The first novel by “master of mystery” ( The New York Times ) Walter Mosley, featuring Easy Rawlins, the most iconic African American detective in all of fiction. Named one of the “best 100 mystery novels of all time” by the Mystery Writers of America, this special thirtieth anniversary edition features an all new introduction from the author. The year is 1948, the town is Los Angeles. Easy Rawlins, a black war veteran, has just been fired from his job at a defense factory plant. Drinking in his friend’s bar, he’s wondering how he’ll manage to make ends meet, when a white man in a linen suit approaches him and offers him good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a missing blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs. Easy has no idea that by taking this job, his life is about to change forever. “More than simply a detective novel…[Mosley is] a talented author with something vital to say about the distance between the black and white worlds, and with a dramatic way to say it” ( The New York Times ).

"Mournful, insightful, and mystical...Mosley's best work of fiction." —Elle New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley introduces us to Socrates Fortlow, an "astonishing character" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) in this acclaimed collection of linked stories. "I either committed a crime or had a crime done to me every day I was in jail. Once you go to prison you belong there." Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his own two rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working a dead-end job at the supermarket and moving perilously close to invisibility, Socrates seeks inner truth and redemption amid the violence and hopelessness of South Central Los Angeles. In fourteen intertwining tales, Socrates grapples with situations that are never easy as he attempts to hold on to a job and offer a lifeline to a young man on his same bloodstained path. In Socrates's battle-scarred wisdom, there is hope of turning the world around in this "powerful, hard-hitting, unrelenting, poignant short fiction" ( Booklist ).

Easy finally believes he can lead a simple life and leave his haunted past behind him—until he meets a woman who changes everything. November 1963: Easy's settled into a steady gig as a school custodian. It's a quiet, simple existence—but a few moments of ecstasy with a sexy teacher will change all that. When the lady vanishes, Easy's stuck with a couple of corpses, the cops on his back, and a little yellow dog who's nobody's best friend. With his not-so-simple past snapping at his heels, and with enemies old and new looking to get even, Easy must kiss his careful little life good-bye—and step closer to the edge.

Easy Rawlins comes home one day to find Easter, the daughter of his friend Christmas Black, left on his doorstep. Easy knows that this could only mean that the ex-marine Black is probably dead, or will be soon.Easter's appearance is only the beginning, as Easy is immersed in a sea of problems. The love of his life is marrying another man and his friend Mouse is wanted for murder. As he's searching for a clue to Christmas Black's whereabouts, two suspicious MPs hire him to find his friend Black on behalf of the US Army. Easy's investigation brings him to Faith Laneer, a blonde woman with a dark past.As Easy begins to put the pieces together, he realizes that Black's dissappearance has its roots in Vietnam, and that Faith might be in a world of danger.

Mosley departs from his Easy Rawlins mysteries for this thought-provoking novel. Charles Blakey is a young black man whose life is slowly crumbling. When a mysterious white man offers to rent Charles's basement for the summer, Charles embarks on a journey into inconceivable worlds of power and manipulation, and unimagined realms of humanity.

A "taut collection" ( USA TODAY ) of seven stories featuring Easy Rawlins from New York Times bestselling and award-winning mystery writer Walter Mosley. In the "delectably hard-boiled" ( Entertainment Weekly ) Six Easy Pieces, beloved Ezekiel Rawlins now has a steady job as senior head custodian of Sojourner Truth High School, a nice house with a garden, a loving woman, and children. He counts the blessings of leading a law-abiding life but is nowhere near happy. Easy mourns the loss of his best friend, Mouse. Though he tries to leave the street life behind, he still finds himself trading favors and investigating cases of arson, murder, and missing people. People who can't depend on the law to solve their problems, seek out Easy. A bomb is set in the high school where Easy works. A man's daughter runs off with his employee. A beautiful woman turns up dead and the man who loved her is wrongly accused. Easy is the man people turn to in search of justice and retribution. He even becomes party to a killing that the police might call murder.

Walter Mosley delivers at last the compelling master work everyone's been waiting for--a novel so intriguing, so soulful, so unstoppably dramatic that it will rank among the classic mysteries of our time. At the height of the riots that cripple LA in the summer of 1965, a white man is pulled from his car by a mob and escapes into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a red-headed woman known as Little Scarlet is found dead in that apartment building--and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. The police ask Easy Rawlins to investigate. What he finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around race and passion. Rawlins's hunt for the killer will reveal a new city emerging from the ashes--and a new life for Easy and his friends. Mosley's lean and muscular vernacular captures the heat and the rhythm of Los Angeles' heart, where danger is the common currency of everyday life.

