GONE FISHIN'

Fans of Easy Rawlins who worry that he's been growing old too fast—Mosley's five novels from Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) to A Little Yellow Dog (p. 565) have carried him from 1948 to 1963—will be happy to have this prequel set in 1939, a slender coming-of-age story that takes Easy and his violent friend Raymond (Mouse) Alexander from their boyhood home in Houston's Fifth Ward to the aptly named town of Pariah, where Mouse plans to squeeze money out of his stepfather, Reese Corn, to underwrite his marriage to his sweetheart EttaMae. Easy, scared that Mouse will find out about the company he's been keeping with EttaMae, agrees to drive the car Mouse has swindled for the trip, and the two of them set off into a landscape dotted with hapless hitchhikers and seductive voodoo queens, hard men, willing women, and hellfire preachers—most with unforgettable stories to tell. By the time Easy heads back for Houston, Mouse will have gotten his money, Easy will have lost whatever innocence he had in "my real war" before the white man's war of 1941, and Mosley's vast audience will have learned that "life was so hard that we were too tired from just living to lend a hand." No mystery, but a densely imagined prologue that goes a long way toward explaining why Easy spends so much of his adult life hamstrung by his deepest loyalties, as if every friendship were a life sentence.