It was almost as if he were rage-colored." It all starts when one of L.A.'s few black detectives drops by Easy's house looking for help in a case where black female bar girls are being murdered: "Quinten was a brown man but there was a lot of red under the skin. Little Jesus is now living with them, still silent, but with growing independence. White Butterfly is set in a middle chapter in Easy's life his little house is now filled with a wife, Regina, and new baby, Edna. Although, quite honestly, I'm glad of the chance to read it again, to linger on Mosley's language and characters. I peeked at the resolution, and sure enough, I was right. Because some day, in a mere ten years, I'm going to innocently pick up this book and think, "hey, I should give this a try." About twenty pages in, I realized I had already read White Butterfly. A great read that, like all great books in the genre, is more than the sum of its parts. Through Easy's struggle we learn about pain and sorrow and regret, which is to say we learn about life. He doesn't try to make us completely understand Easy's world, he simply allows the reader to ride along with Easy as he attempts to make sense of it all himself. If Raymond Chandler wrote like a slumming angel, then Mosley writes like an angel of the slums. Mosley makes us feel Easy's personal loss at the end of this book, and it stays with us longer than the mystery. The reader does not have to be black to appreciate the complex moral landscape Mosley paints of Easy's world. We as readers completely understand why Easy is more comfortable with the amoral Mouse than with the rest of society because of the deftly painted landscape of such by Mosley. Easy wrestles with his own life and motives as much as he does with the cops and bad guys. Mosley has written Easy as a good but deeply flawed man. Nor does he disclose to her the source of his income. He cannot open up fully to Regina, keeping from her the fact that he owns property. Mosley again shows the complexity of the world Easy inhabits as a black man in post-war Los Angeles.
He has a woman named Regina and a child in his life now. is the last thing Easy wants or needs at that particular moment. Along the way we get to revisit the friendship of Mouse and Easy, and again Mosley puts a spotlight on the degrees of right and wrong.īlack girls are getting murdered at an alarming rate in 1956 Los Angeles, yet only when a white girl joins their ranks do the police ask for Easy's help.
Like Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley weaves a tapestry of pain and heartache and human frailty into White Butterfly. Though Devil in a Blue Dress and A Red Death are great reads which stand apart from other books in the genre, White Butterfly might be the finest of the early stories featuring Easy Rawlins, for my money.
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