FAMILY & MURDER: WALTER MOSLEY'S BEEN WRONG SO LONG IT FEELS LIKE RIGHT

Few authors know the private eye novel so well and use that knowledge to bend the genre to their will like Walter Mosley. He employs his detectives to explore his interests in race, morality, and family, as well as his experimentations in the form. His latest Joe "King" Oliver book, Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right, proves a strong example of this.

King, Mosley's most recent detective hero, is an ex-cop and ex-con, framed by his colleagues. After proven innocent, he got a license and an office and worked the streets on New York, His daughter, Aja, puts a familial spin on the Girl Friday role, doing her best not to get too involved with his cases. His unique background gives him allies on and an understanding of both sides of the law. Mosley further into his backstory with this book.

His grandmother, Grandma B, confides in King that she is dying of cancer and she would like to see her son, his father Chief, before she leaves this earth. King thought he was still in prison for a shooting tied to a robbery, but Grandma B says she knows he was released nine years ago. He hits the city, traveling through an underworld where politics, crime, and revolution often intersect., questioning Chief's old friends and the many women in his life (something father and son have in common). King soon learns that the police are also looking for him, connecting the old crime to a new murder. It also becomes linked to a controlling businessman who hired King to find his wife and daughter.

Mosley constructs the story, so we get to know Chief much like King does. He holds a grudge against his father, nit because of his guilt, but because of his innocence. He went away from his mother and him for a principle> His mother entered a mental ward soon after. As we follow King's search and what is revealed in his questioning, Mosley created a mosaic of the effects incarceration beyond the one imprisoned.

Like other Oliver books, Mosley writes in a less meditative style than in other series. King shares fewer observations than Easy Rawlins on his lie and society. The style is more direct and immediate that becomes less prosaic, yet still poetic. If Easy is Mile Davis jazz, King Oliver is Howling Wolf blues. The reader interprets the story more, fusing their own point of view to our sleuth's.

Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right has an experimental feel while delivering a satisfying genre romp. It takes the surface of the tough, jaded, womanizing fifties paperback PI and fleshes him out, partly with a different shade of flesh than usual. It plays more on relationships maintained, built, and crumbling. Once again, Walter Mosley serves us what we like, all while doing what he wants.