A Little Yellow Dog

Easy Rawlins #5

by Walter Mosley

November 1963: Easy's settled into a steady gig as a school custodian. It's a quiet, simple existence -- but a few moments of ecstasy with a sexy teacher will change all that. When the lady vanishes, Easy's stuck with a couple of corpses, the cops on his back, and a little yellow dog who's nobody's best friend. With his not-so-simple past snapping at his heels, and with enemies old and new looking to get even, Easy must kiss his careful little life good-bye -- and step closer to the edge....

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Detective, Mystery Thriller, African American, Noir

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Walter Mosley (b. 1952) is the author of the bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins, as well as numerous other works, from literary fiction and science fiction to a young adult novel and political monographs. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the Nation, among other publications. Mosley is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Tracy P. (Away for long wknd. Have a good one!=) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mosley's A Little Yellow Dog is definitely the most solemn and emotional book of the 'Easy Rawlins' series I have read so far.

The year is 1963, and Easy finally has a reputable job as head custodian for the Sojourner Truth Junior High School. He could not be more content, and is finally free from his previous life of high risk street life. Now a respected supervisor, Easy is beyond grateful to be doing something he is not only passionate about, but people greatly appreciate.

Somehow, the streets find their way into Easy's life yet again when a staff member is found brutally murdered in the school's garden. As more bodies start piling up Easy is blindsided to learn he is being looked at as the number one suspect. Now he has no choice but to find out who is behind the deaths or be doomed to take the fall and face a lifetime in prison. Easy can never catch a break.

What makes this story particularly powerful for me is it takes place in unison with the devastating historical moment with changed our country forever in November of 1963.

Above is just a brief synopsis of what takes place in A Little Yellow Dog. Needless to say, it was unputdownable. Lots of suspense, amazing character development and countless opportunities to pause for thought. Highly recommend.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars for book 5 in the Easy Rawlins series. I have read the previous 4 books in the series and I have a better understanding of the relationships between the characters because of my reading those previous books. It is 1963 and Easy Rawlins now has a steady job as maintenance supervisor at the Sojourner Truth Junior high school in Watts, Los Angeles, California. He has given up the street life that brought him so much trouble in the past. He has two adopted children and is a single parent.
But trouble finds Easy, and he is soon involved with some dangerous criminals and the police suspect him of murder. How he manages to solve who did what to whom and escape alive makes for an entertaining story. He does get attacked in the process. This series gives the reader some insight into the black community in Watts.
I recommend this series to mystery fans. There is some sex and bad language. The violence is not very graphic.
This was an inter library loan book.

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fifth book in the Easy Rawlins series might be the best in the series so far but it doesn't stray far from the elements that have made the series so beloved by fans. Mosley breathes life into the African-American neighborhoods and hangouts of post-WWII/pre-Vietnam Los Angeles that feels like an adjacent puzzle piece to the world of Philip Marlowe. The complicated and tangled storyline, as always, takes a backseat to the memorable characters.

[Erth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book. Walter Mosley did not disappoint in this book or any of his books that I have read. It is a definite page turner and just when you think you have figured out the crime, nope, you're wrong. The way the pieces are put together is excellent.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was a regular family scene. All we had to do was clean up a few murders and a matter of international dope smuggling, then we could move next door to Donna Reed.”

Easy Rawlins is back. 1963, two years on from the disastrous end to Black Betty he is out of the doing favours for people business; living the straight life, working hard, keeping his head down and watching his two adopted children grow. But all that changes when a beautiful woman (aren't they always) pays him some attention, on her schoolroom desk, early one morning. From that moment nothing can ever return, the line has been crossed and before the hunt for a killer can be completed and his name cleared bodies will litter the less respectable areas of L.A., heroin will be imported from France, Easy will fall off of the wagon, a president will be dead, woman will throw themselves at the hero and a little yellow dog will have his vengeance.

There's something about Walter Mosley's prose that keeps me coming back for more. The first Easy Rawlins mystery was a superb piece of noir fiction that introduced one of the great protagonists of the genre but the following three books never really reached those same heights and still I come back for more. They mysteries might not be at the same standard but the manner in which Mosley evokes the time and place, the complex characters that litter Easy's life and especially the complex nature of Easy himself plus the relaxed nature of the first person past tense narration are what make these books worth coming back to.

