Walter Mosley is probably best known for his mystery novels about Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones. I really like the Easy Rawlins books and have read them all. Fearless Jones I don't care for so much, and I've not yet gotten through one of Mosley's science fiction books. His new series, featuring Leonid McGill, is very promising after two novels.
Browsing our local used bookstore, I found The Man in My Basement, shelved with Mosley's detective novels. This book is a "mainstream" novel (discussion of genre is for another occasion). Published by Little, Brown, and Company in 2004, The Man in My Basement is narrated by Charles Blakey, who lives alone in a large house that has been in his family for "seven generations or more." Blakey is African-American, but his family pride themeselves on never having been slaves. In Easy Rawlins, the reader discovers a Los Angeles experience, a gritty urban life; Easy struggles to survive and protect the ones he loves. Leonid McGill lives in New York City and works out of an elegant office he acquired through happenstance.
With both Easy and McGill, Charles Blakey shares a darkness of soul, a need to be alert to nuances in order to survive. Blakey is not a private investigator, however; he lives alone, associates with two card-playing and drinking buddies, spending most of his time in his house reading and drinking. Blakey also is in dire need of money.
A white man shows up at his door with a strange request: he will pay Blakey nearly $50,000 to live in the house's large basement for a couple of months in the summer. This man, Anniston Bennet," has a very strange summer in mind, a summer that changes Blakey and gets him moving in a different direction.
Before the basement can be inhabited, Blakey must clear it out. He finds there a trove of family possessions: diaries, furniture, paintings, and three small ivory masks. In moving these things and having them evaluated by an antiques dealer brings Blakey to a new knowledge of his family's past and thus of his identity.
The Man in My Basement is the story of a man's crisis, economic, social, and existential. The writing is clear and clean and the insights convincing. I hope you read it and enjoy it.