A Red Death, as detective fiction, is related to many novels in the genre.

Mosley, however, does not follow early "classic" authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, E. C. Bentley, or Agatha Christie, for whom crime is an intrusion into a decorous social order. Instead Mosley adopts hard-boiled formulas replete with dark urban milieus and corrupt members of the so-called respectable classes. The founders of this type are Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler who, like Mosley, continue a hero's exploits through a series. Mosley, though, centers each mystery in a successive time frame, and suitably ages Easy Rawlins in each new work.

Comparisons of a general sort can be drawn between A Red Death and Hammett's Red Harvest (1929). Hammett's hero, the Continental Op, finds on an assignment that the "powers that be" consist of men who lust after influence and money, and consort with gangsters. The police...