A Little Yellow Dog however is the first time since Devil in a Blue Dress that I've had a great time with the plot and mystery as well as being a fly on the wall in the life of Easy Rawlins. At one point it seems to rely a little too heavily on a deus ex machina type device to stop the plot getting bogged down in its own setup but that aside it's a story of a good man doing what he needs to do to survive in a place and time when an innocent black man was guilty until proven otherwise. There's a fair amount of socio-political statement running through the story but it's done in such a subtle way that even if you're a racist, redneck, honky, cracker, peckerwood you probably won't be offended by it. Anyway, if you haven't heard, Bill Clinton loves these books.

You feel like this book marks the end of an era for Rawlins, a lot is left hanging open but it's made clear that they can't return to the way they were, you're made to see that a lot of the trouble Rawlins has is of his own doing and until the man can learn to contain his anger, control his darkness, he will never find lasting happiness.

I highly recommend the work of Walter Mosley, the Rawlins series is very good but if you ever stumble upon his Socrates Fortlow books that start with the highly impressive Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned do read them despite the lack of hard-boiled and noir content.

[Cheryl James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy Rawlins is my book character man crush. I love to listen to the series on audio and just go along for the ride. He is so stunning and street smart. He leaves no stones un turned.

But please don't let Mouse be dead😓 and i need to hear the original Easy Rawlins voice on the next book🤗

[Monica **can't read fast enough** · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, A Little Yellow Dog is the darkest and most melancholy of the Easy Rawlins stories so far. From the beginning of the story there is a sense of a dark cloud hovering over Easy despite having found some stability in both his personal and professional life. Easy is still uneasy with the way his life is going and that feeling leaps from the pages. Mosley is able to convey Easy's sense of discomfort and dissatisfaction so well that it made me feel just how unsettled he is. Easy can't quite put his finger on exactly what he needs, but by the end of A Little Yellow Dog both Easy and the reader knows what's missing and what the solution may be.

This series just gets better and better with each installment and I am happily continuing the ride!

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[Marrico Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starts off slow but gets really really good.

[Amos · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad I finally got my hands on this early entry in the Easy Rawlins series as it begins to answer certain questions I've had concerning a few constant/key characters. And while A Little Yellow Dog is not the strongest book of said series, I still am of the belief that any time one spends with "An Easy Rawlins Mystery" is always time well spent.

3 Snarling Stars

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you read your first book in a mystery series and only gave it three stars, why would you move immediately on to the next book in the series? It is a mystery and I haven’t figured that out yet myself. In spite of the fact that the plot of the first book twisted my brain mercilessly, making me feel a little stupid, there was a good deal of captivating writing. I thought maybe I had missed something crucial and would catch up with it in a second book. Or maybe I am just having a moment of false bravado like Easy Rawlins.

In this book Easy is management, likely on the strength of his thuggish resume. He is a supervisor of the maintenance crew of a junior high school named Sojourner Truth in the Watts section of Los Angeles. One of the custodial staff that he helped get hired is an old sidekick called Mouse, whom Easy describes as a killer. Literally. And then a dead body turns up at the school. And then another one. The twin bother of the first dead one.

This is a fiction story with the emphasis possibly on seriously unreal. But it is only my second Easy Rawlins book so I should not give it up as non-literature too quickly, I am telling myself.
So the story goes on in its only slightly believable fashion. Mr. Rawlins has to take a break from his law abiding life and go back to being Easy, the tough guy, in order to solve the murders. Anyone else would be well over his head quite rapidly, but Easy is not anyone else. He has a good writer creating his part, a mesmerizing writer who can make you suspend disbelief and enjoy the story.

Easy is the good-guy, bad-guy mix with the roles of family-man and gangster each pulling at him. The book ends with some uncertainty about which road he will follow in his next adventure. I will give this book three stars although I enjoyed it more than the previous episode that I also gave three stars. I have some other series that I want to check in on but have pulled the real life Columbine off the shelf for my next read, one that has been beckoning to me for a couple of years.

[K2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best in the series, so far

[Leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've enjoyed every book enough to give them all A 4 star rating. But it took me far to long to pick this next book up. Need to try to read the rest sooner rather than later. Very enjoyable and we'll written series that never gets dull

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nov 1963 and Easy has a real job and responsibilities. then a teacher runs out and leaves him a dog. A body is found in the garden at School where Easy is the head custodian. HMMMMMMMMMMM

[Larraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's 1963 LA. Easy Rawlins is playing it straight. He's left the street life behind and is working as a custodian at Sojourner Truth Elementary School. Life is quiet and perhaps sometimes it's boring, but Easy is satisfied with the trade. He's a single father to his two adopted children, Jesus and Feather. Then one day he arrives at school to find one of the teachers there much earlier than normal. Ida is beautiful and seductive, telling him a tale of an abusive husband who has threatened to kill her dog, Pharoah. Then Ida disappears leaving the dog behind, and a corpse shows up in the school's garden. The investigating police officer wants, more than anything, to pin this murder on Easy because he is well known by the department. Soon, Easy finds himself back in the life he left behind. However, it's not the same world he knew. It's darker and even more dangerous. Mosley brings this era back to life - a time when, if you wanted an ambulance, you told them that a white man had been shot near your home. Published in 1996, this could have been written in the present with a few small changes. Mosley is one of the best American writers in my opinion.

