Walter Mosley with "Black Betty" paints a great fresco of the divisions and injustices of American society

Los Angeles, 1961. John Kennedy took office a few months ago in the White House, and Martin Luther King gathered more and more proselytes in his battle to eliminate racial discrimination in the United States. Yet, in the streets of metropolises and in the American countryside, black skin continues to condemn men and women to marginalization and ghettoization.

The "black" private investigator Easy Rawlins has not yet completely abandoned the hope that America can become a better place, even if he immediately has to think above all about how to make ends meet. He then accepts an assignment from a stranger who asks him to find a missing woman, Elizabeth Eady, known as Betty. Easy accepts because he can't spit on two hundred dollars even if the assignment smells like a rip-off and a mile away from danger. But above all Betty is the ebony goddess who filled Rawlins' dreams when he was just a little boy. She is the woman that all men wanted and that no one could conquer. Betty, so beautiful and so damned, for whom Easy is willing to risk everything. Even life.

Worthy heir of hard boiled masters such as Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane, Walter Mosley gives us with "Betty the Black" (21letters, 2024, Euro 17, pp. 256) a poignant and elegant noir, which is at the same time a great detective novel and a snapshot of social history, a live testimony of the condition of blacks in post-war America. Mosley, with raw realism, narrates, subjectively, using the voice and thoughts of his protagonist, a society, the American one, where the strongest, the most violent, the richest always wins. A society where white matters more than black, the rich more than the poor, the male more than the female. Thus, it tells of a humanity accustomed to violence, oppression, because it is forced to accept discrimination and injustice. A humanity where a ruthless law reigns, summed up in the Latin saying homo homini lupus.

An unfair universe whose rules Easy Rawlins knows inside out. He learned from an early age what it meant to be black in a white-dominated America. He knows that at any poker table he sits down with a white man he will be dealt cheated cards. However, he's not the type to let things get in his way. He went to war, he learned to evaluate human beings and above all he is no longer willing to accept injustices, especially if they are perpetrated by those who think that human beings should be judged by the shades of their skin. He is not a vigilante, nor a Don Quixote. He doesn't want to be a hero, but he can't help but think that there are causes that deserve heroism, risk, fear, pain.

To this protagonist, so human, so true, so far from losers and stereotypical anti-heroes, Mosley gives an underlying bitterness that never becomes desperation, nor disillusionment, nor even less cynicism. It makes its protagonist move, giving the impression that it is destiny, fate or chance that determines his days and his actions. Easy, however, continues to choose, to decide, to act, in the name of a fundamental honesty that we could call justice. In the end, not everything will be fixed and not everything will go right, but this is life and for our protagonist it is worth living it... or dying while trying to do the right thing.