# Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins

Ezekiel "Easy" Porterhouse Rawlins is a fictional character created by the American novelist Walter Mosley. Rawlins is an African-American private investigator, a hard-boiled detective and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. He is featured in a series of best-selling mysteries set from the 1940s to the 1960s.
The mysteries combine traditional conventions of detective fiction with descriptions of racial inequities and social injustice experienced by African Americans and other persons of color in the Los Angeles of that period. While Rawlins is clearly in the tradition of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, he differs sharply from these earlier fictional detectives in that Rawlins is an unlicensed private investigator (though he acquires a license late in the series) with no background or training in law enforcement.
Mosley has written fourteen novels and a collection of short stories featuring Rawlins, his most popular character. Mosley originally featured Rawlins in a novella called Gone Fishin', but it was rejected by several publishers because they didn't think that there was a market for books about black men. When Mosley rewrote the story as a detective novel, he found a publisher.
Mosley once stated he intended to bring the character into contemporary times, but later said the 2007 novel Blonde Faith, which is set in 1967, would be the last. Nevertheless, in 2013 a new Easy Rawlins novel entitled Little Green was published, followed by Rose Gold (2014), Charcoal Joe (2016), Blood Grove (2021), and Farewell, Amethystine (2024).

## Character biography

Easy Rawlins was born on November 3, 1920, in New Iberia, Louisiana. His mother died when he was eight years old; soon afterward his father fled to escape lynching after fighting with a white man. The fight was the result of a dispute with his father's supervisor over earnings. Easy had accompanied his father to his job at the slaughterhouse and saw his father argue with the man. When the man called his father the N-word his father punched him. After the scuffle Easy and his father ran off, with his father kissing Easy one last time, and telling him to go home. Easy never found out what became of him.
Easy's older half-brother and half-sister went to live with cousins in El Paso while Easy was taken in by his mother's brother-in-law, a violent man named Skyles. After a few weeks, Easy ran away from Skyles's farm and spent the rest of his childhood and adolescence living on his own in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas. After accompanying his friend Raymond ("Mouse") to Pariah, which resulted in the death of Mouse's stepfather, Easy decided to leave Houston to move to Dallas, Texas. He lived there a short while before enlisting in the armed forces. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army, fighting in North Africa, Italy, and finally, the Battle of the Bulge under George S. Patton and Omar Bradley; after the war, he moved to Los Angeles where he purchased his first home and worked at an aircraft assembly plant. Easy got into his own dispute with his supervisor at the Champion aircraft assembly plant. He was asked to stay behind after his shift, but felt tired, and did not trust his ability to check his work. Easy was fired for not remaining to complete the work. Concerns about his unemployment and mortgage payments influenced him to take up his first case as an amateur private investigator.