People moved so often, and neighborhoods changed so quickly, and the world was changing so quickly. Did you have a sense of this as a neighborhood when you were growing up?ĭoes anybody think about neighborhood in Los Angeles? Maybe they do now, but they didn’t when I was a kid.

You were raised on Spaulding, just south of Pico, not far from where Easy now lives. If you write the book well enough, people will fill it in. There are so many details you know, people make up their own details. Do you do research? Or does it come from memory?

But it’s only possible starting in the 1960s.Īll the books do a vivid job of capturing a lost Los Angeles. In many ways, Easy’s friends have surpassed him. Mouse becomes at least a national heist man, maybe an international heist man Jackson Blue becomes a computer expert, working for the largest insurance company in the world. But now, in the 1960s, people can develop in really strange ways. They’re protesting, but there aren’t major changes. The 1940s and 1950s, black people are on the side. I know a lot about it, about the things that happened, and culturally they fit into Easy’s life. I always planned that once I hit the 1960s, I would spend a little time there.

But starting with “A Little Yellow Dog,” which takes place in 1963, the chronology gets condensed. And work out some of the problems Easy had developed over the previous dozen books.Įarly in the Rawlins series, the time frame is spread out, with several years between the action in the books. I knew there was going to be this guy, and I had the thought that he would be related to Frank Green, who appears in “Devil in a Blue Dress.” And I wanted to see Mouse again, see Mama Jo, all the characters. As usual, what I did is I discovered it as I was doing it. You’ve called “Little Green” a rebirth for Easy, a new beginning.

Little green an easy rawlins mystery