SOURCE: Ulin, David L. “A Grand Contrivance.” Atlantic Monthly 290, no. 1 (July-August 2002): 186-88.

In the following essay, Ulin offers a positive assessment of Bad Boy Brawly Brown and discusses how Mosley's Easy Rawlins series recreates the landscape and social climate of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles.

I don't put much stock in classifying novels by genre. The simple truth is that good writing is good writing, regardless of its form. I'm not saying that all fiction is equal, or that engaged reading doesn't require an active, critical intelligence. But books like Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and James M. Cain's Double Indemnity are not merely great crime novels; they are works of literature, with all the intricacy and insight that implies.

The tricky question of genre has marked the career of Walter Mosley since the publication of his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, in 1990. Mosley, after all, is commonly...