reading Mosley is the classic, sharp-paced action mixed with commentary on the problems of being African American in a racist society.
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LibraryThing member MarthaHuntley
I had been wanting to read one in Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins series for a long time, and wasn't disappointed in this one. It strikes me that Walter Mosley is almost like the flip side of Dennis Lehane in addressing racism in America through noir crime fiction.
LibraryThing member BraveKelso
After reading the first four Easy Rawlins novels as they were published, I lost track of this series, and recently came back to it to find that the story arc has been extended from immediately after the Second World War to the summer of Newark, Detroit, and Watts.

Mosley brings literary prose
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style, good characters, credible plots, to a vivid perspective of the black experience. I am not in a position to judge the authenticity of the voice, and perhaps Mosley is himself too well educated and articulate to achieve the voice to which he aspires, but the novels are both satisfying as genre stories, and solid literature without becoming polemical.
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LibraryThing member page.fault
The LA riots have erupted, and the state of mind of Easy Rawlins, official janitor and unofficial detective, reflects the chaos around him. While saddened by the rage and violence, he understands it deeply, seeing that to even make the offenders aware of the gulf between white and black, something
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has to break. In the midst of his own inner turmoil, the LA police call him in to investigate a potentially racially sensitive case. Easy Rawlins has a unique perspective and voice. He is easy to like and sympathize with, and if the mystery isn't exactly brilliant, the story's theme and message are vital and heartrending.

Like all the stories in the series, its message decrying racism is not exactly subtle. The inequalities and prejudice Rawlins receives are shocking and horrifying, especially since this was less than fifty years ago. Anyone who even thinks to complain that African-Americans have chips on their shoulders or whatever should be forced to read a book from this series along with Beloved by Toni Morrison.

I read this during a bout into noir literature, and I'm left wondering what is wrong with LA (apart from the obvious, of course.) I mean, Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Connelly's Harry Bosch, and Mosley's Easy Rawlins all set up shop there, and all give unique perspectives on the city--a PI in the 30's, a police officer in the 90's, and an unofficial African-American PI in the 60's--and in all of them, the police are incredibly corrupt, the city is an immoral sinkhole, and racism is so ubiquitous that it erupts into violence. Mosley's story is important in this set since he is the only writer in this set--in fact, the only noir writer I know of--who describes the racial tensions from the African-American point of view.

Overall, a story very much worth reading; not for the mystery, but for Rawlin's heartwarming interactions with his family and to grasp a very personal perspective of the '65 riots of LA.
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LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd
This entry in the Easy Rawlins series is one of the best so far. It's August, 1965; Watts is erupting; a black woman who was known to have rescued a white man from a beating in the streets is found murdered and the unidentified white man is the prime suspect. The police can't afford to add THAT
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fuse to the powder keg, and white cops in the black neighborhoods are only likely to provoke further violence, so they ask Easy to investigate discreetly under a letter of authority from the police commissioner. He soon becomes convinced that the white man did not kill Little Scarlet, and that the actual murderer has been killing black women involved with white men for a long time. Encounters with a thoroughly decent detective who treats Easy with a collegial respect he's never experienced from any white man in authority before lends a tone of optimism to this tale of troubled times.
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LibraryThing member macha
Easy Rawlins goes looking for a serial killer in the middle of the 1965 Watts riot. black women are dying and nobody seems to care. he takes on a temporary partner, who is white, to solve the case. "He was a cop by trade and I was a criminal by color. But there we were." and he's thinking about the
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experience of blacks in a white world, the harsh reality of every chance encounter, identity and stereotypes shifting just a little but not enough at a moment when the ground is suddenly changing beneath their feet. in one of his best mysteries, Mosley makes a powerful clear statement about fear and understanding in two worlds set against each other.
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LibraryThing member RonWelton
It's August of 1965 and Easy is fighting to keep himself undercontrol while rage and hate and property burn in Watts. He refuses the hand of white detective Melvin Suggs when Suggs approaches him for help on a special case for the LAPD "that needs solving outside of the public eye." A white man has
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been pulled from his car and has been badly beaten. He is suspected of brutally murdering a young black woman, Nola (Little Scarlet) Payne. The only witness, Geneva Landry, has been taken into custody to keep a tight lid on the case.
Easy takes on the case not for Suggs and the LAPD but for the people he cares about. Along to way to solving it Easy comes to terms with Detective Suggs and a tenuous friendship develops.
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LibraryThing member JudyGibson
More philosophical than most Easy Rawlins stories, in the immediate aftermath of the Watts riots. Also more loving.

Awards

Barry Award (Nominee — Novel — 2005)

Pages

306

ISBN

0316073032 / 9780316073035
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