Book Review: 'The Long Fall' by Walter Mosley

THE LONG FALL

By Walter Mosley

Riverhead. 306 pp. $25.95

"The best time to kill someone is when they're going through a door." This little tip reveals much -- but not everything -- about Leonid McGill, played-out private investigator and hero of "The Long Fall," the first novel in a new mystery series by Walter Mosley. 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, this African American boxer with a deceased communist father (hence Leonid) listens to the BBC and practices Buddhist meditation. But don't get nervous; there is nothing New Age about McGill's struggle to "go from crooked to only slightly bent."

We meet McGill as he encounters the shiny, corporate world that has replaced his old New York. "It wasn't my skin color that bothered her," he observes of a Madison Avenue receptionist, "Juliet didn't like me because of my big calloused hands and no-frills suit." The plot that forces McGill uptown is both simple and tantalizingly opaque. He has been hired to track down four men, knowing only the street names they used as teenagers. His client won't say why he wants to find these men, but what does McGill care? It's a job. He delivers their current whereabouts.

But when their bodies start showing up, it becomes clear that the original assignment was far from simple and that McGill may be next in line for elimination. Not that he hasn't seen it coming. "All the years I'd pulled the plug on men who maybe weren't angels," he admits. "That's why someone will kill me one day."

In the meantime, there is McGill's loveless marriage, so convincingly portrayed that we feel voyeuristic; his teenage son's disturbing plan of revenge on a friend's father; and McGill's second assignment, this one from the mob. "I considered . . . telling him without uttering the words that he was no longer welcome in my world," McGill says about the gangster who hires him. "But pushing Tony Towers away would be like sweeping a rattlesnake under the bed before retiring."

Mosley cinches these plots elegantly together as he moves McGill between the worlds of new and old money and into the lives of crooks, cops and every species in between. We follow eagerly, seduced by Mosley's laconic style and by a newly arrived hero who seems to have been around forever.

Mundow is a literary columnist for the Boston Globe and a contributor to the Irish Times.