Racial Transformation in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Focusing on Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series

This paper aims to closely examine the racial transformation of the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series. Although Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series makes use of genre conventions of hard-boiled detective novels (such as displaying a pessimistic view of the world or introducing independent detectives), it establishes a new paradigm of race and criminality that goes against the tradition. While the ruling class is represented as the root of social evil in hard-boiled detective fiction, racism is the cause of social oppression and political corruption in the Easy Rawlins Series. When the hard-boiled detective is able to maintain absolute independence, Mosley's detective has to compromise with governmental authority due to his racial position. Whereas the hard-boiled detective novels define blackness as criminality, whiteness embodies criminality in the Easy Rawlins Series. This paper concludes that, unlike the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction which reaffirms racial hierarchies, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series presents a radically different type of hard-boiled detective novel which challenges the dominant structural ideologies of race.