Houston, 1939. A nineteen-year-old Easy Rawlins and his friend, the dangerous Raymond ?Mouse? Alexander, are about to take the ride of a lifetime - into a mysterious bayou world of voodoo, sex, revenge and death that will both change and link their destinies for ever. The first book Walter Mosley wrote, Gone Fishin' introduces us to the world of Easy and Mouse and shows us the basis of their friendship - quite literally a matter of life or death. Walter Mosley is a major writer of his time - the promise of genius is clear to see in Gone Fishin'.

A brand-new mystery series from one of the countryas best-known, best-loved writers: a new character, a new city, a new era. A new Walter Mosley. His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. Itas a name that takes a little explaining, but heas used to it. aDaddy was a communist and great-great- Granddaddy was a slave master from Scotland. You know, the black manas family tree is mostly root. Whatever you see aboveground is only a hint at the real story.a Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGillas an old-school P.I. working a city thatas gotten fancy all around him. Fancy or not, he has always managed to get byakeep a roof over the head of his wife and kids, and still manage a little fun on the sideamostly because heas never been above taking a shady job for a quick buck. But like the city itself, McGill is turning over a new leaf, adecided to go from crooked to slightly bent.a New York City in the twenty-first century is a city full of secretsaand still a place that reacts when you know where to poke and which string to pull. Thatas exactly the kind of thing Leonid McGill knows how to do. As soon as "The Long Fall" begins, with McGill calling in old markers and greasing NYPD palms to unearth some seemingly harmless information for a high-paying client, he learns that even in this cleaned-up city, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be constantly tested. And we learn that with this protagonist, this city, this time, Mosley has tapped a rich new vein thatas inspiring his best work since the classic "Devil in a Blue Dress."

Walter Mosley, "one of crime fiction's brightest stars" (People), returns to mysteries at last-with a dazzling new thriller set in the deadly back alleys of 1950s L.A.... Bookshop owner Paris Minton is minding his own business when a brief encounter with a beautiful stranger gets him beaten, shot at, robbed, and then burned out of store and home. Paris needs help but his secret weapon-brave, reckless WWII hero Fearless Jones-is in jail. Vowing to dish out some heavy justice, Paris plots to get Jones back on the street. But when these two men come together, they'll find themselves trapped in a bewildering vortex of sex, money, and murder-and a dicey endgame that's littered with dangerous players...

New York Times bestsellers Ed McBain, Walter Mosely, and Donald Westlake each provided a brand-new, never-before-published tale for this unique collection of stories edited by bestselling author and mystery legend Ed McBain. "Merely Hate" by Ed McBain: When a string of Muslim cabdrivers are killed, and the evidence points to another ethnic group, the detectives of the 87th Precinct must hunt down a killer before the city explodes in violence. "Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large: Walking the Line" by Walter Mosley: Felix Orlean is a New York City journalism student who needs a job to cover his rent. An ad in the paper leads him to Archibald Lawless, and a descent into a shadow world where no one and nothing is as it first seems. "Walking Around Money" by Donald E. Westlake: The master of the comic mystery is back with an all-new novella featuring hapless crook John Dortmunder, who gets involved in a crime that supposedly no one will ever know happened. Naturally, when something it too good to be true, it usually is, and Dortmunder is going to get to the bottom of this caper before he's left holding the bag.

A convention-defying novel by bestselling writer Walter Mosley, John Woman recounts the transformation of an unassuming boy named Cornelius Jones into John Woman, an unconventional history professor--while the legacy of a hideous crime lurks in the shadows. At twelve years old, Cornelius, the son of an Italian-American woman and an older black man from Mississippi named Herman, secretly takes over his father's job at a silent film theater in New York's East Village. Five years later, as Herman lives out his last days, he shares his wisdom with his son, explaining that the person who controls the narrative of history controls their own fate. After his father dies and his mother disappears, Cornelius sets about reinventing himself--as Professor John Woman, a man who will spread Herman's teachings into the classrooms of his unorthodox southwestern university and beyond. But there are other individuals who are attempting to influence the narrative of John Woman, and who might know something about the facts of his hidden past. Engaging with some of the most provocative ideas of recent intellectual history, John Woman is a compulsively readable, deliciously unexpected novel about the way we tell stories, and whether the stories we tell have the power to change the world.