Title: Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley, ISBN 0-316-07302-4, Little, Brown and Company, September 2005, 314 pp.

Genre: Detective Fiction

Characters:  Forty-five year old Easy Rawlins, part-time custodian at an inner-city junior high school and—more significantly for purposes of Mosley’s enjoyable and provocative novel—part-time private investigator, lives with his several children and his live-in girlfriend Bonnie in 1960s Los Angeles. As a World War II military veteran, an African-American, and a frightened father of a dangerously ill daughter, Rawlins (seen in nine previous Mosley novels), is principally joined in this tale of mystery, mayhem, and murder by the notorious Raymond “Mouse” Alexander (whom Rawlins calls “death personified”) and fellow P.I. Saul Lynx. A large ensemble of colorful characters is involved either in Rawlins’ personal life or in the conventionally plotted mystery which threatens to further complicate Rawlins’ life.

Plot: Desperate to earn money for his daughter’s medical treatments at a European facility, Easy Rawlins contemplates teaming up with Raymond “Mouse” Alexander in a dangerous caper involving an armored car robbery. Fortunately—perhaps—that plan doesn’t quite materialize because Rawlins, through his good friend and fellow P.I. Saul Lynx, has an opportunity to earn some really big money—apparently rather easily—when he is retained by a an enigmatic and secretive P.I. in San Francisco with the unlikely name of Robert E. Lee. The job seems to be quite simple (when Rawlins can finally get some straight answers from the evasive Lee): A man is missing, a brief case that he is believed to have had as well as some unusual documents are missing, and a young woman named Philomena “Cinnamon” Cargill, might have important information about the whereabouts of the missing man and the documents, but the issue is further complicated by that fact that she also is missing; so, Rawlins is hired to find her (and obtain information about the missing man and the mysterious contraband) in Los Angeles, the city with which Rawlins is intimately familiar, the city to which Cargill has apparently fled. As the plot develops, Rawlins encounters a colorful cast of either helpful or duplicitous characters. Soon, especially as some of the characters begin turning up as dead bodies, Rawlins realizes that the missing documents are much more important than anyone had initially permitted him to believe. Apparently, persons involved in unspeakable crimes and sordid pasts are most anxious to prevent the recovery and disclosure of those purloined papers, and the stakes and the dangers will steadily escalate until the resourceful Rawlins finally closes in on the mystery’s solution in the final chapter.  

Comments: Beyond being an entertaining, conventional detective novel, Cinnamon Kiss explores some important themes in its characterizations and subplots. With the action unfolding four decades ago in Los Angeles—less than a year after the Watts Riots of 1965—Cinnamon Kiss is more than a genre mystery in that it is also a somewhat sophisticated exploration of racial attitudes in 1960s America as well as a look at the problems of interpersonal relationships presented through Rawlins’ first-person point of view. Certainly the novel will appeal to the genre’s typical readers and, of course, Mosley’s enthusiastic fans, but it should also appeal to readers interested in taking a look back at the interracial tensions of the not so distant past. 

Touchy Areas: Like many contemporary novels in the popular fiction market, Cinnamon Kiss contains strong language, graphically explicit sexual situations, and a certain amount of disturbing violence. Of course, many (most?) students are neither unfamiliar with nor uncomfortable with those qualities in media; nevertheless, I personally would be very reluctant to use Mosley’s gritty and steamy novel in a secondary classroom setting. Moreover, I can imagine many high school librarians also being hesitant to include Mosley’s novel among their libraries’ holdings. Admittedly, Cinnamon Kiss has many excellent qualities, and it would provoke plenty of discussion about American racial attitudes in the 1960s (especially as those attitudes may in part remain, as some students will argue, somewhat unchanged in American society), but the “negatives” and the distractions in this adult novel might interfere with students’ focus upon many of Mosley’s important themes.

Related Titles: Titles mentioned (and commended) by the protagonist Easy Rawlins within Mosley’s narrative include Wright’s Native Son and Ellison’s Invisible Man, and those superior novels (along with perhaps the works of Baldwin, Morrison, Gaines, Walker, and any number of other contemporary masters not, of course, alluded to within Mosley’s text) should, I suggest, prove to be much more meaningful reading experiences for young adults interested in the complex themes of racial identity and American society’s problems with race relations.

Reviewed by Tim Davis, Department English and Foreign Languages, University of West Florida