Washington Post review: Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley
Riot Act
Reviewed by John Burdett
Sunday, July 25, 2004
It is a matter of legend that Walter Mosley’s career took off one fine day in 1992 when Bill Clinton named him as one of his favorite novelists. Mosley fits squarely within the tradition of African American authors writing about race and blackness and has been compared to Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man). In an interview with the New York Times recently, Mosley said: “I have never met an African American who was surprised by the attack on the World Trade Center. Blacks do not see America as the great liberator of the world. Blacks understand how the rest of the world sees us, because we have also been the victims of American imperialism.”
Given all that, one would expect a Mosley novel based in the Los Angeles suburb of Watts at the height of the devastating race riots of 1965 to amount to more than a simple murder investigation, and Little Scarlet does not disappoint. Although the story is narrated in the first person by Easy Rawlins, who is the hero of a series of Mosley novels, the true protagonist of the book is collectively the riots and their aftermath. Mosley is considerably more interested in the ambiguous state of mind of the black citizenry, the disorientation of the cops and the looted, shambolic condition of Watts itself than he is in the adventures of his hero. Watts, in truth, is a world turned upside down, and Mosley simply points his hero at it and rolls the camera.