Fearless Jones

Fearless Jones #1

by Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley's Fearless Jones inaugurates a new crime series set in 1950s Los Angeles. But can Jones match Mosley's engaging long-term hero Easy Rawlins? On the evidence of this first book, the answer is resoundingly in the affirmative, even if the new series takes a little time to establish the new protagonist. And this is probably because the central character here is not so much the eponymous Fearless Jones as Paris Minton, the owner of a small second-hand bookstore. Minton is savagely beaten up and his store burned to the ground for mysterious reasons. A beautiful woman is involved, and the beleaguered Minton asks for the aid of his friend, the resourceful Fearless Jones. As Jones painstakingly investigates the woman's past, a very dark mystery begins to unravel. The crime aspects here are delivered with total panache, but Mosley would never be happy without adding that level of socio-political commentary he is so adept at, and the place of black men in 1950s LA (with few rights and little money) is a potent theme. Easy Rawlins is still Mosley's main man, but Fearless Jones gives every appearance of possessing similar longevity. --Barry Forshaw

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, African American, Mystery Thriller, Noir, Detective

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Walter Mosley (b. 1952) is the author of the bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins, as well as numerous other works, from literary fiction and science fiction to a young adult novel and political monographs. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the Nation, among other publications. Mosley is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[B Sarv · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read a Raymond Chandler novel from the 1940s and was displeased with the blatant racism in the novel. Reading it made me want to find mysteries written by African Americans with African American protagonists. I remembered watching Denzel Washington act in Devil With a Blue Dress, a film version of a Walter Mosley novel, so I went in search of Mr. Mosley (among others). I was not disappointed. Although this is the second Mosley novel I read (I finished John Woman in 2019) I have come to enjoy his work. I am currently working on the first installment of his Socrates Fortlow series: Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.

I am not certain what the appeal is of suspense and mystery novels of this "gritty detective" genre. There are so many dead bodies! On reflection I think that it must be the appeal of the anti-hero. Certainly Fearless Jones and his side kick Paris Minton qualify. I can happily forego that era of the Chandler novels and replace them with anything written by Mosley.

Two things in particular appealed to me about this story. One was Minton owning a used book store. I could really identify with his love for books and reading. And, as usual, I added some books to my "to read" list based on books this character was reading in this story. The other appeal was the way Mr. Mosley developed the story: it caught my interest and held it throughout.

I have set a goal to write and publish a "goodreads" review of every book I read in 2020. This is my first. I hope I live up to this goal. I highly recommend this clever and entertaining read.

[Melki · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Man, Paris, you got us into a real mess here."

"I didn't get into no mess. Mess just fell right top'a me. I was just sitting in my store reading a book."

It's 1954. Paris Minton is living the dream, running a used bookstore in Watts.

Business wasn't brisk, but it paid the rent and utilities. And all day long I could do the thing I loved best - reading. I read Up from Slavery, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Mein Kampf, and dozens of other titles in the first few months. Whole days I spent in my reclining swivel chair, turning pages and drinking Royal Crown colas.

For three solid months, I was the happiest man in L.A. ...

Then SHE walked in.

And of course, everything went to crap.

Soon Paris and his friend, Fearless Jones, are stumbling over dead bodies, being beaten, chased, shot at, and hauled in by the cops. Everyone wants a stolen bond and it's a convoluted shell game as to who has it and who will end up with it.

There's some beautiful writing here, but the characters are basically made of smoke. You never really get to know them. The women are little but hairstyles and high heels. What makes Fearless tick? Your guess is as good as mine. And all I really know about Paris is that he loves to read and has a big penis. (He was more than happy to tell me THAT particular fact.)

Hmm...wait a minute...

Loves to read, big penis... Mosley may have just created the perfect man.

