SOURCE: Lock, Helen. “Invisible Detection: The Case of Walter Mosley.” MELUS 26, no. 1 (spring 2001): 77-89.

[In the following essay, Lock asserts that Mosley draws upon the literary genre of hard-boiled detective fiction to express issues particular to the contemporary urban African American experience.]

In the years since Chester Himes's success in the 1950s and 60s, there has been a comparative dearth of African American detective fiction. The genre was once perceived by African Americans as trivial or, given its primarily white focus, irrelevant. Recently, however, the tide has turned, as writers have started to emerge who have glimpsed, not only the possibilities of the genre for the expression of the African American experience, but also, more importantly, the ways in which it is perfectly designed for the purpose. The most prominent of these writers (who include Barbara Neely, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Penny Mickelbury, and Gary Phillips) is Walter Mosley, who follows Himes in choosing to work within the hard-boiled variant of the genre: his novels are in fact set in the same period in which Himes was writing, although the locale is 1950s and 60s South Central Los Angeles rather than Harlem.

Given the turbulent and often violent nature of the times, the reasons a writer might choose to reflect them through the medium of hard-boiled detective fiction might seem self-evident. But Mosley's work has made the point increasingly explicit that there is more to his authorial decision than simply zeitgeist. More important is his perception that the narrative principles and the mores of the hard-boiled detective story, especially as they pertain to the investigative figure and his methods of operation, have a resonance that transcends the formula of the genre when the detective in question is African American. Mosley's Easy Rawlins, it transpires, is a lot more than simply a darker-skinned version of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.

The world of the hard-boiled detective story, popularized in the 1930s and 40s by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, is essentially one of urban societal corruption and moral ambiguity. Rather than working to preserve social standards and values, as a detective does in a traditional mystery, the hard-boiled detective fights a lone battle against them while struggling to prevent himself from being infected by the corruption on which they are based. This struggle is additionally complicated by his constant immersion in the criminal milieu since an essential tool of his trade is his intimate knowledge and understanding of the criminal psyche: his ability not just to penetrate it, but, when necessary, to identify his own psyche with its corruption. The hard-boiled detective's task, then, is “not simply a matter of determining who the guilty party is but of defining his own moral position … [in] a complex process of changing implications” (Cawelti 146). These implications require the detective to redefine continually even such apparently basic terms as criminality: if a crime is a disruption or transgression of an established social order, for example, what constitutes criminal behavior in a society governed by moral chaos? The detective figure in the hard-boiled story, then, operates in a frequently murky borderland between good and evil, where he can never be sure at any given time which is which. He is thus an essentially liminal figure, with a foot in both camps, struggling to preserve the distinction between them, even if he is often unable, given the odds, to cause the good to prevail.

The ambivalence and duality necessarily inherent in such a detective's perception both of society and of himself take on a more profound significance in Walter Mosley's novels, where they become a powerful metaphor for the African American experience of “double-consciousness” (in W. E. B. Du Bois's phrase), especially in the urban America of the period. The “changing implications” of the investigative process become infinitely more complex, and painful to negotiate, when a black detective finds himself haunting an additional borderland, that where the interests of his own community and those of the broader, predominantly white, society uneasily co-exist and frequently collide. Mosley's protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is in fact characterized and motivated most centrally by his experience of duality and by a resultant ambiguity of attitude toward the cases he investigates, often reluctantly. At the same time, however, it is this very duality that facilitates the functional invisibility that he exploits to his advantage, making his detective work possible.

Easy Rawlins has so far appeared in five novels: Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), A Red Death (1991), White Butterfly (1992), Black Betty (1994), A Little Yellow Dog (1996), plus the “prequel” Gone Fishin' (1997). Rawlins establishes himself not as a professional detective but as being “in the business of favors. I'd do something for somebody, like find a missing husband or figure out who's been breaking into so-and-so's store, and then maybe they could do me a good turn one day. It was a real country way of doing business. At that time almost everybody in my neighborhood had come from the country around southern Texas and Louisiana” (RD [A Red Death] 5). But this modest “business” requires that he lead a double life since in order for the quid pro quo to work, he must conceal the fact that his clients are not his economic peers, that he is in fact a man of substance who through hard work has acquired and rents out several properties. He pretends to be the handyman—and does the handyman's work, while an employee in on his secret collects the rents—in order that his clients trust him as an equal who shares their values and concerns. “I had a reputation for fairness and the strength of my convictions among the poor. Ninety-nine out of a hundred black folk were poor back then, so my reputation went quite a way” (Red 5).

