Rawlins is an African-American private investigator, a hard-boiled detective and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The mysteries combine traditional conventions of detective fiction with descriptions of racial inequities and social injustice experienced by African Americans and other persons of color in the Los Angeles of that period.
Mosley originally featured Rawlins in a novella called Gone Fishin', but it was rejected by several publishers because they didn't think that there was a market for books about black men.
[2] Nevertheless, in 2013 a new Easy Rawlins novel entitled Little Green was published, followed by Rose Gold (2014), Charcoal Joe (2016), Blood Grove (2021), and Farewell, Amethystine (2024).
After a few weeks, Easy ran away from Skyles's farm and spent the rest of his childhood and adolescence living on his own in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas.
Set in 1948, Devil in a Blue Dress introduces Easy Rawlins, a newly unemployed factory worker, let go from his job building aircraft because his white supervisor found him "uppity".
Needing money to pay his mortgage, Easy agrees to search for Daphne Monet, the missing mistress of a wealthy white politician.
No one is willing to tell Easy just why so many people want to find Daphne, and the trail leads him through the intersection of crime, corruption, and race politics in Los Angeles.
In the course of the search Easy reunites with a childhood friend, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, a charming but conscienceless stone-cold killer, recently arrived in LA from Houston.
[3][4] The book was adapted into a 1995 film of the same name, which starred Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins, and also featured Jennifer Beals, Tom Sizemore, Maury Chaykin, and Don Cheadle as the unhinged "Mouse".
As the book opens, Easy is audited by the IRS, a problem because he cannot account for how he came to own his property in the first place (because the money with which he bought his first building was stolen).
A black Los Angeles Police Department detective named Quinten Naylor reluctantly taps Easy to investigate a murder spree: four women have been killed, apparently by a serial killer.
Easy is pressed for cash because most of his money is tied up in a real estate deal, which he's running through a front because he doesn't want any white investors to know that the primary stakeholder is black.
Easy manages to sort out the missing-person case and stop Mouse from killing half the neighborhood, but he loses his real-estate investment when his agent sells him out to a group of rich white men.
Easy, concerned for his adopted children's future, has given up his career as an outside-the-law "fixer" and secured a state job with a pension, working as the supervisor of the janitorial staff at Sojourner Truth Junior High School.
With assistance from Mamma Jo Easy gets better in enough time to try to stop Mouse's plan to bring violence to his stepfather, but the events of this trip haunt him.
Easy's old friend John asks him to look for his stepson, Brawly Brown, a young man in his early twenties, hugely strong but immature, who has left home after an argument with his mother.
The seven short stories in the book are connected by the threads of Easy's search for news of Mouse and his own growing dissatisfaction with the predictability of his workaday life as a head custodian.
Easy looks into cases of arson, missing persons, and murder, and we learn he has formed a relationship of wary mutual respect with Sergeant Andre Brown, a black LAPD officer, and that Momma Jo the witch (last seen in Gone Fishin' ) has moved to the LA area from Texas.
Easy is unsettled by his girlfriend Bonnie's acquaintance with African princes and civil rights activists and other people who are working to change the world; perhaps in response, he rents an office and takes steps toward setting up his own investigation business.
Suggs tells Easy he wants him to investigate the murder of a black woman named Nola Payne, whose nickname was "little Scarlet" because of her reddish hair.
As the book opens, Easy takes a leave of absence from his job as a head custodian in the LAUSD, because he is desperate to find money for the treatment of his daughter Feather, who has a life-threatening blood infection.
On behalf of an eccentric private investigator named Robert E. Lee, Easy sets out to find Philomena "Cinnamon" Cargill, the black assistant of a white public-aid lawyer who has gone missing after discovering proof that his family's law firm had secret dealings with the Nazis during World War II.
Knowing this means Christmas is in trouble, Easy investigates and comes up against former servicemen who smuggled drugs in Vietnam; this soon leads to his needing to clear his childhood friend Mouse of murder.
Easy must sort out what happened, while also defending his friend Jackson from extortion and preventing trouble between Evander and Mouse, and at the same time recovering from his injuries and trying to reconnect with Bonnie Shay.
Easy's friend Mouse asks him to take a case on behalf of "Charcoal Joe", a crime boss currently serving a jail term.
In 2006, it was announced that HBO Films had acquired the rights to Mosley's 2004 novel Little Scarlet for a feature starring Jeffrey Wright as Easy, and rapper/actor Mos Def as Mouse.