The author of The Good Lord Bird and other works takes us on an expedition into Walter Mosley territory – and a rewarding expedition it is. Set in 1969 Brooklyn under the administration of Mayor John Lindsay, it is also a picture of a neighborhood in transition, from the stickball, ring-a-levio and neighborly numbers-games of its elderly characters’ remembered childhoods, to the heroin-fueled entrepreneurialism of insatiably-greedy young drug-lords and mafia wanna-bes.

As in The Good Lord Bird, McBride revels in dialect and anecdote.  The language is casual and unlearned, full of nicknames, asides, put-downs and epithets that would be verboten in contemporary conversation. The characters too, emphasize what a different world it was back then – the oldsters on whom the action centers being uniformly quirky, folksy and stout of heart.  The young and rising who bedevil them are nearly as uniform in their vulgarity, thoughtlessness and despicability. It is telling too, that the one young man who redeems himself does so though the unlikely route of minor league baseball, a throwback ambition if ever there was one.  (Having grown up not too far away from this place and time, though infinitely far from its hardships, I can recall the reverence with which the ‘national pastime’ was held in those days and parts, and the phantom hope it offered, of escape from all that is unholy).

Race is, of course, a (the?) major theme here, how the ‘coloreds’ moved in after the docks died and the Italians moved on to more fertile ground; how blacks and whites existed in separate virtual civilizations veneered upon the same streets.  How Irish cops had been part of the glue holding it all together, till the stakes grew too high (thank you, drug money) and forced everyone to choose a side and hold it with their life.  How irrelevant most of the white man’s world and morality is to those kept down by them, and how, in this telling, a few resilient souls can even manage to bridge the divides and find a better life on their own terms.  (An aging cop, for example, finds happiness with the daughter of an Italian mobster, whose wife years ago ensured the family’s future by purchasing a Bronx bagel shop with the imprisoned goombah’s cash stash, allowing McBride to opine that you don’t need to be Jewish to make a kosher killing in New York.)

Deacon King Kong’s crime-scene of a plot aims for a sort of urban picaresque, with an old drunk named Sportcoat as through-line, humankind’s earliest art object (the Venus of Willendorf) as its MacGuffin and several oddball romances to give it color and warmth.  Despite frequent descents into over-long conversational riffs, there is enough mystery and eventfulness to carry it along, and the eventual resolution is plenty satisfying so long as one does not look to closely.  Goodness triumphs to a far greater degree than the undercurrents have suggested it should, and the characters for whom one has been taught to root end up – for the most part – intact and even improved in their circumstances.

All in all, a joyful love song for a lost culture (if it is to be believed; I am certainly not one who would know) and for the importance of community over easy assumptions, easy money and taking the easy way out. 

(and no, that did not start out as a reference to Mosely’s Easy Rawlins character, but may as well end there…)