This benign deception has predictably polarizing consequences for Rawlins's life. On the one hand, it gives him an advantage in his role as an investigator, precisely because he knows so well how to exploit the guise of a poor working man: “As long as he thought I was a poor man he'd be scared of me. That's why I kept my wealth a secret. Everybody knows that a poor man's got nothing to lose; a poor man will kill you over a dime” (Red 108). Like all hard-boiled detectives, his superior insight into the psychology of those he investigates is a key weapon. On the other hand, though, this double existence wreaks havoc on Rawlins's private life, costing him his marriage, for example. “I had lived a life of hiding before I met Regina. Nobody knew about me. They didn't know about my property. They didn't know about my relationship to the police. I felt safe in my secrets. … The money wasn't apparent in my way of living. So there was no need for her to be suspicious. I intended to tell her all about it someday. A day when I felt she could accept it, accept me for who I was” (White 35). Who he is, however, proves to be a vexed question, and Regina's suspicions drive her away before he can satisfactorily answer it.

Although this juggling of public and private identities is the most obvious manifestation of the dualism of Easy Rawlins's existence, it is in fact also the most superficial. The borderlands that he inhabits produce a far more radical split identity, emblematic of the double-consciousness that arises when personal and racial identity are predicated on competing societal demands; indeed, it becomes apparent as the series progresses that Rawlins is far from being the only character so affected. On the most fundamental level, for example, Rawlins not only has two names—his formal name, Ezekiel Rawlins, and his nickname, Easy—but two different rationales for their use: in A Red Death, for instance, he says that “only my best friends used” the name Ezekiel to address him (20), while in Devil in a Blue Dress he identifies himself to a stranger as Ezekiel “because I didn't want her so familiar as to use my nickname” (53). While this suggests a basic ambivalence about his core identity, and the possibility and nature of “familiarity” with that identity, it also establishes another distinction: the invitation to use variations on his first name contrasts with his insistence to a disrespectful plant manager that “My name is Mr. Rawlins” (Devil 66). Here there is no ambivalence about the relationship of name to identity: he prefaces it by saying, “I pointed at my chest” (66). It is not incidental that the plant manager is white and has casually called him “Easy”; Rawlins thus projects a formal identity designed to command respect and repudiate a false familiarity based on condescension and a latent racism. Yet he is unclear what a “real” familiarity might be.

In addition to his double name(s), Rawlins also has a double voice, again reflective of the ambivalence of his self-perception. His narrative voice, as storyteller, uses “standard” English; Rawlins is an educated man who takes college courses in Shakespeare and speaks of the “love that poetry espoused” (Red 19). But he downplays his education in much the same way that he hides his wealth, for related reasons of community solidarity: he says of a black police officer, for example, “He had an educated way of talking. I could have talked like him if I'd wanted to, but I never did like it when a man stopped using the language of his upbringing. If you were to talk like a white man you might forget who you were” (Red 143). Voice reflects identity, in other words, so he consciously chooses a linguistic persona that aligns him with his “upbringing,” establishing verbally a loyalty to and continuity with that background.

Yet this is more than simply a pragmatic decision to speak the language of his clients, and to avoid the fate of the black policeman mentioned above, of whom he remarks, “Quinten had the weight of the whole community on his shoulders. The black people didn't like him because he talked like a white man and he had a white man's job. The other policemen kept at a distance, too” (White 20). Despite Rawlins's education, which he values, and his command of standard English, he finds it inadequate as a means of functioning verbally in the world that he inhabits: “I always tried to speak formal English in my life … but I found over the years that I could only truly express myself in the natural, ‘uneducated’ dialect of my upbringing” (Devil 10). Although he is essentially bilingual, he equates standard English with “talking like a white man,” and thus with crossing a perilous border; Quinten is in this respect his mirror image. Standard English lacks the linguistic freedom through which his sense of self can be fully articulated. Thus Mosley's decision to have him convey his story to the reader through the medium of standard English has a particular poignancy, suggesting as it does both an inner fluency in a language that does not permit him to express himself outwardly, and the necessity of using the language of the broader society with which he interacts, and to which he implicitly addresses himself (at least in part), if he is to convey the totality of his experience.

