Book Review: “Farewell, Amethystine” by Walter Mosley
Hard-Boiled and Easy
It was a dark and stormy night. Steam rolled off the Los Angeles street like smoke from one of Groucho Marx’s cigars. It was a night not fit for a human being, but there I was. I was waiting. Waiting for a package. I opened my trench coat and checked my piece. It was still intact, unlike my nerves. I began humming a song, “Bird on a Wire,” because that’s how I felt — like I was high above the street, shaking like a leaf. Suddenly, he appeared. The courier. He had my package; I was sure of it. I slid up to him smoothly as he reached into his overcoat and pulled out a book.
“What is this?” I demanded, pointing at the book.
“What? You don’t even say, ‘Hello, my friend?” he said.
“Are you?”
“Are you what?”
“A friend?”
He sighed, tucked the package into the crook of his arm, and shook out a cigarette from a pack he was carrying. He offered one to me. I declined. I’ve been off the cancer sticks for nearly two years and wasn’t about to start up with that habit again: one that could get me killed.
“So let me ask you again,” I said, pointing to the package. “What is this?”
The courier tossed the rectangle from his free hand and I barely caught it in mine, wet and slippery from the damp. I looked at the gift closely. It was a book by Walter Mosley.
“It’s the new Easy Rawlins book,” said the courier.
“What’s it about?”
The courier sighed and took a drag.
“Set in 1970, the story follows Easy as he is hired to look into the missing ex-husband of an employee of the woman who owns his business and his house.”
“And?”
“And what? Easy starts to investigate but comes to find out that a police officer he’s friends with has gone missing, too. Can the two cases be linked?”
I sighed and scraped the muddy pavement with my shoe. Up above, a streetlight fluttered to life giving me a better view of the courier. He had a scar on his left cheek, as though someone wanted to carve a question mark into him but didn’t finish the job. His overcoat was brown to match the buzz cut of his hair. He had the tiniest suggestion of a mustache.
“Another thing,” the courier said. “The client that hires Easy for the job is Black, but her ex-husband who is missing is white.”
“That’s bound to be a complication,” I suggested.
“It is,” he replied.
I looked at him and looked at the book cover and then back at the courier again.
“So, I guess the question is, is the book any good?” I asked.
The courier scratched at his skull with the hand fingering the smoke and seemed to sigh and cough on the spot, as though he couldn’t make up his mind as to which action he wanted to fulfill.
“Aren’t you goin’ to read the thing and find out for yourself?” he asked.
“I like to know what I’m getting myself into,” I countered.
The courier sighed and shrugged his shoulders, as though he were suddenly uncomfortable in his skin.
“I’ll keep this relatively short,” said the courier. “The book is fun. There’s a lot of entertainment to be had in these mystery yarns. There’s also a bit of subtext in the read as to how it’s like to be a Black man with a sizeable reputation for getting into trouble during the Vietnam Era.”
“But what’s not so good about it?” I enquired.
The courier looked at me as though he wanted to take back the book and throw it squarely right at my head.
“Well, I’d reckon that it suffers from the usual trappings of hardboiled stories,” he said. “By the end of the book, it’s kind of hard to follow what’s going on because of all the double and triple crosses. Things that may make sense on the page, but hardly would come across as realistic in real life.”
The courier licked his lips and added, “But did I say that the book was fun?”
“You did,” I said. “Thank you. I’m sure I’ll give this a read.”
With that, the courier shuffled his feet back towards the way he came, evaporating into the smog and smoke of that dank Los Angeles night. I tucked the book into my trench coat, mindful of not getting it wetter than it already was. I had determined that there were a great deal of books out there that were like Farewell, Amethystine. However, reading just one more book like it couldn’t be the most egregious of sins. No, the most egregious of sins involved a bottle of brandy and the bullet-shaped hole I’d left in the head of a previous courier. This man tonight had gotten off lucky.
I turned and walked. Walked down the cold, desolate, uncaring streets of the City of Lost Angels. I was determined to find a reading nook, a local watering hole where I could wet my whistle and settle down for a good read. It was the perfect night for such a scholarly activity. Maybe I could hire a prostitute to read the book to me. There were far worse ideas I could come up with and I knew of a good brothel out on the Sunset Strip. I fingered the collar of my coat and began to walk, began to dream, began to think of all the ways I could squeeze my satisfaction out of my latest acquisition. This was the stuff that warmed the heart of this constant reader, and I squinted and walked on into the din of the mist that obscured the moon. It was a dark and stormy night.
Walter Mosley’s Farewell, Amethystine will be published by Mulholland Books on June 4, 2024.
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