Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley
May. 23rd, 2009 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meganbmooreLike Mosley’s better known Easy Rawlins series, this is a noir story focusing on a black man and his best friend who get caught up in a series of escalating events.
Set in 1950’s L.A., Paris Minton has only recently opened a used bookshop when a woman named Love comes in, looking for help and pursued, of course, by mysterious men. Soon, he’s been beaten, shot at and robbed. And then he went home and found his store-and home-burned to the ground. He knows he needs help but his secret weapon is his brave, charming friend, Fearless Jones, a WWII veteran, who’s in jail. And so, naturally, he has to get him out.
The friendship between Paris and Fearless and overall plot play out fairly similarly to the friendship between Easy and Mouse in Devil in A Blue Dress, though some themes are different, such as the inclusion of Jews and their treatment at the time, and Mosley has come a ways as an author in between the two books. Paris and Fearless are easy to like (and I’m especially fond of Paris’s love of books) as are their supporting cast. Devil in A Blue Dress is less misogynistic than most noir, and Fearless Jones is even less so. Multiple women get to have sex without dying. Actually, I think only one woman dies, and for important plot reasons. Women also get to have sex without being temptresses out to lead our hero astray.
I was also better able to follow who killed and attacked who and why, though that did still get a little confusing.
Set in 1950’s L.A., Paris Minton has only recently opened a used bookshop when a woman named Love comes in, looking for help and pursued, of course, by mysterious men. Soon, he’s been beaten, shot at and robbed. And then he went home and found his store-and home-burned to the ground. He knows he needs help but his secret weapon is his brave, charming friend, Fearless Jones, a WWII veteran, who’s in jail. And so, naturally, he has to get him out.
The friendship between Paris and Fearless and overall plot play out fairly similarly to the friendship between Easy and Mouse in Devil in A Blue Dress, though some themes are different, such as the inclusion of Jews and their treatment at the time, and Mosley has come a ways as an author in between the two books. Paris and Fearless are easy to like (and I’m especially fond of Paris’s love of books) as are their supporting cast. Devil in A Blue Dress is less misogynistic than most noir, and Fearless Jones is even less so. Multiple women get to have sex without dying. Actually, I think only one woman dies, and for important plot reasons. Women also get to have sex without being temptresses out to lead our hero astray.
I was also better able to follow who killed and attacked who and why, though that did still get a little confusing.