Fearless Jones

I'm sure at some point Mosley could run out of things to do with '50s LA, but frankly I'm just a sucker for his writing so I wouldn't even mind if he just kept repeating his old plots scene by scene. The plot in this one takes a while to make any sense, but it's mostly an excuse to set in motion some characters who are good to know, and to let you soak in Mosley's savory sense of life. He writes about a corrupt, unjust, violent world with a strange lack of cynicism: evil schemers may cause you grief, but the world is too interesting to despair.

The title character, a noble ass-kicker who doesn't think too hard and isn't afraid of anything, but who's happy to put the action on hold to adopt a dog or just drive around town with his show more girlfriend, is so idealized that the book shouldn't work at all; but it does because he's not the narrator-- the story is told by a guy with normal fears who thinks a lot. The contrast between these two, who still live in the same world and have a pure trust in each other, shakes up the familiar noir setup and makes it seem like anything is possible. The first scene they both appear in, where the narrator is picking up Fearless from jail, may be my favorite piece of writing by Mosley ever: a long passage of descending through the purgatory of the jailhouse, made only of descriptions of walls and doors and colors, until we meet the angry thugs who rule the place, but they're holding a man who's at peace. show less

Paris Minton ingeniously builds his used bookstore from discards and sales from local libraries. For a Negro to own his business in 1950s Watts, California, Minton knows he is an anomaly. What he also is, is unlucky. Soon after a beautiful woman in distress hides in his bookstore he is badly beaten and his store, burned to the ground. Who was the impossibly beautiful woman? Who would want to burn down his store and do that has anything to do with the men who beat him? There is only one thing to do, bail his good friend Fearless Jones out of prison and enlist him to solve the mystery. As Minton tells the story he builds the character of Fearless Jones through their friendship, setting up the character development in future stories.
When show more you read Walter Mosely expect crackling humor, fast paced action, racial truths, and lots of quick-jab violence. show less

Watch out, Easy Rawlins and Socrates Fortlow! There’s a new gumshoe in town—two of them, to be exact: Paris Minton and Fearless Jones. That’s right, all you Walter Mosley fans, it’s time to beat those gumshoe feet to the nearest bookstore. The master of modern pulp noir is back with a brand-new novel and a fresh set of sleuths.

Set in the racially-turbulent 1950s, Fearless Jones is the kind of novel that proves just how good Mosley is at the game writers like Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett brought to a hard boil half-a-century ago. Sure, there are plenty of other hacks writing books populated with fast dames, sleazy crime lords and knuckle-punch gorilla-henchmen, but none of those writers come close to show more Mosley’s ability to create memorable characters surviving in a gritty noirish landscape—most of whom eventually find redemption of one sort or another.

Few mystery writers tint their stories with as much hope and optimism as the writer who was once President Clinton’s favorite bedtime reading material (insert cheap political potshot here). Surprisingly, Mosley has never won the esteemed Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He hasn’t even been nominated.

What Mosley lacks in awards, he makes up for in fans, presidential or otherwise. For those unfamiliar with his work (which includes Devil in a Blue Dress, Black Betty, White Butterfly and Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned), Fearless Jones is as good a place to start as any.

What Mosley has that sets him apart from many contemporary mystery writers—and Fearless Jones proves this admirably—is his deep connection with his characters. He has the keen talent to capture the lingo, the fright, the bravery, the heart of those souls on the page.

As the novel opens, Paris Minton is sitting in his used bookstore in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood. He’s minding his own business when in sashays Elana Love, “a picture-perfect damsel in distress.â€? Less than thirty pages later, Paris has been seduced by Love, shot at, robbed, beaten by a knuckle-fisted thug and had his bookstore burned to the ground. Events cascade very quickly in the world of noir.

Suddenly, Paris finds himself entangled in a labyrinthine plot that involves Jewish Holocaust survivors, Israeli secret agents and shady evangelicals—all of them on the trail of a missing bond worth more money than Paris ever dreamed he’d see. The black man with the slight build soon realizes he’s in over his head and calls on his friend Fearless Jones to help untangle the tangle.

Fearless Jones, an ex-soldier and ex-con, is a larger-than-life saint in brute’s clothing. True to his name, he wades headlong into any situation, no matter how many bullets or fists are flying. He’s got the fiery-veined temperament of Easy Rawlins plus the philosophical heart of Socrates Fortlow.

Paris, the book’s narrator, spills plenty of ink talking about his best friend, including these three snippets:

Fearless Jones. Tall and slender, darker than most Negroes in the American melting pot, he was stronger than tempered steel and an army-trained killing machine.

Fearless was the kind of person who attracted trouble. He didn’t know how to look away or back down. He couldn’t even spell the word compromise. Whenever he called me, I didn’t know if we were going to get drunk at a party or get jumped down some dark alley.

Fearless wasn’t a bright man, at least not in straightforward thinking. He only read at a sixth-grade level even though he had finished high school. A child could beat him at checkers two times out of three. But Fearless could survive in the harshest environments. He could tell you if a man was going to pull out a gun or cry. You could fool Fearless Jones sometimes, but he always seemed to make the right choices when the chips were down. And he had eyes in the back of his head.

