I turned back, leading the way to my office and wondering how long a man with my kind of temper could survive. By any sane reckoning I should already be dead and buried.---private eye Leonid McGill, regretting mouthing off to a cop.
Yeah, McGill, I was wondering the same thing. Man fifty-five years old with a temper like yours who has spent practically his entire life in the company of violent and conscienceless men in the habit of carrying guns and using them? You’d think by your age you’d have popped off a dozen times at the worst possible moment and gotten yourself killed twelve times over. How is it that hasn’t happened? How is it you’ve survived long enough to be narrating When the Thrill Is Gone
, the third in Walter Mosley’s series of detective novels featuring you as the detective? Frankly, I was surprised you got through the first novel, The Long Fall.
But I didn’t get far into the second, Known to Evil, before I’d figured out the pattern.
You have a terrible temper, true, and you don’t seem to know how to keep it under control. You don’t, but your author does. He makes sure you only lose it when your losing it will spice up a scene but not get in the way of his moving his plot along.
Your temper is a dramatic convenience.
Like just about everything else about you and your fellow characters and the plot devices of the books your in.
Of course all novels are contrivances and things happen in the best of them to move the plot along. The writers of serious realistic fiction work hard to hide that fact by doing their best to keep the machinery out of sight and by having the gears mesh so smoothly, the engine hum so quietly that readers can forget they’re looking at feats of imaginative engineering and believe, or let themselves believe, they’re looking at something that’s come alive of its own accord and is moving itself along as naturally as if its not happening on a page but in the real world in front of them.
Writers of genre fiction don’t have to be as careful. For one thing, their readers tend to be in a hurry to get through a story so they can start another and it takes time to cover over the machinery. But for another, part of the fun of genre fiction, of romances, westerns, and mysteries is watching the machinery work to move the plot along. There are conventions in all the genres that make the genre that genre and a book establishes itself as a romance, or a western, or a mystery by adhering to those conventions. Our enjoyment is in the idiosyncratic ways different writers handle those conventions.
But in his McGill series, Walter Mosley writes as if the fun is looking at the machinery for its own sake. Reading any of the the McGill books is like looking at an exploded diagram of a car engine.
You can see all the parts and see how they would fit together if re-assembled and gain some understanding of how they would work together to make the car go. What you don’t see is the car.
I’m a huge fan of Mosley’s Easy Rawlins books. I think they rank with the best of American detective fiction, maybe not right up there with Chandler and John D. MacDonald but definitely with Ross Macdonald and Robert Parker and I can re-read Devil in a Blue Dress and White Butterfly and the others several more times over and hope to do so. But I understand why Mosley would want to get away from Easy sometimes. Agatha Christie had Poirot and Miss Marple and she wrote many books that featured neither. Parker had Sunny Randle and Jesse Stone to turn to when he needed a break from Spenser. Stone can do things Spenser can’t. Fall in love, for instance. He can brood, mope, and be sad. He can feel lost, afraid, and out of his depth. He can die.
Spenser is something of a superhero. He can be hurt but he can’t be killed---he is protected from death by being a first person narrator. How could he be telling this story, if he dies at the end? And his sense of humor and good nature and integrity are as invulnerable as his loyalty to Susan Silverman. Stone doesn’t tell his own stories. He’s followed around by a limited third person narrator who sees through his eyes and reads his mind but still exists apart from him and could therefore survive him.
The narrator can also see weaknesses in Stone that Spenser established long ago he does not have. Stone gave Parker new possibilities to play with the main one being a hero who could fail.
Easy Rawlins is not superhuman like Spenser but he’s boxed in by history. Rawlins operates in what passes for a realistic version of Los Angeles and through him we watch it in the Post World War II era as it grows, decays, rots, changes, and renews itself. This means there are fights Easy can’t win, which is one of the more interesting things about his books, Easy loses a lot and often has to settle for the something that’s better than nothing when he wins. But it also means that there are fights Mosley can’t give him to fight because he would have to lose them or have to violate “rules” Mosley has established for his books. Most mystery novelists try to make their books “realistic” to the point that what happens in them and the way characters behave are possible in real life. Easy Rawlins, though, because he lives within the real Los Angeles is limited by what’s likely.
