Mosley has received critical acclaim for creating a detective hero in the hardboiled private-eye tradition of Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, 1930; see separate entry) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, 1939; see separate entry).

Easy's discovery of the culpability of Bonnie Shay in A Little Yellow Dog has been compared to the ending of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, when detective Sam Spade confronts the deceptive Brigid. Mosley's hero, of course, unlike Spade, understands the workings of crime from the perspective of white racism, blight in African-American urban life, and gangsterism on both sides of the racial line. In the specific area of African-American mystery writing, Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels have precedent in Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies:A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932). Fisher belonged to the 1920s to 1930s Harlem Renaissance, generally regarded as the first arts movement to involve African-American writers. He is considered the...