A Demon in My View

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.

Death Invites You

The first edition of the book

I ever read, back in Grade 9

First there were ten. Ten people, strangers to one another, summoned to Indian Island by the elusive figure of Mr. U. N. Owen. That night, all are accused of murder, and one by one, they fall prey to a murderer’s ruthless hand, as “Mr. Owen” seems bent on killing everyone present. The motive? A mad sense of justice: Mr. Owen has decided that these people have all gotten away with a murder that the legal system cannot touch, and therefore it is up to him (or her) to play judge, jury, and executioner. And remember the madman’s alias: U. N. Owen… or, by a slight stretch of the imagination: unknown…

Agatha Christie’s 1939 masterpiece And Then There Were None was originally entitled Ten Little Niggers. The infamous N-word is an inherently offensive one, and it wasn’t long before the term was replaced by “Indian”. Thus, all the references to “Indian” were originally the N-word. But in my mind, And Then There Were None is ever so much more evocative: it sets the book’s claustrophobic, dark tone right from the title page. I picture a solitary figure standing in a spotlight, with corpses all around, and giant hand reaching from the shadows to strike for one last time…