McGill lives in a New York City so much in the now that it doesn’t seem to have had a past or expect a future. It’s a city that doesn’t remember itself at all, which is to say, it can be any sort of city Mosley needs it to be at any given moment in a story. The city is built, furnished, lit, and peopled almost entirely out of Mosley’s imagination and seems designed more to remind us of New York than to be New York, a job it does not quite as convincingly as Toronto or Vancouver do when they’re asked to stand in for New York in a movie.
McGill operates in town not bound by either history or geography so in effect he lives outside of time and place. This frees him from the limits of the likely. The problem is that Mosley has also freed him, and himself, from the limits of the possible.
Mosley has written many books without Rawlins, moving away from him into other genres sometimes. I’m guessing though that Mosley isn’t satisfied with his alternative to Easy within the genre, and McGill has been designed to do what Fearless Jones isn’t doing for him. But McGill mainly seems to have been designed to be not Easy Rawlins.
First, he is not a character who could be played by a young Denzel Washington. McGill is short, fat, bald, and middle-aged, Second, he is not easy, not in mind, body, spirit, or temperament. Easy has his problems and his worries, things get to him, and he has ghosts from his past haunting him. But McGill is afflicted by demons. He’s haunted by one ghost, his Marxist father, who abandoned McGill and his mother long ago to chase after the ghost of Che Guevera in the jungles of South America and apparently die there, but not before giving the young McGill all the education he ever got or, as far as McGill is concerned needed, in the form of bedtime lectures on economics, philosophy, history, and literature. all with the same moral purport, to teach the boy McGill that the world is a corrupt and dangerous place and all the forces in it, economic, religious, political, and historical are aligned to crush the spirit right out of a man’s body and then crush the body as well.
Naturally, this has given McGill a less than sunny outlook on life.
Here’s how McGill’s father’s ghost typically turns up inside McGill’s head:
And don’t you go thinking that you’re unique, my father went on to say, time after time. That you have defined yourself. It’s the city that has made you. The streets and streetcars, the police and the bankers. You aren’t anything more than an ant to them, and they are the kings and queens, tunnels and mounds that keep you from what you could be. They have made you into a hive dweller.
Another manifestation:
The prisoner loves his warden, my father’s words came back to me. The slave fairly worships his master, and worker deifies even the name of the rich man.
And another:
Some people live outside the sphere of Law and Man…They see something off the road or follow after a tune that no one else can hear. This solitary event leads them on a journey that could be taken by no other. They’re gone for years from their families and the world. They have fantastic adventures and battle for the freedom of all men.
Then one day the same flash or color or song that led them away from everything and everybody leads them back into a life where they don’t belong. All of a sudden there are rules and customs that, if you touch any part of them, will hold you trapped.
The ghosts of dead Communists are cliche machines.
A final haunting:
The biggest enemy of the revolution…is a man’s love for a woman. He will turn his back on his comrades in a heartbeat if that heart beats for some senorita with dark eyes and a sway to her butt.
But McGill is mainly haunted and afflicted by his own conscience, for which his father’s ghost is sometimes a spokesman and sometimes an irritant. Up until fairly recently, that is, up until not very long before the beginning of The Long Fall, McGill was essentially a criminal. His business card said Private Investigator but his clients weren’t innocents looking for help saving themselves from criminals but criminals looking for ways to prey on innocents or other criminals. McGill was really a spy, saboteur, and enforcer for hire. And he did this work without qualm or regret or remorse or, he hints, without pity or mercy. Then one day one day his work got a woman killed and watching her die in his arms shivered him to his soul or, rather, altered him to the fact that he had a soul and he suddenly wanted to save it.
These days, he only takes on honest work and tries to make amends, not so much by doing good---thanks to his father’s teaching and then unintended fatal example, he doesn’t believe there’s much good that can be done---but by not doing harm. This is a problem for him since all his past training and experience is in doing harm and when he’s at work on a case his mental and physical reflexes push him to act as if he’s still working for criminals and still a criminal himself, which means that he is constantly arguing with himself about how to go about things without resorting to violence or about whether or not resorting to violence in this instance is justified.
