He knows - as a black man living in the last half of the twentieth century in the United States, and from his own experiences - how easiliy it can all be stripped away.
So far, through the series, he’s managed to do both, but the price Easy has had to pay to hang on to what he’s got seems to be steadily rising. But his faults are tempered by his passion to rise above what has been pegged as his station in life and an innate sense of what’s right and especially what’s wrong. As well, his obsessions with acquiring wealth and privacy sometimes lead him into making poor decisions. He can be cruel or petty and sometimes cowardly, and too easily led astray by temptations of the flesh. He’s a proud man trying to cope with the social injustices of his time, as well as his own personal demons and prejudices and he doesn’t always do a great job of it. Unlike some larger-than-life P.I.s, Easy is refreshingly human, even in sometimes disappointing ways. Since then, author Mosley has continued the series, jumping ahead a few years at a shot, each book offering a vivid snapshot of the black experience in America - and particularly Los Angeles, in the latter half of the 20th century a sort of alternative social history that burns through the genre. President Bill Clinton, then riding the crest of his popularity, cited Mosley as one of his favorite authors. New York Magazine called it “a black Chinatown, a cross between Richard Wright and Raymond Chandler” and U.S. That memorable first appearance, 1990’s Devil in a Blue Dress, with its vivid sense of time and place, drew immediate and widespread praise.
In post-WWII Los Angeles, EZEKIEL “EASY” RAWLINS, an unemployed black vet desperate to hang on to his small house, agrees to do a little private snooping for a local gangster, tracking down a woman, and soon discovers that he has a knack for the work. “If I knew where I stood then I had a chance of getting where I was going.”
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