SIX EASY PIECES

Even though six of the seven color-coded stories here have already appeared as pendants to recent paperback reprints of Mosley’s first six Easy Rawlins novels, it’s a special pleasure to have them all gathered together with the brand-new “Amber Gate,” whose inquiry into the murder of much-loved prostitute Jackie Jay makes it the closest thing to a whodunit Mosley (Bad Boy Brawly Brown, p. 709, etc.) has yet produced. True, the tales, covering a few months in Watts in 1964, revisit much the same territory over and over: Easy’s asked by a trusting friend to find some missing relative or clear an acquaintance suspected of some crime, descends into a demi-criminal underworld, triggers an outburst of cathartic violence, and then goes back to his job as janitorial supervisor at Sojourner Truth Junior High. By bundling them together, however, Mosley strengthens the links among them: Easy’s struggle to find dignity in his work and provide a role model for his two children and his quiet jealousy when his stewardess lover Bonnie Shay is romanced by the activist son of a Senegalese chief. In “Smoke,” the first and best of the stories, Easy tries masquerading as his friend Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, presumed but not proved dead, to get to the bottom of a fire at Sojourner Truth, but has to face the fact that he’s hamstrung by his un-Mouselike reluctance to hurt and kill. As Easy’s alter ego, Mouse continues to haunt the others as well.

Despite the repetition, readers who missed these meaty, powerful stories in their paperback debuts will gobble them up at one sitting.