This is complicated by the fact that McGill is a character in a detective novel and the conventions of detective novels allow and often require the most noble and high-minded detectives to lie, cheat, steal, burgle, bully, and commit other what are really crimes, including and especially acts of violence, to solve their cases and rescue the innocent.
And it’s a promising premise: A reformed villain turned hero living on the edge of becoming a villain again who feels constrained from doing what other heroes do with relative impunity.
Also promising as a necessary setting for that premise to work itself out in is that the world Mosley has imagined for McGill to operate in is designed to prove McGill’s father right, worry his conscience, and tempt him back into his old ways.
An important convention---the important convention---of mysteries and thrillers is that the world of criminals and the world of the more or less innocent are as separate as church and state. Stories begin when the wall between the two is breached. This can happen when a criminal decides he needs something on the other side and breaks through to begin threatening the lives of innocents or corrupting them. It can happen when an innocent accidentally or negligently or recklessly, in pursuit of something or somebody, finds a hole in the wall and wanders through and then can’t find their way back. And it happens when one of the formerly innocent or seemingly innocent decides they need something that can only be obtained by criminal means. In detective novels, a hero is required to drive the criminals back through the wall or go through it himself or herself to pull back the innocent or identify and expose, and sometimes punish, the criminal hiding among the innocent.
In the McGill novels the wall has completely broken down. There are no true innocents, everybody is to one degree or another a criminal, except a few special women and children who appear as angels to bless the hero’s actions, and the the criminals who are monsters and demons and devils. Evil is the weather. doesn’t matter if it comes in the form of rain, snow, or warm sunshine, there’s no escaping it, just living with it or living through it.
In other words, McGill’s world is Hell on Earth. He’s Dante solving crimes in the Inferno, which, actually, is a pretty good metaphor for Philip Marlow and Travis McGee too, although for those two the wall still stands and their adventures begin with them passing through the gates under the sign that warns Abandon all hope ye who enter here. They cross back and forth through the various circles encountering souls who have been damned for sins of lust, greed, ambition, pride, and betrayal, and are usually only lucky in getting out with their own souls relatively unsoiled. McGill’s soul is already damned, in his own estimation, and that gives him the courage to go everywhere in his hell of a world and face down any and every demon. (It helps that he is a favorite of a sort of Lucifer and friendly with a few influential secondary devils.) And he manages to drag a few people out of if not all the way out of hell then at least to the outermost circle where the virtuous pagans dwell in the green fields of Limbo, punished only by being denied access to Paradise and the full-time company of God. The real question is whether or not McGill will get out along with them.
Like I said, a good premise, but that’s all it ever is, a premise. Sometimes it’s not even a premise, it’s a cog in the machinery, another piece of contrivance. Like McGill’s temper, his moral quandaries only come into play when Mosley needs them to keep the machine functioning. McGill’s conscience bothers him but it only stops him when if it didn’t Mosley couldn’t write a scene as he’s written it.
Whenever Mosley feels the need, and feels he can get away with it---that is, when it wouldn’t leave McGill dead or on his way to prison or take the story off on a tangent---McGill will lose his temper or his conscience will fail him, and then all hell breaks loose, for a paragraph or a page or two, however much ink and paper it takes for McGill to beat someone up or get beaten up. The former happens more often the latter.
Mosley has a ready explanation for why McGill survives and thrives in situations that ought to leave him dead in a ditch.
He’s a boxer.
By training if not by profession. He coulda been a contenda, though, and even at fifty-five he has the reflexes and stamina and the unaddled brains of a champion in his prime.
A boxer turned detective? Remind you of anyone?
This is the first of a series of posts on Mosley, McGill, Easy Rawlins, Spenser, Travis McGee, and Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum. The first sequel, The Uneasy Detective Meets a Hero for Hire, will post in the next few days.
I posted something of a prequel, Doubting the Detective, back in May.
edited by Tom Peyer and Hart Seely.
by Richard Brautigan.
, his most recent, comes out here in the United States in October.
Recent Comments