Inevitably, the ambiguity of Rawlins's self-perception is at the heart of all the moral ambiguities that inform his life and professional activities. Some are blatant, such as his investigating crimes while maintaining an unswerving loyalty to his best friend, an amoral and vicious killer. But many of the more important ambiguities are more subtle and revolve around, perhaps equally inevitably, the issue of race, which is itself here not an unambiguous concept. Rawlins's is not simply a black and white world, in any respect. Virtue does not reside exclusively in any racial or social group: although he tells us that “I trusted a black man before I'd even think about a white one. That's just the way things were for me” (Red 143), he also finds himself investigating black suspects at the behest of white policemen while the crime victims vary from a white woman who turns out to be a light-skinned black woman, to a white coed who lives a double life as a stripper, to a black preacher, a male Jewish activist, and a black maid, among others. Along the way Rawlins also “collects” some of the more passive victims, so that although he loses his own child with his departing wife, he becomes the unofficial adoptive father of a Latino and a mixed-race child. Sometimes the policemen he assists, or who assist him, are black, and when they are, they come in two varieties: “Naylor was idealistic, believing that law was a virtue and that the police were the tools of good. … But Lewis knew that the law is just the other side of the coin from crime, that they're both the same and interchangeable. Criminals were just a bunch of thugs living off what honest people and rich people made. The cops were thugs too; paid by the owners of property to keep the other thugs down” (Black 213-14).

The latter view is a classic description of the mores and social structure of the world of the hard-boiled detective story, where cops and criminals operate essentially by the same rules and methods, and where the line between “law” and “crime” is frequently so fine as to be invisible. But it also makes another important point: in this environment, the economic factor is the primary determinant of social order and worth, the primary social dividing line. This does become a racial issue by default since, as Rawlins says in the passage quoted earlier, “ninety-nine out of a hundred black folk were poor back then” (Red 5), and their poverty was largely a function of race, but this only complicates matters further for Rawlins, who is on one side of the racial divide and on the other side economically.

The reason, however, that Easy Rawlins is successful as a detective is precisely that he is able to exploit the fundamental ambiguities of his universe so that they work to his advantage: they enable him to function invisibly, and thus undetected. Downplaying his wealth in the black community, for example, and speaking the “‘uneducated’ dialect of my upbringing” to the authorities, enables him to hide behind the smokescreen of stereotype, and to elude scrutiny by conforming to the expected, predictable role: hiding in plain sight like the purloined letter. He tells us, referring to the “two days … that made me a detective,” that “Nobody knew what I was up to, and that made me sort of invisible; people thought that they saw me but what they really saw was an illusion of me, something that wasn't real” (Devil 128).

This is one of the oldest principles of literary detection, the manipulation of perception: the progenitor of detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, used it in 1844 in “The Purloined Letter” to illustrate the invisibility of the demonstrably obvious. Because the human tendency is to overlook that which, as Poe's detective Dupin describes it, is “too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident” (222), it is thus rendered functionally invisible, and can elude detection and identification. If useful in the case of the purloined letter for the concealment of evidence, this principle becomes even more useful for the concealment of the detective himself, and doubly so for an African American detective who experiences, in Du Bois's words, the “sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others” (45). Rawlins's constant awareness of how he is perceived ideally positions him to manipulate and exploit that perception, in a process akin to Dupin's “identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent” (217), and to create “an illusion of me” that functions as a mask, adaptable to every occasion: a mask which is in each case “too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident” to attract scrutiny. In fact, it is precisely because Rawlins is forced to be so continually self-aware that it becomes necessary to find ways to use this to his advantage.

As an African American, Rawlins has available to him a pre-existent mask, the social stereotype that fosters invisibility, and in this respect his other major literary ancestor is obviously Ralph Ellison's invisible man. Poe ties the concept of invisibility more specifically to the process of detection, but in fact it is clear that Ellison's protagonist uses functional invisibility in much the same way, although he is a far less overt detective. In his Prologue and Epilogue, the invisible man reveals himself to have finally and consciously adopted for his own purposes the same liminal stance as Rawlins, after having unconsciously been forced to play a double role throughout his life. Secretly living in a white-owned building in a border area, the invisible man is clandestinely at work below the surface, and it is here in his “hole” that he performs his detective work. Again it comprises the manipulation of perception, but in this case his own: his detection involves shifting perspectives on, or altering his perceptions of, the clues that have crossed his path throughout his life, until ultimately he is able to assemble them into the picture that reveals the mystery, if not its solution.

