The Long Fall
Walter Mosley, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451230256
Summary
His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL—PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR.
It's a name that takes a little explaining, but he's used to it. "Daddy was a communist and great-great-Granddaddy was a slave master from Scotland. You know, the black man's family tree is mostly root. Whatever you see above ground is only a hint at the real story."
Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGill's an old-school P.I. working a city that's gotten fancy all around him. Fancy or not, he has always managed to get by—keep a roof over the head of his wife and kids, and still manage a little fun on the side—mostly because he's never been above taking a shady job for a quick buck.
But like the city itself, McGill is turning over a new leaf, "decided to go from crooked to slightly bent."
New York City in the twenty-first century is a city full of secrets—and still a place that reacts when you know where to poke and which string to pull. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 12, 1952
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Johnson State College
• Awards—Mystery Writers Grand Master; Shamus Award, Private Eye Writers of America; Grammy Award for Best Album Notes
• Currently—lives in New York City
When President Bill Clinton announced that Walter Mosley was one of his favorite writers, Black Betty (1994), Mosley's third detective novel featuring African American P.I. Easy Rawlins, soared up the bestseller lists. It's little wonder Clinton is a fan: Mosley's writing, an edgy, atmospheric blend of literary and pulp fiction, is like nobody else's. Some of his books are detective fiction, some are sci-fi, and all defy easy categorization.
Mosley was born in Los Angeles, traveled east to college, and found his way into writing fiction by way of working as a computer programmer, caterer, and potter. His first "Easy Rawlins" book, Gone Fishin' didn't find a publisher, but the next, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) most certainly did—and the world was introduced to a startlingly different P.I.
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Part of the success of the Easy Rawlins series is Mosley's gift for character development. Easy, who stumbles into detective work after being laid off by the aircraft industry, ages in real time in the novels, marries, and experiences believable financial troubles and successes. In addition, Mosley's ability to evoke atmosphere—the dangers and complexities of life in the toughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles—truly shines. His treatment of historic detail (the Rawlins books take place in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the mid-1960s) is impeccable, his dialogue fine-tuned and dead-on.
In 2002, Mosley introduced a new series featuring Fearless Jones, an Army vet with a rigid moral compass, and his friend, a used-bookstore owner named Paris Minton. The series is set in the black neighborhoods of 1950s L.A. and captures the racial climate of the times. Mosley himself summed up the first book, 2002's Fearless Jones, as "comic noir with a fringe of social realism."
Despite the success of his bestselling crime series, Mosley is a writer who resolutely resists pigeonholing. He regularly pens literary fiction, short stories, essays, and sci-fi novels, and he has made bold forays into erotica, YA fiction, and political polemic. "I didn't start off being a mystery writer," he said in an interview with NPR. "There's many things that I am." Fans of this talented, genre-bending author could not agree more!
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Mosley is an avid potter in his spare time.
• He was a computer programmer for 15 years before publishing his first book. He is an avid collector of comic books. And ahe believes that war is rarely the answer, especially not for its innocent victims.
• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is what he said:
The Stranger by Albert Camus probably had the greatest impact on me. I suppose that's because it was a novel about ideas in a very concrete and sensual world. This to me is the most difficult stretch for a writer—to talk about the mind and spirit while using the most pedestrian props. Also the hero is not an attractive personality. He's just a guy, a little removed, who comes to heroism without anyone really knowing it. This makes him more like an average Joe rather than someone beyond our reach or range.
(Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble .)
Book Reviews
While nowhere near as charming as Rawlins, McGill is easy to like, given the character-building temptations that come his way as he tries to be an honest investigator and a good family man.... All things considered, McGill is someone you can definitely settle down with.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times
After Easy Rawlins and Paris Minton, Mosley's best-known creations, McGill is a welcome conundrum. A detective in the classic noir style—cynical, romantic, doomed—who exists not in the 1940s but in today's New York City.... We follow eagerly, seduced by Mosley's laconic style and by a newly arrived hero who seems to have been around forever.
Washington Post - Anna Mundow
Mosley leaves behind the Los Angeles setting of his Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones series (Devil in a Blue Dress, etc.) to introduce Leonid McGill, a New York City private detective, who promises to be as complex and rewarding a character as Mosley's ever produced. McGill, a 53-year-old former boxer who's still a fighter, finds out that putting his past life behind him isn't easy when someone like Tony "The Suit" Towers expects you to do a job; when an Albany PI hires you to track down four men known only by their youthful street names; and when your 16-year-old son, Twill, is getting in over his head with a suicidal girl. McGill shares Easy's knack for earning powerful friends by performing favors and has some of the toughness of Fearless, but he's got his own dark secrets and hard-won philosophy. New York's racial stew is different than Los Angeles's, and Mosley stirs the pot and concocts a perfect milieu for an engaging new hero and an entertaining new series.
