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The Long Fall

by Walter Mosley

ISBN13: 9781594488580
ISBN10: 1594488584
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A brand-new mystery series from one of the countryas best-known, best-loved writers: a new character, a new city, a new era. A new Walter Mosley.

His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. Itas a name that takes a little explaining, but heas used to it. aDaddy was a communist and great-great- Granddaddy was a slave master from Scotland. You know, the black manas family tree is mostly root. Whatever you see aboveground is only a hint at the real story.a

Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGillas an old-school P.I. working a city thatas gotten fancy all around him. Fancy or not, he has always managed to get byakeep a roof over the head of his wife and kids, and still manage a little fun on the sideamostly because heas never been above taking a shady job for a quick buck. But like the city itself, McGill is turning over a new leaf, adecided to go from crooked to slightly bent.a

New York City in the twenty-first century is a city full of secretsaand still a place that reacts when you know where to poke and which string to pull. Thatas exactly the kind of thing Leonid McGill knows how to do. As soon as The Long Fall begins, with McGill calling in old markers and greasing NYPD palms to unearth some seemingly harmless information for a high-paying client, he learns that even in this cleaned-up city, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be constantly tested.

And we learn that with this protagonist, this city, this time, Mosley has tapped a rich new vein thatas inspiring his best work since the classic Devil in a Blue Dress.

Review:

"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 (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"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... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) — 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.

Reviewed by Anna Mundow, who is a literary columnist for the Boston Globe and a contributor to the Irish Times, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Synopsis:

A new mystery series from the author of the classic work "Devil in a Blue Dress" offers a new character, a new city, and a new era.

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: Glenn, January 1, 2010 (view all comments by Glenn)
Great book, every bit as good as the Easy Rawlins stuff.
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: Robert Moyer, June 16, 2009 (view all comments by Robert Moyer)

Walter Mosley has carved a sizeable ouvre out of California’s past, making the sixties, seventies and eighties each a setting for one of his successful series. Recently, however, he has given signs of moving on; he killed off Easy Rawlins, married off Socrates Fortlow, and put Fearless Jones on hiatus. Sure enough, in his latest novel, he has deserted the hard-boiled past of Los Angeles for the harder-boiled present of New York. The stocky, fifty-ish, African American native New Yorker Mosley has created a new protagonist—Leonid McGill, a stocky, fiftyish African American native New Yorker. The son of a Communist union organizer who “believed in living with everybody but his family,” McGill has not seen it easy. After watching his white mother die of a broken heart, he grew up making his own way “in a world of chains and choking, imperfect choices and the fools who made them..” A trained boxer, he works out to a “rhythm of violence” that keeps up his balance “in the rotted infrastructure of my city and my life.” He’s a tough guy in a tough business, a “moral illiterate” who took money from anyone to trace anyone down, whatever the consequences.

Until now. One of those consequences caught up with him, and he turned a corner when the result died in his arms. His determination to change his ways is tested, however, when the four men he is hired to find start dropping dead around the city and state. Faced with a force of evil, as well as former mob employers, he cannot escape the darkness in the heart of New York, the capitol of noir.

Of course, Mosley explores more than one aspect of blackness in his books. As he takes us into unseen parts of the city, McGill, a descendant of a slave dealer, gives us glimpses of the plight of the black man in America today. A young blonde receptionist looks at him as if he “…were a city trash collector walking right from my garbage truck into the White House and asking for an audience with the president.;” an African American guard gives him extra scrutiny because he, like McGill, “…had descended…from a long line of suspicion.” As opposed to his previous series, these encounters smack of the here and now, not the once upon a time of his California books.

We also meet his personal circle of hell: the cop whose sole purpose is to bring McGill down; his disaffected spouse, with whom he had a marriage full of“…decades of detritis;” his biological son who rejects him; and the son from an affair of his wife’s “…a lively trout slipping between my fingers in an icy-cold stream.” whom he loves most dearly and goes to great lengths to protect. Of course, there is the “other” woman who loves Leonid unrequitedly, the one who helps us understand why he is so appealing a character: “You are a man on the road,” she tells him. Some men might lie and blame others, but McGill to her is “…right out there in the light of day. That’s all I want from a man.”.

And that’s what we want from a Mosley detective. Like Mosley’s previous protagonists, McGill endears himself to the criminal class and reader alike, a common man with an uncommon streak of outrage at injustice in all its forms. He will certainly return to take us on another tour through the dark side of the city that never sleeps.

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: Bev E., March 5, 2009 (view all comments by Bev E.)
The Long Fall is the first book in a new detective mystery series from the author Walter Mosley. He introduces a new character, Leonid Trotter McGill, aka LT, aka McGill, an ex boxer, wanna be ex smoker who is starting to come to terms with his past. He's 53 years old and starting to see things in a different light. But his career long habits have made it difficult to change, after all his clients have come to rely on his particular expertise in getting jobs of a delicate nature done.

McGill's father was an idealistic communist and his grandfather was a slave master from Scotland. Roll that all together and you get a gumshoe with a conscience, a father who loves a son that isn't his and a man who strays but still finds his way back home.
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9781594488580
Author:: Mosley, Walter
Publisher:: Riverhead Hardcover
Subject:: Mystery & Detective - General
Subject:: Mystery fiction
Subject:: Private investigators - New York (State) -
Publication Date:: April 2009
Binding:: Hardcover
Language:: English
Pages:: 305
Dimensions:: 9.04x6.40x1.19 in. 1.11 lbs.

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