Unable as a child, for example, to decipher the clue contained within his grandfather's advice to “Live with your head in the lion's mouth … agree 'em to death and destruction” (16)—in other words, manipulate and exploit the invisibility that stereotype creates—the invisible man brings it into clearer perspective when considering his much later encounter with Rinehart and his adoption of Rinehart's trademark hat and dark glasses, which make him invisible to Ras's followers: “They see the hat, not me. There is a magic in it. It hides me right in front of their eyes” (474). This dawning perception of the potential uses of invisibility parallels Rawlins's adoption and exploitation of “an illusion of me,” the mask that makes it possible for him to function freely. As Ellison wrote elsewhere, “Masking is a play upon possibility and ours is a society in which possibilities are many” (Shadow 54). His specific context here was the stereotypical mask of the Negro minstrel, of which he said, “its function was to veil the humanity of Negroes thus reduced to a sign, and to repress the white audience's awareness of its moral identification with its own acts and with the human ambiguities pushed behind the mask” (49).

But as Ellison implied, and as Rawlins and the invisible man make explicit, many possibilities become available when a reductive sign is made to signify subversively and when human ambiguities position themselves, of their own volition, behind the misleading mask. This latter point is crucial: for the invisible man and for Rawlins, invisibility can be a powerful weapon only to the extent that, in making use of an inevitable stereotype, they also retain the ability to reject it when they choose, rather than simply having it imposed upon them. Thus, for example, as Alan Nadel has said, “the figure of Rinehart is not so important as the invisible man's ability to become him—or not. In acquiring this ability, he fully becomes the marginal man, the crosser of borders, who contains secrets and uses disguise” (21).

In the essay “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (Shadow), Ellison was at some pains to question the relevance or validity of regarding Rinehart as a trickster figure, at least as derived from African American folklore. Be that as it may, Nadel's formulation of the “ability” that Rinehart unknowingly bequeaths to the invisible man suggests that at least some elements of the trickster can usefully be applied to Rawlins and the invisible man, particularly given their mutual experience of double consciousness, a belated awareness, in the case of the invisible man, and one of the key revelations produced by his detective work. Whatever the specific binaries of the trickster (sly/stupid, good/evil, divine/bestial, and so on), his genesis in the psychic tension between opposites causes him to function as “the principle of ambivalence” (Diamond xvii). This is the principle that the invisible man comes to recognize in his “hole” as the central controlling principle of his existence: “I too have become acquainted with ambivalence,” he says in his Prologue, “that's why I'm here” (10), and in his Epilogue, “So I approach [life] through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love” (567). This is the principle that enables Rawlins, who has come to this recognition much earlier in life, to operate.

In fact, Rawlins might be imagined as the invisible man's next incarnation as “the crosser of borders,” having emerged from his hole, taking advantage of ambivalence by exploiting the role of the trickster as “the enemy of boundaries” (Kerenyi 185), crossing social and racial lines, and fooling most of the people most of the time. The trickster analogy cannot be pushed too far, however. As Jung's analysis emphasizes, the trickster's “chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness” (203), but it is clear that Rawlins and the invisible man are not only highly conscious but, indeed, doubly so. Yet even here there is a certain parallel. Jung's trickster “is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other” (203). Double consciousness can have the same effect.

In tracing Easy Rawlins's literary inheritance from Poe and Ellison, it is important to make a distinction between the ways these two writers conceive of the workings of invisibility in the detection process. Perhaps the most obvious difference is their conception of the origin and causes of such invisibility: for Poe it is an interesting theory of perception, but for Ellison a profound and problematic sociological phenomenon. The means by which their detectives manipulate functional invisibility also differ. The invisible man recognizes that to decipher the clues that will reveal the truth he cannot simply rely on empirical evidence, which is so often deceptive, but must also take account of what can only be known intuitively: learning to trust his intuition is a decisive step toward perceiving the mystery of invisibility. “There is … an area in which a man's feelings are more rational than his mind” (Invisible 560). Poe's Dupin, on the other hand, is concerned to show that all “apparently intuitive perception” (141, emphasis added), as he puts it in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is actually the result of rigorous analytical reasoning, a stance that reflects, in part, the tendency in Western thought to resist the mysteries of the nonrational or nonlogical, which cannot be co-opted into the dominant ideology and thus intellectually controlled.

For a contemporary African American detective writer like Mosley, however, the differences in these two approaches can be as fruitful as the similarities. Combining the analytical and the intuitive, taking Poe as a theoretical model and Ellison as a sociological and aesthetic model, and grafting both onto the blueprint provided by the hard-boiled genre, Mosley has been able to construct a new narrative approach that establishes a distinctively African American variant on what has historically been a predominantly white genre (see Crooks). Moreover, there are indications that Mosley is not alone in this vision of the possibilities of African American detective fiction. While Mosley may or may not be a direct influence on their work, it seems clear that other writers have mined the same veins of social and literary history, leading to the construction of similar narrative approaches, though often with salient variations, which demonstrate the principle's flexibility.

