"This is the house my parents owned, the front and the back," he explains. He prepares to leave, but before he goes, there's a little surprise: He stops in front of a pink fourplex with fancy, diamond-paned windows. Mosley has walked a couple of miles now on a lot of the streets he knew intimately as a teenage boy. (Her concoction gave Easy the strength to hunt for Little Green.) There's a lot of LA in Little Green, from the street carnival that was Sunset Boulevard during the mid-'60s to a forested lot in Compton, behind which is the carefully hidden home of a root-working healer named Mama Jo. The unnamed alleys of South Los Angeles provide a setting for Mosley's fictional speakeasy, Cox Bar. In fact, Mosley says, "A lot of LA hasn't changed at all." The boom years that put so many shiny, high-rise offices and apartments on the city's Westside didn't touch the parts of town Mosley and Easy know best, like South LA. Mosley says LA's topography reinforces that separation, keeping poor and working class neighborhoods isolated from better-off parts of town.
Mosley and Easy also see the city through the same lens, as a place that's constantly filtering and separating the vast majority of the have-nots from the slim number of haves. "One of the reasons that I left Los Angeles is because I was oppressed by the feeling that how I lived - who I lived with, where - was going to define my entire life," Mosley says.
And while he and Easy may have gone in different directions, the character and his creator each wanted the same thing - more freedom and more opportunity to live his life as he saw fit. Mosley did just the opposite: He was born in Los Angeles, but left the city decades ago for New York. Many of the landmarks he knew as a child find their way into his books. Walter Mosley stands in front of the house his parents owned, near the Pico-Fairfax neighborhood in Los Angeles.
She's wearing a badly constructed knockoff dress that's been made by one set of poor people across the border, and sold by another set in Los Angeles. Timbale wore a shapeless purple dress that had probably been stitched in Mexico, smuggled into Southern California and sold downtown replete with fake tags." With just a few words, Mosley shows that Timbale has little money and even less time for fashion. Once the detective hero has partially recovered, Mouse asks him for a favor: He wants Easy to find a kid named Evander Noon, aka Little Green, who left home to hang out with some hippie kids and hasn't been seen since.Įasy meets up with Evander's worried mother, Timbale, in a scene that's classic Mosley: "Her eyes were wide and her fists trembling. His violence-prone best friend, Raymond Alexander (Mosley fans know him as Mouse), brought him back, barely alive. When Easy first reappears in Little Green, it's 1967 and he has recently driven off a Malibu cliff.
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