SOURCE: "Murder and Mystery from Watts to Bologna," in The New York Times, August 7, 1991, p. C16.

In the following excerpt, Mitgang praises the second Easy Rawlins novel, A Red Death, noting that Mosley "has depicted a special locale and a corner-cutting way of life that most readers will find far more riveting than the crime pages of their newspapers."

Good writers, including mystery writers, somehow know how to make their fictional characters foretell events before they actually happen in real life. They strike the prescience key on their typewriters or computers and out comes a story that later bounces off the front pages and emits radiation from the nightly horror news on television. Only the writers, of course, know where that magical key is located.

Fortunately for the reader of genre fiction, Walter Mosley in A Red Death again shows that he knows where it is. Last year...