[His new novel, “Every Man a King,” is a hard-boiled tale of
billionaires, white nationalists and a detective with a complicated
past.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WALTER MOSLEY’S NEW YORK: CLASSES DIVIDED, RACES AT WAR  
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Daniel Nieh
February 17, 2023
The New York Times Book Review
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_ His new novel, “Every Man a King,” is a hard-boiled tale of
billionaires, white nationalists and a detective with a complicated
past. _

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_Every Man a King
A King Oliver Novel_
Walter Mosley
Mulholland Books
ISBN-13: 9780316460217

The title of Walter Mosley’s provocative new novel, “Every Man a
King,” is a motto with a violent history. It was the catchphrase of
the firebrand Louisiana populist Huey Long, who might have challenged
Franklin Roosevelt from the left in 1936, were he not assassinated
first.

These words — a cry for equality from a bygone era — are a snug
fit for Mosley’s novel, which skitters across the spectrum between
orthodox and radical like a polygraph needle wired to a nervy
accomplice.

The narrative begins with Joe King Oliver, a Black ex-cop and private
detective in New York, driving uptown to meet a client at a palatial
estate overlooking the Hudson River. The client is Roger Ferris, an
enormously rich old white guy. Roger is the boyfriend of Joe’s
feisty grandmother, Brenda, whose parents were sharecroppers.

Roger asks Joe to investigate what appears to be a government
kidnapping. A man named Alfred Xavier Quiller has been unduly jailed
in a secret cell on Rikers Island. Quiller is a noted inventor, a
“natural-born genius,” and a manifesto-penning icon of white
nationalism. Jillionaire Roger claims to abhor Quiller’s politics,
but, he intones, “the betrayal of our civil rights is a crime worse
than any he’s being held for.”

Freedoms betrayed, classes divided, races at war — such heady themes
lace the length of Mosley’s 46th novel. Fans of his Easy Rawlins and
Leonid McGill series will not be disappointed, for we remain in the
realm of deliciously gritty noir. There will be cold-cocks and
gunfights and stakeouts. There will be tough-talking heavies named
Rembert Cormody and D’Artagnan Aramois, formidable femmes called
Amethyst Banks and Minta Kraft.

I was struggling to update my corkboard when I read this exquisitely
pulpy line: “Lawler was a New York blue blood who married a nouveau
riche nobody named Constantine Psomas — a.k.a. the can man.”
Warmth filled my guts like whiskey. I didn’t need a map. Mosley was
driving me to Rikers in a cream-colored Bianchina, and Mingus was
playing on the stereo. I was along for the ride.

As readers learned in “Down the River Unto the Sea,” the 2018
novel in which Joe King Oliver first appeared, Mosley’s latest
private eye has spent some time on Rikers himself. A decade ago, Joe
was the rare clean cop. Framed by corrupt colleagues, he spent
torturous months in solitary. When he re-enters the prison in the new
book to find Quiller, his trauma is palpable: “My left hand was
shaking slightly and my feet felt as if they were growing toe roots.
… The sweating started when the iron door slammed shut.”

This back story brings the novel’s high-tone themes to life. Joe’s
experience of wrongful incarceration forms a psychic bond between him
and the racist ideologue he’s been employed to rescue. As the story
unfolds, prison contractors emerge as central antagonists —
alongside alt-right militias and Russian oil-trading syndicates. Did I
mention that Joe’s ex-wife’s husband, a chiseled Wall Street
swindler named Coleman Tesserat, has also been thrown in prison?

Joe takes on this second case out of consideration to his brilliant
daughter, Aja-Denise, Tesserat’s stepchild. As the two
investigations tangle together, the narrative threads become difficult
to follow. But Mosley’s labyrinth leads Joe to a delightful variety
of artfully drawn settings. One minute, he’s outwitting oligarchs in
the Obsidian Club, a gleaming Midtown billionaires’ lounge; the
next, he’s bantering with a sex worker in hardscrabble Brownsville,
“a place where children learn lessons that they spend the rest of
their lives trying to forget.”

All this is classic Mosley, a master of the hard-boiled style that
Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett pioneered in the 1930s. The
byzantine plot, the suave private eye, all the uncanny similes; it’s
a cocktail that skilled authors will serve as long as bartenders are
still pouring Negronis. At times, Mosley seems reluctant to part with
outmoded aspects of the formula: Quiller’s fatale wife has a figure
“reminiscent of a Playboy bunny of the late ’60s — opulent,
impossible”; Joe describes a dandy he encounters as “what once
might have been called an effeminate Black man.” When Joe gruffly
resigns himself to evolving social mores, I wondered whether I was
hearing the voice of the 71-year-old author and not the 44-year-old
detective: “I was old-school. In my heart I held women to what used
to be called a higher standard. But the world had changed and if I
wanted a relationship with the new order I had to at least be aware of
its expectations.”

Over the course of his prolific career, Mosley has accumulated laurels
including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy and a lifetime-achievement medal
from the National Book Foundation. In my local bookstore, his novels
are shelved in the mystery section. What distinguishes these works
from certain crime-centric tomes on the literature shelves, such as
“Motherless Brooklyn,” “The Goldfinch” or — while we’re at
it — “The Brothers Karamazov”? In interviews, Mosley has
objected to the label of “mystery writer.” Chandler, who also
bristled at the pigeonholing of his oeuvre, insisted that “when a
book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic
performance it becomes literature.”

I like this blatantly subjective standard, and my nose tells me that
Chandler often met it. As for “Every Man a King,” it’s a
sterling example of a genre that it scarcely transcends. Of course,
only a snob would always prize artistic performance over wisdom and
fun. Mosley is an avid consumer of both poetry and comic books. When
it comes to questions of what’s mystery and what’s literature,
what’s tired and what’s timeless, and what’s highbrow or low, he
seems to possess all the detachment of a Taoist sage. “Trying to set
yourself up for importance and legacy … who cares?” he told The
Paris Review.

Mosley imbues his memorable protagonist with a corresponding
equanimity. When Aja-Denise castigates Joe for taking on Quiller’s
case, he is at once pained by his daughter’s judgment and proud of
her principles. “If someone had asked me at that moment to explain
my emotional state,” Joe says, “I would have said, Everything good
and everything bad that makes me human.”

 

_Daniel Nieh is a translator and a novelist. His most recent book is
“Take No Names.”_

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