In Los Angeles we call June “June Gloom,” as the mist hangs over the day… all day, and we bask in the last moments of companionable weather before the big heat comes.
But in the larger world June is CRIME MONTH! Time to get into your great reads!
I have to take a moment to recommend a Los Angeles detective, Easy Rawlins, for your June read. There are many books by the wonderful Walter Mosley, but I suggest you start off the way I always started off my students when I would teach Mr. Mosley: with A LITTLE YELLOW DOG.
In A LITTLE YELLOW DOG Easy has gotten himself a job running the janitorial crew at a public school, and he’s doing all right, that is until a very beautiful teacher pleads with him to help her save her dog from her husband, who wants the yellow mongrel dead. It’s been a long time since Easy held a beautiful woman, and he’s not made of stone. And she, well, she will do anything for her little dog.
And so Easy first finds himself deep into a woman, then deep into a mystery, and stuck with a nasty little mutt that hates his guts.
Can Easy save the mutt, save the woman, and save his skin?
One of the things I always discussed with my students was the hot sex scene that happens in the first pages of the book. It is titillating that’s for sure. And we talked about the things that authors put in books, like sex, violence, obscenities, animals, religion, graft, ghouls, murder….! How do we decide, as readers, whether those things in the books we read are gratuitous, or necessary? How do we decide if they add to the plot, and the story, enrich the story, or if they’re just in there to get attention: all splash no substance? I can tell you that I tend to poo-poo romance novels and the like, but the trouble Easy gets himself into is, in my humble opinion, both sexy and plot-centric. And I have read that book many times now, over my long years of teaching people to write. It works. And the greater story works around the sex scene. The scene and the story arc compliment each other, grow each other. And Mosley also does a wonderful portrayal of life for people in Los Angeles in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. To be a Black man trying to live on your own terms was not, in contrast to the character’s name, easy. It’s a well-documented fact that Los Angeles policing has long had its issues with racial profiling, issues that still continue today. Mosley writes his story so that I feel like I’m walking in Easy’s shoes, and I see how careful each step must be. It’s when you see how tough it can be for a good man to even get dinner on the table without being harassed that you understand how far society has come, and still needs to go. This, in my view, makes Mosely not just a great author, but an important one. And you know what else? I’m gonna channel Tom, from my favorite restaurant back in Philly, “I’ll make you a promise, if you like hard boiled detective novels, you’re gonna love this book, and if you don’t, I’ll take it in the back, and read it myself, no charge.”
😉
Start crime month off right. Read A LITTLE YELLOW DOG. And drop back to visit the blog at Hawkshaw Press, as we bring our authors on in videos all month long to tell you about their favorites for crime month!
Here’s mud in your eye~
Dianne
Hey, what’s your favorite crime novel? Leave it in the comments!
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