SOURCE: "Easy Rawlins, Just a Little Older," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 5, 1994, pp. 3, 12.

Gaines is an American novelist whose works include A Lesson before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In the following review of Black Betty, he detects a weariness in the aging Easy Rawlins that could lead the detective to abandon his trade and implores Mosley to contime the series.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy was president of the United States, Martin Luther King was leading civil rights demonstrators in Alabama and Georgia, and Easy Rawlins was searching for Black Betty out of South Central Los Angeles.

Black Betty is Walter Mosley's latest novel, and Easy Rawlins is his private eye, just as Philip Marlowe was alter ego for Raymond Chandler in that same city, and Sam Spade served that purpose for Dashiell Hammett 400 and some miles farther north in San Francisco. I...