Charles E. Wilson, Jr. Walter Mosley: a Critical Companion.

Charles E. Wilson, Jr. Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood P, 2003. 232 pp. $35.00.

Despite the acclaim popular crime and mystery writing has achieved for its revelations of dark motives concealed beneath the veneer of normalcy and the journeys it offers down mean streets and into questionable neighborhoods, this body of work constitutes a mannerist rather than a realist genre. The point becomes clear upon consideration of two transformative processes it offers readers. The first process is the curious attainment of pleasurable entertainment resulting from its treatment of violent rupture of the social contract. Second is the dependency of the genre upon redundancy to engage our attention. To generate pleasure through rendition of violence and anti-social behavior requires the use of such distancing techniques as obliquity of narration, which turns attention away from the crime and onto the procedures employed by detective protagonists for explaining the means and motives of crime. In contrast to local TV news reports which work to induce apprehension in an audience--this terrible thing could happen to any ordinary person, including me--the fictionalized accounts make crime an exhibit for philosophical meditation on the origins of evil in society (is money its root or is social pathology the explanation?). As for redundancy, every regular consumer of crime and mystery fiction already knows what the newest installment in the production of the genre will bring. The story is the same as before, and that is grounds for satisfaction, because the new story, having been validated by countless repetitions of conventions of plot and so on, allows a reader to learn how this author this time works variations into the pattern.

For critics of the mannerist genre, analysis is largely already prescribed. One links the author or work under scrutiny to a tradition in the genre (Golden Age, Cozy, Hard-Boiled) and proceeds upon that ground to figure out the innovations. When writing for a series, as Charles E. Wilson, Jr., has done with this addition to the Greenwood Press "Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers," the outline of analysis is also predetermined. House editors stipulate a necessary coverage of plot development, character development, thematic issues, historical background, narrative structure, and an "alternative reading," which calls for application of such approaches as Feminist Criticism, Postcolonial Analysis, New Criticism, and whatever additional modes of investigation the critic may choose to demonstrate. Thus, a contributor to the "Companion" series (in obedience to the principle of full disclosure, this reviewer acknowledges that he has produced two Greenwood Companion volumes of his own), such as Wilson in this book, rather than writing a sustained analytic argument or interpretation, must create room within the publisher's template for his original observations. Inevitably, then, singular criticism is likely to be fragmentary.

Faced as he is with two frameworks of convention--the first inhering in the mannerist quality of the detective genre and the second deriving from his publisher's requirements--Wilson does a creditable job of securing space for suggestive comments on the work of Walter Mosley. His first technical decision was to treat just eight of the fifteen works of fiction Mosley has published. This allows him to present his selections as representative, thereby reducing the effect of redundancy. An even more important decision on Wilson's part was to include in each of the chapters devoted to these eight novels a brief section on the historical context. In this way he not only contextualizes the fiction but also enforces the point that the adventures of Easy Rawlins and those of Mosley's other protagonists constitute a saga of Black experience in the parlous time and place of post-World War II California. The subtext of the saga, as Wilson lays it out in the sections of his chapters focused on thematic issues, is a struggle for masculine identity delineated through ethical themes, which is a feature placing Mosley's detective in the hard-boiled category of the genre. By Wilson's reckoning, the use of a sequence of novels to inscribe this saga-text and its accompanying subtext are Mosley's distinctive innovations in the redundant genre of the mannered detective story.

The portions of chapters given over to plot development, usually no more than four pages each, provide little more than summary, as though many users of the Companion volume will need reminding of what they read. The similarly brief considerations of narrative structure in each chapter, however, delve into the workings of the familiar first-person voice of the hard-boiled variety of detective to make a useful distinction between the co-existing present-I and past-I perspectives that allow an author to detail progress through events (the past-I) while giving the detective narrator options for commentary that aid in his characterization. Seeking narrative structure in Mosley's non-detective writings, Wilson takes an appropriately functional view. RL's Dream, for example, he describes as a cyclical work influenced by the improvisational nature of the blues music performed by the lead character Atwater "Soupspoon" Wise. Mosley's science fiction work Blue Light is shown by Wilson's analysis to be founded on its protagonist's intrusive insistence that he is crafting a manuscript, a pattern that renders the work self-reflexive. And the episodic compilation Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, which probably strikes many readers as a clutch of vignettes about experiences of an ex-offender adjusting to freedom, Wilson argues is a novel because Socrates Fortlow's self-discovery forms its armature.

In addition to requiring chapters on novels deemed representative, the publisher's template for the Companion specifies the book shall open with a chapter on the life of Mosley and one on his literary heritage. In the former Wilson probes the autobiographical sources for Mosley's expressed attitudes and familial knowledge of African American striving to attain a stake in society, while outlining as well his transition from a man unsure of his vocation into a famous writer. The chapter on literary models for Mosley's work takes pains to connect the body of his work to that of other Black writers in the popular genres of mystery and science fiction. This linkage gains value later when, in the chapter on the novel Black Betty, in which the title-character's employer sexually pursues her, Wilson declares that the literary and historical foundation for Mosley is Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

This is a work for beginning students, not for professional critics; yet, by adapting his readings of Mosley's works to the specifications set by Greenwood, Wilson assures readers the benefit of insights honed by a critic's knowledge of the mannerist genre of detective fiction.

John M. Reilly

Howard University