SOURCE: "Kick Back with Crime," in Newsweek, Vol. CXXIV, No. 1, July 4, 1994, pp. 66-7.

In the following review of Black Betty, Jones discusses the ironies that drive Mosley's writing.

Driving around Los Angeles a few weeks back, Walter Mosley had every reason to be in a fine mood. His latest novel, Black Betty, was the one novel creating a big buzz in town at the American booksellers' convention. Elsewhere in the city, Jonathan Demme was producing a film of his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington as his detective hero, Easy Rawlins. But none of that seemed to matter much to Mosley. He was much more interested in talking about the street life only a windshield away. Mosley is obsessed with the paradoxes and mysteries of Los Angeles. "It's a land that on the surface is of dreams," he said. "And then there's a kind...