[Susan Gottfried]

I'm not entirely certain how I feel about this one... it was a hard read, probably because I'm dropping into the middle of the series and there's so much in Easy's past that colors this story as it emerges. It's convoluted, with a large cast of characters; maybe too large for my brain to process.

BUT.

There's so much going on. This is messy and it's brutal and it's ugly and it doesn't shy away from any of it. Mosley's voice, of course, is as amazing as every review I've ever read, and I love the complexity of Easy, even as I'm uncomfortable with how his past dogs him, how he backslides -- and how he's willing to take a chance on growing, even if may not turn out as well as we'd like it to for him.

I think, to really do this series justice, you have to start at the beginning and grow with Easy. I think I need to learn his world more thoroughly so that I can understand all the nuance I'm seeing but not always understanding.

Yeah... the more I think about this, the more I'm convinced it's a better book than I can give it credit for being, because I'm missing too much backstory. And I definitely want to read at least the next one so I can find out what happens to both the dog and... well, that chance Easy is willing to take at the end here.

[Carol Storm · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the Easy Rawlins series, but the best books are the early ones, such as A RED DEATH, BLACK BETTY, and DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS.

The trouble with this story is that it reads more like a soap opera. Easy keeps pining over his woman who's left, and then a new woman comes around, and it gets really tiresome. The kids he adopts are tiresome too. It's like he's trying too hard to prove he can be respectable.

Bring back Mouse!

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure I like Easy Rawlins in this book since his heart is almost darker than anything that has gone on in the previous books in the series. A very interesting mystery, but it left me wondering if Easy can survive his life much longer. His inability to trust is HUgE. Here's hoping Easy finds something give him succor in the next book.

[Pat Murphy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A murder mystery set in the area of Los Angeles. I gave it a two because I had a hard time keeping up with who was who and who did what. There were likable characters and pretty good action. The time setting is when President Kennedy was shot. The ending left me with a feeling that little was resolved.

[Hannah Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

The characters in this milieu are so remarkable and believable and their responses to events are so touching that the book transcends its genre: Mosley is rueful about love, funny about crime, and so perceptive about American tensions. Some of the best dialogue I've ever read!

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty basic mystery story but end of the day, Mosley's stories are much more about the characters and locations - all atmosphere all the time. This one doesn't disappoint as turns it's eye to LA and Easy Rawlins trying to go straight, but having road block after road block thrown in his way, only a little bit of his own doing.

The story itself is somehow both very convoluted and a pretty simple "sex and drugs gone wrong" with a few twists, but the fun is watching Easy (and of course picturing Denzel from his spin in the role in Devil in a Blue Dress) do his best to keep the cops, his bosses, gangsters, murderers and of course several women all in the lanes he needs them to stay to keep his new life with his family together.

Enjoyable read, although got a feeling Mosley at this point was in the Evanovich mode of "well, probably rather write something else but money is money" so seems a bit thin, but definitely still paints a vivid picture of the early 60's LA from an african american point of view.

[John Devlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.2) I've said this before if you want to read crime fiction of LA in the 40's-70's, read James Ellroy, but then read the Ez Rawlins mysteries to get a handle on the black side of town during those turbulent, lawless times. Some of the tropes of the genre are here: the femme fatales and the loose women, the cops on the take and the desperate folk living on the margins of a city; however, the gamechanger is that the detective's black and that gives his desperation, his lone gunman like mentality a sheen of isolation and drama that's lacking in other smart workings of detective fiction.

[La Lectora · Rating 1 out of 5]

A la trama , sobre todo en la primera mitad le falta cohesión , son como varias historias cortas juntas con Easy como punto común, tomando decisiones incoherentes. Luego, no solo no he encontrado nada nuevo respecto a los anteriores, sino que me ha parecido uno de los más enrevesados, de los más machistas, de los más liosos por el exceso de personajes, de los peor escritos y de los menos interesantes de la serie , he acabado leyendo muy deprisa solo para llegar al final que tiene más de “continuará” que de desenlace .Este libro no me ha gustado nada, más bien me ha aburrido.

