Black Betty by Walter Mosley

First published: 1994

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Detective

Time of work: 1961

Locale: Greater Los Angeles

Principal Characters:

• Elizabeth “Black Betty” Eady, who disappears in Los Angeles
• Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a part-time private investigator who is paid to find Betty and who becomes the target of the police and of others trying to kill him
• Jesus, and
• Feather, Easy’s two adopted children, who are fifteen and seven years old, respectively
• Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, Easy’s friend, who has just finished a prison sentence for manslaughter and who is looking for the person who turned him in five years ago
• Odell Jones, and
• Martin Smith, two other African American friends of Easy
• Sarah Cain, the wealthy white woman for whom Betty worked
• Marlon Eady, Betty’s disturbed half-brother
• Terry, and
• Gwendolyn, Betty’s twin children by Albert Cain, the father of Sarah Cain
• Saul Lynx, a private investigator who pays Easy to find Betty

The Novel

Walter Mosley’s detective novel Black Betty is set in 1961, and it begins when Easy Rawlins is offered four hundred dollars by white private investigator Saul Lynx to locate “Black Betty.” As Lynx says, Easy knows how to find people in Los Angeles’s African American community. Easy takes the job, because he is chronically short of money, but he is soon sucked into a whirlpool of violence. Easy knew Betty when he lived in Houston as a child, but she has been working in Los Angeles as a domestic servant for a rich white family named Cain for twenty-five years. Betty’s disappearance corresponded with the death of Albert Cain, the family’s patriarch, and Easy searches from Watts to the desert, from Baldwin Hills to Beverly Hills, following various clues in his attempts to locate her. Along the way, Easy comes upon several corpses, and he is stabbed and knocked out by assailants. He is arrested and beaten by the police and, after his release, finds himself the target of murderers: He must send his two children to a friend’s house for protection and go into hiding himself.

Further complicating the plot, Easy’s friend Mouse has just been released from prison, and he is attempting to discover who informed on him to the police. Easy attempts to keep Mouse from killing the informant in revenge for his five-year prison term. A third plotline involves a real estate broker named Clovis who has tricked Easy and his partner Mofass out of the money they hoped to make from a land-development deal.

In the end, Easy locates Betty, only to have to tell her that her brother Marlon is dead and that her son and daughter—the products of her rape by Albert Cain—have also been murdered. Cain had been killed by his daughter Sarah’s ex-husband, Ronald Hawkes. Prior to his death, in a fit of remorse over his rape of Betty, Cain had willed everything to her. Members of the Cain family began murdering people in the wake of Albert’s death in order to secure the family fortune for themselves. The novel is wrapped up with a rough kind of criminal justice, and even the corrupt white police captain who targeted Easy is sent to prison.

The Characters

The players in this murder story are three-dimensional and painfully realistic. Easy Rawlins is a complex man, equally capable of love and rage, bothered by violent dreams (although he never kills anyone himself in this novel). He tries to live by his own code of ethics, to share with those less fortunate than himself, and to find justice in an unjust world. The novel is set during the early 1960’s, at a time when racial tensions in Los Angeles are high. African Americans hardly trust whites, and with good reason, for most of the acts of violence in the novel are committed by the dominant group against the subordinate one. The other African American characters are also complex. Easy’s friend Mouse is a violent killer bent on revenge, and only Easy saves him from himself. Odell Jones helps Easy grudgingly, because there is past bad blood between them; his third old friend Martin Smith is slowly dying of cancer.

Betty is a victim as well, raped by Cain, her weak half-brother Marlon sucked into the Cains’ criminal world. The white characters are consistently evil and arrogant, and Easy’s lack of trust in them is well founded. The prime exception is Saul Lynx, a white man who is saved in the end by Easy and who becomes his friend. The Cains are more typical of Mosley’s representation of white characters: A white family haunted by their violent past, they would probably get away with murder were it not for Easy. Mosley’s characters may be black or white, but their characterizations are usually shades of gray. Easy Rawlins’s first-person narration conveys their complexity at the same time that it reveals his own pained and troubled mind.

Critical Context

Mosley has often been compared to the hard-boiled crime writer Raymond Chandler; Mosley sets his novel just a few decades after Chandler’s private investigator Philip Marlowe walked what Chandler called Los Angeles’s “mean streets.” Like Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), Black Betty revolves around a wealthy but corrupt white family. The novel also resembles the 1974 film Chinatown in that a rich family’s sexual secrets hide at the heart of the story. The difference is that Easy’s world is mainly African American, and he spends as much time solving crimes in Watts and Compton as he does in Beverly Hills and Oxnard. In a sense, Mosley is closer to the African American writer Chester Himes, whose novels (such as If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1945, or Cotton Comes to Harlem, 1964) include some of the same urban racial tensions that Mosley portrays.

Critics have complained that Mosley has incorporated a genre—the Los Angeles detective story—that is inherently conservative. Mosley has actually used that genre for his own literary and political purposes, however, to point out the true racial feeling of the city, to underscore its violence, but to counter it with the strong sense of family and community to be found in this African American world. Like the plays of August Wilson, Walter Mosley’s novels give a fresh and challenging look at black America.

Bibliography

Berger, Roger A. “’The Black Dick’: Race, Sexuality, and Discourse in the L.A. Novels of Walter Mosley.” African American Review 31, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 281-295. Argues that Mosley’s novels reinforce the conservative values of most American detective fiction, rather than subverting those values.

Coale, Samuel. “Race, Region, and Rites in Mosley’s Mysteries.” In The Mystery of Mysteries: Cultural Differences and Designs. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Compares Mosley to fellow mystery writers Tony Hillerman, James Lee Burke, and Carolyn Heilbrun; sees them as pursuing social and cultural differences in his mysteries, differences that do not usually figure in the detective genre. Includes a 1999 interview with Mosley.

English, Daylanne K. “The Modern in the Postmodern: Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, and the Politics of Contemporary African-American Detective Fiction.” American Literary History 18, no. 4 (2006): 772-796. Reads Mosley’s fiction as doubly historical in that Black Betty, published two years after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, is set four years before the Watts riots of 1965.

Goeller, Alison D. “The Mystery of Identity: The Private Eye (I) in the Detective Fiction of Walter Mosley and Tony Hillerman.” In Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction, edited by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller. Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. Claims that, like Hillerman’s detective Jim Chee, Easy Rawlins may find the biggest mystery of all to be his personal identity.

Muller, Gilbert H. “Double Agent: The Los Angeles Crime Cycle of Walter Mosley.” In Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, edited by David Fine. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Includes a good discussion of Mosley’s early Easy Rawlins novels—including Black Betty—their connection to Los Angeles, and their parallels to the work of Chester Himes.