And yet, when the chips are down and hot lead is flying, to tell you the truth, it’s Paris I’m most interested in. He’s tough, vulnerable, funny and a pitch-perfect guide through this explosively violent world. Why Mosley didn’t call the book Paris Minton is a mystery in itself.

Paris’ smart voice helps us navigate through the book’s often-confusing passages. Fearless Jones can be as perplexing as classics of the genre like The Maltese Falcon or Chinatown, with the plot coming at us like a body tumbling down a staircase, limbs flailing. Yet, it all comes together nicely by book’s end. True to its roots, this is slam-bam, thank-you-ma’am lit noir populated with crooked cops, crooked preachers and crooked crooks. Somewhere, Hammett, Cain and Chandler are, no doubt, coming to the position of attention in their graves. show less

Protagonist(s): used bookstore owner Paris Minton and his friend Fearless
Jones
Setting: 1950s Los Angeles
Series: #1

First Line: "My used-book store had been open for just about a month when the police showed up."

When the story begins, I was transported to the Los Angeles of the 1950s, a dangerous place and time for a black man. But Paris Minton seems to have beaten the odds. He owns a moderately successful and very satisfying business--a used book store. He spends the time he's not in the store scouring libraries for discarded books and selling them in just enough quantity to be independent and happy. Yes, he is visited on a regular basis by members of the LAPD who want him to prove to them that he did not steal the books, but that is a show more small price to pay for independence. Minton's peaceful life is interrupted one day when a beautiful woman walks into his store and asks for the Reverend William Grove. In no time flat, Paris has been beaten into unconsciousness by a man following her and has been rewarded by the woman with sex. The lovely Elana Love is obviously trouble, but Paris jumps in feet first and, as a consequence, his store is burned to the ground. It is obviously time to call in Fearless Jones, a man well named. Jones is afraid of nothing, but there is a little matter to be taken care of before he can help. He's in jail and Paris must raise bail to get him out. Once he does that, the pair embark on a wild ride through Los Angeles on behalf of Elana Love.

I'd heard a lot about Fearless Jones in the various book groups I belong to, so I was looking forward to this book. Although I enjoyed Mosley's time period and setting, the plot and the two main characters just didn't do much for me. show less

Not a bad book, but I'd hoped for a better one. The milieu (1950s Los Angeles) is fascinating, but even after all was revealed I couldn't get all the intricacies of the solution straight, and while the characters were well drawn, they lack wit. Which leaves this a gray story in a gray time.

Last summer I read through the last three of the Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley. Apparently, Mosley has had second thoughts and has resuscitated Easy, but the new book isn't yet available on kindle. So, I figured why not try a different Mosley series, the one featuring Fearless Jones. This is the first of them in which we are introduced to the narrator, Paris Minton, a second-hand book seller who is in the business primarily because he gets to sit around all day reading books, and his friend Fearless Jones, an army-trained killer, who has a strong sense of honor, but who keeps getting into scrapes of one kind and another, and who seems always to enmesh poor Paris in his trials.

This book was fast-paced and interesting. It was set in show more 1954, and has much to say about the problems of racism. I think that might be one of my primary interests in reading Mosley, he's an acute observer of the problems and effects of racism. Basically, he is opening up a mostly unknown world to me despite my having been brought up in Baltimore before the Civil Rights era (believe it or not, I never knew about slavery in my home state until I read Frederick Douglass a few years ago. WTF?).

I found the story itself a bit convoluted and am not sure it makes a whole lot of sense, we have Nazis, Israeli spies, crooked cops, ambitions and wanton young women, crooked store-front preachers, etc. all involved in essentially the same scam. Whatever, Paris and Fearless eventually survive repeated attempts to kill them and more-or-less figure out the reasons they kept coming across dead bodies. show less

At this point there are three books featuring the title character Fearless Jones and his friend (and main protagonist/narrator) Paris Minton. I unknowingly read them in the complete opposite order, as I came across them; it wasn’t a problem as far as comprehensibility was concerned. My favorite of the three is the second book, Fear Itself. Next would be Fear of the Dark, and then Fearless Jones.

Paris could be a more interesting narrator than he is in Fearless Jones—the proof is in Mosley’s next two novels in the series. However, he is interesting enough to carry this initial effort. Although Paris has plenty of personal motivation to scramble through the plot—the back cover tells you that he’s burned out of store and show more home—the actual mystery doesn’t really involve the main characters’ lives much. I found I wasn’t as interested in the mystery plot as I was with the safety of certain characters (woe to anyone tangentially involved in this mix; it turns out that Paris has a knack for walking into rooms furnished with a dead body), and I was interested in the characters who appear in the subsequent books, so that was enough for me. And, as always, Mosley’s prose is excellent.

This may not sound like a glowing review, but that’s most likely because I’m a fan of Mosley and can’t help but compare it to some of his other efforts. However, any fan of character-driven detective fiction will likely enjoy the time spent reading this. show less