Book Review: Readings

Fearless Jones

Little, Brown, 312 pp., $24.95

Paris Minton, the wizened narrator of Walter Mosley's new mystery, says he isn't bitter when the cops come nosing around his used bookstore just itching to arrest him for some phantom infraction. It's October, 1954, in L.A., and Paris knows that being singled out was "a rite of passage for any Negro who wanted to better himself or his situation." But when he is singled out by an alluring and witchy stranger named Elana Love, within several minutes, the harassment doled out by the law seems relatively tame. "That was my kind of luck," Paris confides. "The kind of woman I wanted most, the kind of woman I should stay away from at all costs, that's the woman who I will awaken to from a slumber that might have been death."

Ms. Love needs Paris to tell her why the Messenger of the Divine, the holy roller church that used to be down the block from Paris' store, recently pulled up stakes in the middle of the night. Paris has no clue; he just likes to read. Twenty-four hours later, he's been mauled by a big thug, robbed by a woman he just made love with, used as target practice, and returned to his store to find it smoldering in little bits. He needs his friend Fearless Jones; he needs him right away. But Fearless is unfortunately in jail. After Paris unearths $500 to bail him out, the two of them embark on the strange tale of a missing foreign bond, Holocaust survivors smuggled out of Nazi Germany and living in L.A., and a woman so accomplished in the art of deceit that she, ultimately, is the most puzzling mystery in a book that is gleefully brimming with graft.

Mosley, who is also the author of the Easy Rawlins series, is an incomparably vibrant stylist of a genre that is the very definition of vibrant. There's a moment in Fearless Jones when Paris and Fearless are trying to determine from a Jewish man's relatives why he has been left for dead by his black attackers, and at the very second when the episode threatens to become a maudlin treatise that good people of different races can all get along, Mosley banishes that sentiment, reminding us that the crackling American detective novel isn't exactly the idiom for sweet feelings. "What I wanted was to break up our little powwow and get on with the business at hand," Paris relates, with just enough sass to provoke a little titter, and more than enough awareness that he has a story that's worth returning to.