RFBC #11: Every Man A King
How many people have written more books than Walter Mosley? By our count, he’s written 49 novels, two graphic novels, a couple of full-length plays, six works of nonfiction, and a couple handfuls of scripts. That’s nearly two books a year. The guy’s a machine.
Mosley’s best known for his hardboiled detective novels featuring Easy Rawlins—the first of which, Devil in a Blue Dress, became a big film starring Denzel Washington, Jennifer Beals, and Don Cheadle. That book is set in 1948; the most recent (of 15) Easy Rawlins novels is set in 1969. Altogether, they paint a vivid picture of the twentieth-century Black life in Los Angeles and feature a cast of characters with names like Mouse Alexander, Fearless Jones, and Christmas Black.
Every Man a King is not an Easy Rawlins story—but it is a hardboiled detective novel, and it features a whole lot of colorfully named characters. It’s Mosley’s second novel starring Joe “King” Oliver: ex-NYPD, now private investigator—and the subject of the May 2023 edition of Radio Free Book Club. Spoilers follow, so read if you dare. And listen to the show, which you can stream on Mixcloud right here—or just about anywhere you get your podcast fixes.
Show notes:
The RFBC crew for our May2023 show was Indianapolis writer Ken Honeywell; writer, digital strategies, and Goodreads superstar Christine Hudson; architect/developer/philanthropist Craig Von Deylen; and financial advisor/NFL official Steve Woods. Our show was recorded at Listen Hear in Indianapolis and produced by the peerless Oreo Jones for 99.1 WQRT-LP.
We were all intrigued by the premise. The story is set spinning when Roger Ferris, the wealthy boyfriend of Oliver’s nonagenarian grandmother, enlists him in to investigate the case of Xavier Quiller: a white nationalist accused murder and espionage whom Ferris has reason to believe was set up. A Black detective, engaged with a brilliant racist, whom we also discover is married to a beautiful Black woman? Something doesn’t make sense, which would seem to make for a pretty intriguing detective novel.
We found the second case…less interesting. We all felt that the case Oliver was working concurrently, involving his ex-wife’s Wall Street bigwig husband’s scam to sell heating oil as diesel fuel, wasn’t nearly as interesting as the Quiller case. Unfortunately, the heating oil scam seemed to take up more of the story. We’d all have liked the book better without it.
A partial list of weird character names appearing in the book: Melquarth Frost, Bexleigh Terrell, Henri Tourneau, Augustine Antrobus, Sola Prendergast, Forthright Jorgenson, Gladstone Palmer, Tremont Lewis. They go on. Bonus points if you can guess which of the above is a woman’s name.
The women are treated like broads. Yes, we know. It’s a hardboiled detective novel. Still, Joe never met a skirt he wasn’t willing to chase (and bed), and he ogles just about any woman under the age of ninety—
—except for Aja and Oliya. Aja because she’s Joe’s daughter, who also happens to be a beautiful teenage genius. Oliya because she’s a badass bodyguard who’s probably going to hook up with Melquarth Frost, a career criminal/murderer/torturer who also happens to be one of Joe’s best pals. (Note to Mr. Mosley: Christine would love to see Aja and Oliya team up to fight some bad guys.)
So what’s up with that? Joe seems to know a lot of people who work on the shady side of the street. Probably goes with the territory. But we tried to get a handle on Joe’s moral code, which allows some pretty horrendous behavior. In the end, we decided that Joe was all about justice. He could let criminal behavior slide if the perps weren’t hurting anybody. And lying, torture, and even murder were justifiable if they would help him get to the truth.
Funniest and perhaps least believable part of the book: Joe’s grandmother is shot in the butt. She finds the whole thing amusing.
We all agreed: We’d probably hire Joe if we needed a detective and we didn’t mind a little quasi-legal maneuvering in the interest of justice being served.
That ending? Ferris’s daughter, a character we’ve never met until right close to the end of the book, turns out to be the horrible person responsible for the butt shot, which had nothing to do with the heating oil case and was really only peripheral to the Quiller case. And Joe beds Quiller’s wife, and Quiller dies—by suicide?—in prison, and Joe gives all the dirt Quiller had on dozens of the world’s most powerful people to…someone? To hide? Maybe so it will be in play for a future Joe “King” Oliver adventure? It was a little disappointing all the way around.
Would we recommend it? Craig liked the book and would happily recommend it. Christine and Steve and Ken all agreed they’d recommend it to readers who liked detective novels—but it wasn’t really for them. Christine also hated the book cover, opining that the guy depicted there did not in any way look like the Joe “King” Oliver she imagined. We could only but agree.
Bonus recommendations: Steve recommended the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Christine recommended Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden. Craig recommended Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act; and 10% Happier by Dan Harris. Ken recommended the first of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie private eye novels, Case Histories.
Next month: We’ll have some questions for each other regarding Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You. Join us, won’t you?