[Nora Rawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled a bit with this--with the noir conventions, the femme fatale, Easy's insistence on getting involved when he needn't (this is the character! but still). Eventually I skimmed ahead to the resolution and enjoyed the reveal, as I also liked the appearances of Easy's adopted children in the book. Perhaps the red herrings and detours into the LA nightlife were too much for me, though the race commentary was terrific (frank, bold, unapologetic) and I'm glad I've read Mosley at last to see where he fits into the crime writing picture.

[Cynthia Sinsap · Rating 2 out of 5]

By a certain point I started reading faster just to get it finished

[Tim Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's 1963 and Easy Rawlins thinks he's left the streets behind. He's got a steady job as a head custodian at a local high school supervising a crew. Jesus and Feather are growing and doing well in school. He still owns a few properties, but he has a job with decent pay and good benefits. But the street isn't done with Easy and it comes calling with a vengeance.

After a quick and ill-advised tryst with a lovely teacher at the school at which he works, he's stuck with her ill-tempered dog (the titular little yellow dog) and thrust in to a situation that includes theft from county schools, heroin smuggling and multiple murders. Adding to the problems are an overzealous Mexican-American police sergeant who has it out for Easy because he's lived close to the edge in the past. Oh...and Easy's usual back-up, Mouse, now has a good job and has been going straight.

This was a super tight, compelling read. One that cost me sleep a couple of nights. Given the time period you might have expected a bit more overt look at race relations in the U.S. in the 60s. It's definitely there, but a lot of it is off-hand. Which, in this case maybe makes it more compelling. If this isn't the best outing for Easy, it's very close. A highpoint in a series that's been consistently very good to excellent.

[Taksya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nonostante il fatto che non era il primo romanzo delle serie, dettaglio che non pesa così negativamente quanto avevo temuto, posso dire che mi è piaciuto.
Non avrei mai capito che l'azione era ambientata negli anni '60 se non fosse stato scritto nella quarta di copertina e, fino a quando non si arriva al fatto principale legato a quegli anni, quello che viene descritto potrebbe essere valido per buona parte della storia americana recente.
Mi sono piaciuti i personaggi e Easy, essendo la voce narrante, delinea uno svolgimento lento ma inesorabile verso la conclusione dell'intreccio... molto più semplice di quello che poteva sembrare.
Non adrenalinico, senza troppi colpi di scena, un po' complicato forse quando si arriva ai vari flashback che introducono i vari personaggi, ma scorrevole e gradevole... anche in inglese e nonostante (forse per merito) del diverso slang tra bianchi e neri, non c'è mai un vero calo di attenzione.
Nella mia edizione c'era anche un racconto, che fortunatamento ho letto dopo, altrimenti mi avrebbe spoilerato tutto (anche se non sarebbe poi stato un problema per me)... ma che mi ha convinto a cercare il primo libro della serie... purtroppo...

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5) Every long-running mystery series based on a central character tends to go in one of two directions: 1. The writer either starts aping their past work because they know it sells or 2. The author finds their voice and the books improve over time. Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins series falls (fortunately) in the latter. Devil in a Blue Dress was a quality freshman effort and the two follow ups are good as well but their plots tend to get clunky with Mosley's need to give Easy semi-relevant side jobs. Black Betty was an inspired turn and now, with Little Yellow Dog, the writer has produced his best effort.

The mystery in this one was as compelling and layered as any he's ever done but it's the focus that Mosley provides on the plot that makes this a solid effort. It helped to see Easy at a different point in his life than he had been in books past. The stakes are gradually raised and built to a satisfying, if somewhat predictable, conclusion. I hope this bodes well for the rest of the series.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy Rawlings has settled down with a government job and family, but events pull him back to the streets and his old friends as he desperately tries to preserve his new life. Hard boiled mysteries aren’t my favorite genre, but Walter Mosley is an excellent writer. Unfortunately, Easy’s dislike and rough treatment of dogs marred enjoyment of the story for this animal lover.

[Eddy B · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story-telling was good and the people felt very real. However the plot was very jumbled and in the end too many people were thrown in and out so it got very confusing in the end. Also the whole story about the dog felt weird and unsatisfactory. Came in with high hopes about this author (first book of his I've read) but I was a bit let down.

[Jaxson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Body's dropping daily, extremely dangerous to be out of the house!