Publishers Weekly
Mosley, a master of detective stories best known for his Easy Rawlins series, introduces Leonid McGill, a reformed bad man who strives to hold to his own principles in the roughest situations. Cops don't trust him, hard guys pressure him, and most people underestimate him. His wife abandoned him but now wants him back, two of their kids aren't his, and he's in love with a beautiful woman who's trying to kick him out of his office. McGill is hired to find the names and addresses of four men. Soon, they're all dead, and he wants to know why. The violence escalates, but he refuses to give up. Mosley always tells a compelling story, and this is no exception. But, unlike the Rawlins novels, it has an air of the formulaic. It takes too many digressions to explain McGill's past, and while the Rawlins's Mouse comes across persuasively as a particularly lethal product of the harsh ghettos, McGill's Hush, an ex-hit man who now drives a limousine, seems too good (or bad) to be real. For all its flaws, though, once you start reading this mystery, you won't want to stop. Recommended.
David Keymer - Library Journal
The creator of Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow and Fearless Jones introduces a new detective struggling to live down his checkered past in present-day New York. Leonid McGill has never killed anyone maliciously, but he's done plenty of other bad things. Still working as a private eye in his 50s, he's decided to expiate his sins by going "from crooked to only slightly bent." So he's not eager to help Albany shamus Ambrose Thurman track down four men for vague and unpersuasive reasons, especially after he learns that one is dead, a second is in prison and a third is in a holding cell. Who pays $10,000 to locate men like these unless some further crime is involved? McGill isn't any happier about finding a union accountant for midlevel mobster Tony "The Suit" Towers. And he's deeply troubled when his computer spying in his own home tells him that Twill, his wife Katrina's 16-year-old son, plans to kill the father of a girl who's been sending him distraught e-mails. But the PI's heart drops to his shoes when he realizes that someone is executing the men he's been hired to locate for Thurman. Plotting has never been Mosley's strong point, but McGill, a red-diaper baby, ex-boxer and a man eternally at war with himself, may be his most compelling hero yet.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Long Fall:
1. What do you think of Mosley's new detective hero, Leonid Trotter McGill? How would you describe him...his personality and the code of ethics he lives by—having changed from being "crooked to slightly bent"? If you're a fan of the "Private I" genre, how is LT similar to or different from other PI's...in either in Mosley's or other authors' works?
2. Much of literature is concerned with how the past never leaves us, how it dogs the present. In what way is that especially true of McGill? How does he struggle to live down his past? Is it possible to escape the past, especially a past like McGill's?
3. Talk about McGill's Buddhist approach toward life: "Throwing a punch is the yang of a boxer's life. The Yin is being able to avoid getting hit." How does that translate into LT's life "philosophy" (or anyone's life philosophy)?
4. Comment on this statement by McGill: "One thing I had learned in fifty-three hard years of living is that there's a different kind of death waiting for each and every one of us — each and every day of our lives. There's drunk drivers behind the wheels of cars, subways, trains, planes, and boats; there's banana peels, diseases and the cockeyed medicines that supposedly cure them; you got airborne viruses, indestructible microbes in the food you eat, jealous husbands and wives, and just plain bad luck." Is that a realistic view of life...tragic... cynical...or absurdly pessimistic?
5. What is McGill's relationship with his wife...and what about his mistress? How does he relate to his children? Talk about their problems, especially Twill's.
6. Mosley introduces a large cast of characters fairly early on in the book. Did you find their number confusing...or were you able to follow along easily?
7. Why does McGill accept Thurman's job offer to locate the four young men ... even though he has misgivings? How is LT used to extract revenge, thus becoming an accomplice to murder? To what degree is McGill "responsible" for the various deaths that occur?
8. Talk about the plot. Did you find the novel's twists and turns suspenseful? Or were they predictable...formulaic...or simply confusing?
9. What is the significance of the title? What is the "long fall"?
10. Mosley uses a degree of stream-of-consciousness in The Long Fall. Did that narrative technique work for you? Why might the author have used it, as opposed, say, to straightforward exposition?
11. The works of the great noir mystery writers (Hammett, Spillane, Chandler) serve as lenses through which to view a culture of time and place. How is Mosley's work such a lens for New York City?
12. Is the ending satisfying? Why or why not? Were you surprised by the book's conclusion...or did you "see it coming"?
13. The Long Fall is the first in a planned new series based on Leonid McGill. Is the series off to a good start? Are you intrigued enough to read newer installments as they're added.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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