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Books

Take 1950s L.A., add corpse, stir

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published September 17, 2006

Walter Mosley gives us Paris Minton's character in a nutshell in the first sentence of Fear of the Dark: "I was expecting one kind of trouble when another came knocking at my door."

Fear of the Dark is Mosley's third novel about Minton, a mild-mannered bookstore owner and impromptu detective, and his awe-inspiring pal Fearless Jones.

Like Mosley's bestselling Easy Rawlins series, the Paris books are set in Los Angeles, but they are lighter and more comic in tone, and they don't cover as much historical or sociological territory - Easy's story in that city has run from the 1940s in Devil in a Blue Dress through the '60s in Cinnamon Kiss. Taken together, the books serve as a rich and complex portrait of black Los Angeles.

Paris has so far lived in Watts in the 1950s, trying hard to maintain a blissfully bookish existence reading his way through the stock in his store.

He doesn't like to get messed up in other folks' business, he protests, and what's more he's a coward. When some of that trouble comes through his door, he knows just the route to take: out his back door, over his porch roof and down the alley.

The trouble that knocks in that first paragraph is an unwelcome relative, a cousin named Ulysses S. Grant IV (there's a family legend behind the name) but generally known as Useless.

Last time Useless made an urgent visit, he left behind a bag of stolen jewelry that he failed to mention, and Paris got hauled off to jail. This time, Paris refuses to let him in, and Useless leaves only a cryptic message for his mother.

The next knock is the one Paris was expecting. A few weeks before, he had helped out a pretty blond grifter. Paris may describe himself as a spineless bookworm, but he is irresistible to the ladies, and soon he's "all tangled up with a girl that made my blood boil."

The girl, Jessa, also forgot to mention something: her boyfriend, the ironically named Tiny. Paris is trying to break up with her, but Jessa's knock is soon followed by Tiny crashing right through the door.

Paris' escape route works, but when he returns, he finds Jessa gone and Tiny shot through the head. Time to call Fearless.

Fearless Jones is as efficiently violent as Easy Rawlins' terrifying friend Mouse, without being a psychopath. Fearless' reputation rests not only on his cool bravery and skill with fists and gun (during World War II, he served as an assassin behind enemy lines) but on his unimpeachable integrity and loyalty. Most of the time, Fearless doesn't hurt people because he doesn't have to - he just has to show up.

Paris spends a fearful night with Tiny's alarmingly noisy body in a secret room under the bookstore before he and Fearless dispose of the corpse. But that's just the beginning.

Who killed the big man, and will they be back? What's become of Jessa? And just how much trouble is Useless dragging behind him?

That's a problem Paris can't ignore once his formidable Auntie Three Hearts shows up in search of her son. Three Hearts is, Paris says, "the finest individual you can imagine," but she also possesses the evil eye. Those who cross her have the tendency to meet untoward ends. Besides, Paris loves her.

So he and Fearless set out to solve a whole raft of mysteries, not least of which is the role of Angel, a stunningly beautiful black woman with ties to a list of white men - and to Useless.

Mosley's jazz-cool prose effortlessly draws readers into the Watts of half a century ago, from the protocols of pool halls to the details of fashion and home decor. Paris is a sharp and dryly witty observer; here's his take on one particularly charmless specimen: "Whatever it was his wife loved him for, he didn't display it on the outside."

Mosley's plot meanders sometimes, takes surprising twists at others. But what he really brings are vivid characters, enough to populate three or four books. Much as he focuses on his male characters and their struggles with what it means to be a black man in America, Mosley writes fascinating women. I could read a whole book about Mum, who waits tables in a Chinese restaurant and reads philosophy, or Paris' quirkily brilliant customer Ashe, or Three Hearts, who's as fearless as Fearless himself.

Colette Bancroft is a Times staff writer.

*   *   *

FEAR OF THE DARK

By Walter Mosley

Little, Brown, $25.99, 308 pp

Reviewed by COLETTE BANCROFT

[Last modified September 16, 2006, 11:14:41]