Slice of P.I.: “A Red Death”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



A Red Death, by Walter Mosley (W.W. Norton, 1991).

Set in Los Angeles’ working-class Watts neighborhood in 1953, this second novel starring Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (following 1990’s Devil in a Blue Dress) finds the Black factory worker turned snoop getting into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service over his recent property acquisitions. However, a Red-baiting FBI agent, Darryl T. Craxton, agrees to let him off the hook for back taxes, so long as Easy looks into suspected espionage at a major aircraft manufacturing plant. Craxton also wants our hero to find proof that a local labor union organizer is a closet communist spy. Murders soon follows, of course.

Efforts online to find background online about John Jinks, who’s credited with painting the dust-jacket art for this hardcover edition of A Red Death (which was later reused on paperback versions) have had negligible results. I can tell you that during the late 20th century, he created fronts for fantasy novels by Michael Bishop and interior illustrations for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as producing covers for some of Harper Perennial’s line of Miss Silver mysteries by Patricia Wentworth. Oh, and I tracked down this collection of Jinks’ distinctive angular artistry. But beyond that, well, he remains a mystery. At least for the time being.