To flesh out his hero, Mosley endows him with imposing height, great physical strength, enormous skill in street pugilism and an occasional associate, the killer Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. (”Telling him no was was as dangerous a task as moving nitroglycerine in a truck with no shock absorbers.” ) In evoking the atmosphere of Watts after the riots, Mosley is nothing less than masterly: “All he had left was the burnt and broken worktable surrounded by a couple hundred pairs of scorched shoes. Why would somebody want to burn shoes?”

Mosley is also fearless in exploring the underlying ambiguity of race: Negro National Guardsmen bully blacks in perfect imitation of their white colleagues; it is an out-of-town white cop, Detective Melvin Suggs, who bends the rules in order to send Easy off on his mission; some African Americans are so brainwashed by white elitism they will go to insane lengths to present themselves as Caucasian; poor whites without a racist bone in their bodies are left financially ruined by the riots.

The only quibble I have with Little Scarlet, which I enjoyed immensely, concerns the character of the hero. It is commonplace that the lone male who, in the guise of detective or other secret agent, goes about righting wrongs and fighting for the virtue and dignity of women, is a direct descendant of the Arthurian knight, and Easy is a product of this noble line. He never refuses a joust, he gets embroiled with at least one adversary so big, mean, muscular and bad that he can fairly be called a monster, his anger is always of the righteous kind within his chivalric code and he manages to resist the lascivious temptation presented by Juanda.

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