Not all invisible detectives need be of the hard-boiled variety. For example, Barbara Neely's detective fiction also uses the model of functional invisibility, but in this case applied to a different mystery subgenre. Neely exploits the class distinctions of the domestic mystery through a protagonist, the ambiguously-named Blanche White, whose work in domestic service renders her socially invisible, although this is again by default a function of race: she becomes embroiled in her first mystery, for example, when a wealthy white woman sees her standing outside, and simply assumes she is the new maid, complaining, “That agency always sends you people to this gate” (Lam 11). Since Blanche is “on the lam” at the time, it is to her advantage to exploit this misunderstanding and to disappear behind the stereotype, where she becomes invisible to the household whose secrets she is thus enabled to penetrate. Even “among the Talented Tenth,” as a guest at an exclusive African American resort where “who made her clothes and how well she'd whiteified her hair” (Talented Tenth 15-16) are important determinants of social standing, Blanche's lowly status according to these standards ensures that she is insignificant enough, and thus invisible enough, to have the freedom to investigate crimes and decipher clues that are invisible to others.

The principle of investigative invisibility has even begun to appear in the work of white authors who create black protagonists. James Sallis's black hard-boiled detective Lew Griffin (who in Black Hornet operates in 1960s New Orleans), for instance, conceals himself behind the same mask of stereotype as Easy Rawlins to conduct his detective work: “People seldom pay attention to generic black men going about work they certainly wouldn't do” (164). Griffin's life is equally structured by duality and ambiguity. White friends turn out to be black, for example; victims are of varied racial backgrounds; and of a black culprit whose motive is unknown, Griffin remarks, “So do some almost manage their invisibility—for themselves and their motives. His rage, I thought. … His calm expression of it. That's what was so terrifying. And why at the same time, at some level (at more than one level, truthfully), I identified with him” (175). It then emerges that the rage stems from the man's fury at discovering his father was white and from his resultant crisis of self-perception. The rage, confusion, and frustration that can arise in this milieu from such societal and racial dualities and ambiguities, contributing to the chaos with which a hard-boiled detective (of any color) must contend, are underscored by a cameo appearance by Chester Himes, father of African American hard-boiled detective fiction: he is introduced to an audience with the words, “Chester Himes is angry. Very angry” (97).

Thanks to the emergence in recent years of Mosley and Neely, and others such as those mentioned above, the ranks of African American writers of detective fiction have swelled to permit the publication of an anthology, Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes (1995), and spawned full-length critical studies, the most notable being Stephen F. Soitos's The Blues Detective. It would seem that the long comparative drought since Himes's heyday is over. Despite Walter Mosley's eminence as a best-selling author, he cannot of course be held to be single-handedly responsible; many factors have contributed to the current burgeoning market for African American popular fiction, from the success in other genres (amplified by the translation to film) of writers like Gloria Naylor and Terry McMillan, to Maya Angelou's national Inaugural prominence, to Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. This resurgence of interest in detective fiction, however, can be at least partially explained by the resonance of the trope of invisibility as it has been used by Mosley and others to construct a literary model of detective activity with specific relevance to the realities, concerns, and history—indeed, the entire epistemology—of the contemporary urban African American experience.

Works Cited

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.

Crooks, Robert. “From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley.” College Literature 22.3 (1995): 68-90.

Diamond, Stanley. “Job and the Trickster.” 1972. Radin xi-xxii.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: New American Library, 1969.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1973.

———. Shadow and Act. 1953. New York: Vintage, 1972.

Jung, C. G. “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure.” Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Radin 195-211.

Kerenyi, Karl. “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology.” Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Radin 173-91.

Mosley, Walter. Black Betty. New York: Norton, 1994.

———. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Norton, 1990.

———. Gone Fishin'. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997.

———. A Little Yellow Dog. New York: Norton, 1996.

———. A Red Death. New York: Norton, 1991.

———. White Butterfly. New York: Norton, 1992.

Nadel, Alan. Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1988.

Neely, Barbara. Blanche among the Talented Tenth. New York: Penguin, 1994.

———. Blanche on the Lam. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Edward II. Davidson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. Intro. by Stanley Diamond. Commentaries by Karl Kerenyi and C. G. Jung. 1956. New York: Schocken, 1972.

Sallis, James. Black Hornet. New York: Avon, 1996.

Soitos, Stephen F. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: U Mass P, 1996.

Woods, Paula L., ed. Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century. New York: Doubleday, 1995.