Easy’s Epiphany : GONE FISHIN’.<i> By Walter Mosley</i> .<i> Black Classic Press: 244 pp., $22</i>

One of the unique aspects of Walter Mosley’s mystery novels is that they are presented as time-hopping memoirs narrated by their protagonist, a wily and philosophic African American of seventysomething years named Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. Each book focuses on a different period in Easy’s eventful life, but one memory continues to reverberate throughout all of them.

Early in the author’s first published novel, “Devil In a Blue Dress,” Easy recalls his homicidal friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander: “He had killed his stepfather five years earlier and blamed it on another man.” We are further told, in this and in the succeeding Rawlins mysteries, that Easy’s involvement in this murder produced such a profound change in him that he was moved to transform himself from an illiterate Texas teenager into a traveled and well-read man of the world.

Authors of mystery series often add tantalizing bits of backstory to their works. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, has Dr. Watson refer to a number of unwritten cases, like that involving the giant rat of Sumatra, the details of which “the world is not yet prepared to know.” And it seemed particularly clever, and brave, of Mosley to have his hero refer to his epiphany without providing us with full details.

Well, it now appears that a complete account of Easy’s defining moment has been in existence for quite a while in manuscript form. “Gone Fishin’ ” is a novel Mosley wrote before “Devil” but was unable to sell. It is available now, not from Norton, the publisher of the Rawlins mysteries, but from Black Classic Press, a small house specializing in works of history.

“There are about a dozen black writers whose work sells really big,” Mosley is quoted by Time magazine as saying. “We’re making millions for white publishers, and I thought it was time to give back something.”

What he has given back is not an Easy Rawlins mystery. Unlike the other books in the series, which are very much in the private eye tradition of deduction and disclosure, “Gone Fishin’ ” is a short, muscular and violent coming-of-age adventure. Set in 1939 Texas, it chronicles a car trip taken by a naive, 19-year-old Easy and his pal, Mouse, from Houston to the latter’s East Texas hometown, a hardscrabble patch with the Dickensian name of Pariah.

As one might expect, the journey is a bumpy ride, complete with two rather dim young lovers on the run, a hot-blooded conjure woman and her hunchback son, a pleasant but dotty aging grande dame and assorted other vividly etched characters, not the least of which is Mouse’s stepfather, Daddy Reese Corn, a man of great strength brought quickly to his knees by the power of voodoo. All of them are like puppets manipulated by Mouse, the completion of whose master plan leaves Easy a changed man. “I met the strangest people and went to places that I could never have imagined,” he tells us. And because he aided Mouse, albeit unwittingly, and accepted a payoff for his assistance, “I lost what a religious man would call his soul.”

It’s impossible to know without asking how much Mosley changed his original manuscript to conform to the other titles in the popular series. Maybe he didn’t change it at all. Though Easy’s narrative voice is unmistakably the same and the novel moves as swiftly and surely as the others, it remains a considerably shorter work.

Key elements are missing, primarily the complexities, surprises and textures of the detective stories. There are fewer societal observations, too, though one is as good as any the author has written: “Miss Dixon lived alone out in a colored community that hated her because she owned everything, even the roads they walked on. But Miss Dixon, and every other white person, was, to that colored community, like the cow is to those Hindus over in India. They’d all starve to death, let their children starve, before they’d slaughter a sacred cow. Miss Dixon was our sacred cow. She had money and land and she could read and go to fine events at the governor’s house. But most of all she was white and being white was like another step to heaven. . . . Killing her would have been worse than killing our own children; killing her, or even thinking of it, would be like killing the only dream we had.”

Another missed element is a sense of place. The mysteries richly detail black life in Los Angeles in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. In “Fishin’,” the Texas background is given short shrift. Here’s a sample from “Devil With a Blue Dress”: “When I finally made it back to my house, on 116th Street, it was another beautiful California day. Big white clouds sailed eastward toward the San Bernardino mountain range. There were still traces of snow on the peaks and there was the lingering scent of burning trash in the air.” Compare that with these somewhat less evocative lines from “Gone Fishin’ ”: “Texas by train is a real desert . . . miles of flat gray stone and tumbleweeds blowing and plenty of nothing.”

Regardless, if “Gone Fishin’ ” were nothing more than a simple background story, it would still be eagerly accepted by Easy fans. Thanks to Mosley’s style and talent for spinning a tale, it is considerably more than that. But it would be a mistake for the uninitiated to pick this prequel as an introduction to the beloved Easy Rawlins series or to the character. Both Easy and his creator seem to have improved with age.