"The Black Dick": Race, Sexuality, and Discourse in the L.A. Novels of Walter Mosley

Abstract

streets were dark with something more than night. (Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder 13) Black narrative writing in America often employs a detective-like protagonist struggling against an evil society - as Theodore O. Mason, Jr., points out (182) - yet, curiously, detective fiction itself is a genre that has attracted few writers (most notably, in decades past, Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes). In Mosley's four L.A. detective novels, he joins small cohort of detective fiction writers, apparently as part of a radical project to enter mostly white, male, and conservative populist terrain of American detective fiction. At same time, however, Mosley's often uncritical use of traditional hard-boiled detective formula seems to work against this project by employing a detective narrator in a previously invisible textual location - Los Angeles. Indeed, there is a tension between Mosley's subject and his method, and this tension prompts my basic question about Mosley's L.A. novels: Are they - with use of a narrator, characters, and locations - authentically transgressive texts, or are they discursively subsumed under detective story formula (and especially L.A. detective fiction paradigm, as constructed by Chandler) and do they come, thus, to represent at best nostalgic traces of hardboiled tradition? In other words, are novels merely exotic versions of American detective story, as opposed to subversive texts? My answer to these questions is an Ellisonian yes and no. In terms of use of characters and locations - and also in terms of generic violations of hardboiled detective story - Mosley's novels indeed function as texts of difference. Yet when they deploy Chandlerian hardboiled detective and ultimately embrace essentially conservative thematics of L.A. detective story, Mosley's novels mute subversiveness and reinforce reassuring quality of formulaic detective fiction. In this light, I will read Mosley's novels as metacritical allegories that reflect a fundamental ambivalence about his own intervention into white (detective) discourse. Two recent essays on detective fiction decisively argue in favor of a discursive difference in texts like Mosley's L.A. novels. In Chandler Comes to Harlem: Racial Politics in Thrillers of Chester Himes, Peter J. Rabinowitz argues that Himes could not just imitate hardboiled novels and, as Himes claims, simply make the face black in his detective novels. Instead, Rabinowitz insists, Chandlerian notion of a self-contained integrity and noir heroism is unavailable to Himes's detectives inasmuch as their situation . . . is inextricably tied up in racial politics (22).(1) In another essay, Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins: Detective and Afro-American Fiction, Theodore O. Mason, Jr., similarly argues that, despite his use of detective genre, Mosley breaks with traditional white detective story through oppositional use of subject matter. Even more, Mason contends that Easy Rawlins discovers inadequacy of assumed cultural knowledge - especially about race and sexuality - in construction of self in a racist and sexist society, and thus joins other protagonists (like Milkman in Morrison's Song of Solomon and Papa LaBas in Reed's Mumbo Jumbo) who similarly recognize constructed nature of identity in a racist society. Although Rabinowitz and Mason offer strong arguments in favor of a transgressive detective fiction, both ultimately tell only part of story, for they ignore way in which story and detective in Himes's and Mosley's novels reflect traditional hardboiled detective fiction. Despite Mosley's counter-discursive deployment of a protagonist, his L.A. detective novels reinforce conservative values of traditional American detective fiction. While (as in Chandler) Mosley's Rawlins moves through a world in which white politicians, businessmen, and cops - as well as community leaders - are all corrupt, his novels never put the law itself . …