THE LONG FALL: The First Leonid McGill Mystery
Walter Mosley
Riverhead Hardcover
Mystery
ISBN: 9781594488580
Walter Mosley took the mystery genre by storm in 1990 when he introduced a mystery series set in post-World War II Los Angeles starring a black detective named Easy Rawlins. Here was a detective who worked in the same town as Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe but walked on far different mean streets. It was a significant breakthrough in the world of mystery writing.
There have been nine Rawlins novels since then, and Mosley has gone on to write everything from serious fiction to science fiction to politics to even a book on how to write books. He is one of our most prolific authors. But he has never written a contemporary mystery. And he has never attempted, in his own words, “a classic noire suspense story.”
Until now THE LONG FALL is a new private eye series set in contemporary New York City. Mosley expects to write a total of 10 books following the adventures of private eye Leonid McGill. And longtime fans of both Mosley and mysteries will not be disappointed. This is an important and exciting arrival in the book world, perhaps every bit as significant as the start of the Easy Rawlins series.
Mosley reinvents the PI genre in THE LONG FALL. McGill has little in common with great PIs of the past. Unlike Hammett’s Spade and Chandler’s Marlowe, McGill is not the type to sit around his office, waiting for the femme fatale to come through the door with her mysterious problem. Nor is he a knight errant like Robert B. Parker’s Spenser.
McGill is dirty, plain and simple. He has made his living as a fixer for the mob and others. He does “piecework for killers and thieves.” If you want a politician caught in a hotel room with a $2,000-a-night hooker, McGill is your guy. He tells us early on: “I had no problem bringing people down, even framing them with false evidence if that was what the client paid for. I didn’t mind sending innocent men and women to prison because I didn’t believe in innocent --- and virtue didn’t pay the bills.” Here is a man existentially ready for the fall.
McGill is not a killer, at least not a triggerman. He worked on the edges of the law, often resorting to barter that was little more than extortion/blackmail. So, for example, he is able to rent his office in an Art Deco midtown skyscraper for $1,800 a month when the market value of the space is $11,000 a month. McGill knows how to trade.
But at 53, his past has finally caught up with him, leaving him trapped in what he calls an “impossible life.” He has “decided to go from crooked to slightly bent” and has managed to stay straight for a year and a half. His personal life is a disaster. He has not loved his wife for a dozen years. She ran off with another guy, and then when that imploded, she came back to him. He is father to three kids, two of them not his own. And one, his 16-year-old stepson, is heading right off the deep end and is about to become a criminal himself, unless McGill can save him.
McGill is a black man in a world where, as he points out, “It wasn’t 2008 everywhere in America.” The America of 2008 might have elected an African American president, but the past is never past, as Faulkner supposedly said. Mosley has always been a writer with a voice and social consciousness. And he has not lost it here. For example, he writes, “The scenario is simple, it just didn’t make sense; like a cat sealed in a glass globe or the United States declaring peace.”
McGill is a man haunted by his past, and he soon learns what Al Pacino’s character learned in The Godfather: Part III: it is not so easy leaving the life. At one point he meets with a 70-year-old mobster to tell him he is out. Mosley writes, “The fit septuagenarian allowed another hint of mirth to flit across his lips. No one gets out, his smile said, unless it is on his back.”
So McGill takes a job that smells bad to him from the start. An Albany PI pays him $12,000 for the whereabouts of four young black men. It is simple trafficking in information, something he has done a thousand times before. So despite his misgivings, he takes the money. McGill says, “And, anyway, I was broke and the rent was due.”
In that sentence, Mosley creates a PI for our time, capturing perfectly the financial moral relativism of the past 30 years that has brought our entire economic system to the brink of the abyss. People are soon dying as a result of McGill’s betrayal, and McGill might join them. And even if a killer does not get him, the aging private eye is getting himself. He says, “…I had the sensation of slipping further down into the sandpit of my own sins.”
Mosley has written a true noir novel here. Take this passage for instance: “One thing I had learned in fifty-three hard years of living is that there’s a different kind of death waiting for each and every one of us --- each and every day of our lives. There’s drunk drivers behind the wheels of cars, subways, trains, planes, and boats; there’s banana peels, diseases and the cockeyed medicines that supposedly cure them; you got airborne viruses, indestructible microbes in the food you eat, jealous husbands and wives, and just plain bad luck.”
Mosley has also given us a character who, despite his dark past, has a basically good heart and is decent enough to seek redemption. We can’t help but root for Leonid McGill, which will make this an interesting series to watch develop over the next decade. Will McGill find his redemption, or is it too late for a character so bad?
THE LONG FALL title is a deliberate echo of the past and Chandler’s THE LONG GOODBYE. But Walter Mosley is too great a writer to just recycle the classic PI novel. This is a PI novel for the early 21st century, and the title refers not just to the fate of one man but perhaps an entire nation as well.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
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