Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins has just lost his job at the factory.
He is desperate for money in order to pay his mortgage on his home. But you
see, Easy is a black man in post-WWII Los Angeles, and the world isn’t
particularly kind to people of his race. But Easy’s luck is about to change. He
is introduced to DeWitt Albright, a shady character who takes care of people’s problems. Albright wants to find a white girl,
and his only lead is that she may have been frequenting the kind of clubs that
Easy visits. So DeWitt subcontracts: Easy is to find the girl and let Albright
know where she is.
That’s easier said than done. Easy is very soon arrested for
a murder, and he finds himself thrust into a racially segregated world where
rich men fix election results from the comfort of their office and where police
treat black men like they are the scum of the earth. The result is a highly
stylised, dark, and tough private-eye novel in the vein of Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler.
