SF Chronicle: "The Long Fall" by Walter Mosley

I can't wait to read this book! Mosley is one of my favorite writers, and I'm proud to say he's a distinguished alumnus of my MFA program - The City College of New York!

Here's a review by the San Francisco Chronicle!
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The Long Fall

By Walter Mosley

(Riverhead Books; 306 pages; $25.95)

In his first novel set in contemporary New York City, Walter Mosley, author of "Blonde Faith" and "The Right Mistake," introduces readers to a new series character - the middle-aged, literally low-rent private detective Leonid McGill. McGill is an African American, like Easy Rawlins, the protagonist of Mosley's period Los Angeles mysteries, but he's a very different kind of investigator, and "The Long Fall" is a different kind of Mosley book.

Married to a woman he doesn't love, raising kids not his own, yearning for the sexy building manager charged with breaking his way-below-marketvalue office lease, McGill needs the cash that will come once he unravels the new identity of a troubled kid formerly known as B-Brain. A more upscale detective with a mysterious client wants that information, but McGill isn't at all sure he can trust his colleague not to make life difficult for a guy who seems to have done well for himself since leaving his trouble-making buddies behind.

Once a tool of the local mob, McGill carries a large enough load of guilt as it is, and he can't afford any additional karmic burden. In addition to worrying about the erstwhile B-Brain, McGill has to contend with a mobster who wants a potentially deadly favor, plus his own teenage son's apparent plan to kill the father of a female friend. No wonder McGill has recurring nightmares of being trapped in a burning building.

There's a lot of plot to keep track of in "The Long Fall," but the pleasures of the novel come not mainly from its narrative mechanics but from McGill's first-person perspective on race and class in an America on the verge of electing its first black president. People around McGill tend to underestimate him because of his age, his short stature and the color of his skin. Again and again, he proves that, despite being pushed down, he's a contender. It's hard not to like a detective who sums up a case thusly: "The scenario was simple, it just didn't make sense, like a live cat sealed in a glass globe, or the United States declaring peace."

Starting with Leonid McGill, who bears an obvious legacy as a red diaper baby, Mosley has a lot of fun with characters' names in "The Long Fall." Which is good, because the cast of this slender novel expands almost to the point of unwieldiness. It's particularly amusing that McGill's unfaithful Nordic wife, a storm of destruction in human form, is called Katrina. But then there's a character called Norman Fell, who evokes distracting visions of Mr. Roper on "Three's Company" every time he's mentioned. Inscrutable joke or simply a stray note?

"The Long Fall" accomplishes most of what an inaugural installment of a mystery series should. The three major plot strands are solidly developed and neatly resolved. McGill's quest for redemption, however, is far from over, but it will be interesting to watch it play out across a number of subsequent volumes.

If "The Long Fall" is overstuffed with incidental characters whose importance may not be obvious until later installments, that's a minor flaw. Having retired Easy Rawlins, Mosley has devised a worthy successor in Leonid McGill.