Smears on a seamy L.A. canvas

Fear Itself

A Novel

Walter Mosley

Little, Brown: 316 pp., $24.95

*

Nineteen-fifties Los Angeles is a city of lies. Behind the patina of prosperity and the promise of freedom lies a corpse or two in the grass, a man with a gun, a false accusation and enough desperation to keep crime writers in business for years. Hollywood knew this, but noir quickly dated. Chester Himes knew this, but he pulled stakes before tapping its potential. James Ellroy knew this, but he’s chasing bigger game now. Walter Mosley knows this, and he can’t escape it.

“Fear Itself,” Mosley’s ninth excursion into this postwar maelstrom, picks up where “Fearless Jones” left off, and if you think there’s nothing more to be said, think again. Paris Minton is just getting his life resettled. His bookstore on Florence Avenue is doing as well as his store on Central did, the one that burned to the ground in “Fearless Jones,” and the bloody shootout that closed that book is merely a detail for keeping continuity. Then someone knocks on the door. It’s the middle of the night, an invitation to trouble, and once Tristan -- Fearless -- Jones steps in, there’s no escaping the pull of the story.

When Mosley first arrived on the scene with “Devil in a Blue Dress” in 1990, he went on a fast roll with Easy Rawlins and his buddy, Mouse. But when Mouse died in an alley ambush in 1996 in “A Little Yellow Dog,” Mosley lost the friendship and solidarity that coursed beneath the surface of those earlier novels. Five years later that dynamic resurfaced to mixed reviews in “Fearless Jones.” Paris and Fearless were more casual, less hard-boiled than Easy and Mouse. One reviewer likened them to Laurel and Hardy. If it was unfair then, it’s all the more so today. The troubles in “Fear Itself” are bad, and that’s all for the better.

Kit Mitchell, a hustler with a silver cap in his smile, is missing, and everyone wants to find him. All the roads in this part of town lead to Fearless, and if not Fearless, then Paris will do, but the problem is neither knows where Kit is. Some bring violence, most bring cash and, as each ups the ante on the other, a green pall settles upon Paris and Fearless and catches the attention of every skip tracer, extortionist and two-bit thug who haunts the flatlands and the hilltops of the city. It’s a picture of remorseless greed and ugly desperation.

Why exactly Kit -- and soon enough, another man, Bartholomew Perry -- is a mystery to Paris and Fearless, but they’re not complaining. “That’s three thousand that two poor black men have collected, and we haven’t done a thing but ask questions and survive the answers,” quips Paris, even as Fearless and he find themselves caught in a web that Mosley cinches tighter with each page.

Fired upon, lied to and seduced, they discover bodies long dead, a scheme to pry corner lots from landowners for the development of gas stations and a book -- an ancient and valuable book -- chronicling one family’s African heritage and enslavement.

Mosley keeps a firm grip on the pacing of his story. There is in his writing an effortless simplicity -- contrast the more baroque stylings of Michael Connelly -- that complements the complexity of the events that, told from Paris’ perspective, unfold with a dose of common street sense and a certain literariness. (Paris is, after all, his bookstore’s best customer.)

One evening when he is alone, waiting for Fearless to call, he picks up a folio of photographs of New York by Weegee. “Weegee,” he tells us, “treated the whole city as if it were his backyard .... He roamed from Park Avenue to Harlem with his camera, mostly at night, getting behind all of the lies we tell and showing just how ugly people can be when no one else is around.”

So too with Mosley, who, skipping Weegee-like from Watts to the Hollywood Hills and back, introduces us to the richest black woman in Los Angeles in a meeting stunningly Chandler-esque (think of Marlowe and Gen. Sternwood in “The Big Sleep”) and then to one of the richest white men. By the end we’ve come a long distance from the opening scene, when Paris and Fearless sit and talk, listening to the moths and other insects bouncing off the kitchen screen of Paris’ illegal add-on in South-Central.

Paris’ and Fearless’ dreams of prosperity grow all the more sweet and dangerous the closer they come to tracking down Kit’s whereabouts and ultimately the pornographer, murderer and blackmailer who lurks at the center of the action. To say, however, that the story of Paris and Fearless is a story of loyalty is to miss its broader dimensions. Sure, Fearless once saved Paris’ life in a dark alley in San Francisco, but that’s old news. Fearless’ greatest strength is to call out the strength in other people, and in a world of get-rich-quick, pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams, this is not such a bad thing. By the end, Paris confronts his own capacity for fearlessness, violence and betrayal. As they say, if you own a gun, you have to be prepared to use it.

Just as important is to take a step back before trying to compare “Fear Itself” with the earlier novels and to realize that Mosley is a painter of a time and a place. Each book from the first to the last is a brush stroke filling in the larger canvas of Los Angeles that he’s been painting for some 13 years, and we’re richer for it.

The centerpiece of “Fear Itself” is a lovely sequence, a short story of sorts that comes fresh out of a shooting at the bail bondsman’s and the cops’ third degree. Paris rents a room in a boardinghouse where Kit once lived. The boarders share a common bath, and dinner -- chicken, dumplings, collard greens, creamed corn and peach cobbler -- is served at 6. It’s as loving a picture of African American life in this city 50 years ago as you’ll find.

“There was a lot of talking and jocularity at the table. It was the friendliness of strangers. The only thing we all had in common was our race,” says Paris. Then, looking around the table, he realizes that, by coming to California, the boarders “had to dig out from under nearly a century of white oppression. Everybody, black and white, was a potential enemy. People that had been so mired in poverty that that’s all they could expect. And so when faced with hope, many became distant and watchful.”

We’ve seen pictures of black and white, even brown and white Los Angeles from the ‘40s and ‘50s, but seldom from the inside out. In “Fear Itself,” Mosley taps into this world and shows us a city where opportunity is less than it seems and violence a measure of frustration. The sad thing is it’s a picture of a city not unlike Los Angeles today.