[Monica **can't read fast enough** · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this and dare I say that it is better than Devil In A Blue Dress for me? Yep-I said it! No one can take Easy's place in my reading heart but I have enough room for Paris! I am so so glad that I finally picked up Fearless Jones. The only confusing thing for me is why the series is named after Fearless Jones when Paris Minton seems to be the central character that everything really revolves around. I am happily jumping straight into book 2 where maybe I'll get the answer to that question.

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[K2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Fav Mosley character hands down....

[window · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book but I could only muster up a like. The story started strong but got bogged down in the middle. It was saved mostly by the character of Paris, who makes a nice Watson to Fearless's Sherlock. The author also knows how to turn a phrase nicely, which helped keep me reading.

The characters were mostly well done and the 1950s LA setting was terrific but the plot - oy! Trying to follow the in's and out's of the bond that everyone was chasing was convoluted to say the least. It felt like a chore trying to make sense of who could and couldn't cash the bond and how much it was worth and where the real money was. Luckily, later in the story, Paris, a 1950's bookstore owner, read a suicide note and was able to explain the origin and financial details behind the bond to me. Just as I was asking myself how Paris could possibly know all of this, Fearless asks the same thing. When Paris said he figured it out from the note, Fearless, like me, is skeptical. Paris responds, "I read between the lines." That was a lot of between the lines reading. It was like the author used Fearless's words because he knew readers would be asking the same thing because it just didn't make sense.

Also, I didn't buy the attachment Fearless has to Fanny and Sol Tannenbaum. He meets Sol once (while Sol is semiconscious) and promises Sol that he will protect his wife Fanny. Despite the rapidly rising body count mostly revolving around people the Tannenbaums know, Fearless feels a duty to watch over Fanny and her family - literally strangers one day to best friends and roommates the next. It didn't seem real.

[K2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's Nothing Like A Book!

[~☆~Autumn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book starts out great and is fascinating but then it just goes on and on too long. I got so very bored by the end.

[Milt Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good action, fast paced but I got confused with so many different characters, or my mind is just getting feeble.

[Mahoghani 23 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very entertaining story about how life in the 60s in California was like, how brutal the police department was towards blacks, & how 3 black men beat the system.

Paris Minton is the type of man who will take the cowardly way out than stand up for what he believes in. His friend, Fearless Jones, has seen it all & will step to anyone who approaches him in the wrong way. This time Paris & Fearless have stepped into a bundle of mess that can get them not only arrested but killed as well.

The mystery starts slowly and soon starts to unravel about the 5th chapter. However, it's a story that all will enjoy if you are a Walter Mosley fan.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the Fearless Jones novels, though I apparently have been reading them out of order. This one was marred a bit by what I will term coincidence. Too many details rely on coincidence-- some of which are clearly meant to distract the reader from the real mystery. Why trouble keeps coming to Paris Minton, requiring him to seek the aid of his friend, Fearless Jones, is beyond me...

This series does a find job of showing African-American street culture in L.A. in the 1950's-- fear of the police, and the effort to avoid conflict with white folks. This one, the first in the series, isn't as good as the other I've read-- but it was still enjoyable.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Random Kindle pickup. I have to say that this started out pretty interesting and fun. Paris and Fearless have a pretty cool friendship that could have made for a better overall story. In the end, this was fairly muddled and I found myself losing interest from time to time. Too many deaths and not enough strong plot twists or red herrings. I am still a little confused at the ending, mostly because there were so many characters introduced in this one that it was hard to keep track of who was who.

[Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read, very much like the Easy Rawlins series, also by Walter Mosley.

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, Walter Mosely’s Fearless Jones is classic noir, although the pigmentation of the protagonist, Paris Minton, and the eponymous Fearless make that designation almost a pun. Mosely, of course, is a powerful writer of color and yet, portrays 1950s racism, even out of the South, in a stark black-and-white (more like white vs. black) set of images. The freedom of movement that moderns “generally” experience and the more common nature of bi-racial couples visible in today’s world may mask the traumatic reality of black drivers in white neighborhoods or a black man even giving a ride to a white woman. As someone who, from a white privilege perspective, remembers those “Colored Only” drinking fountains marveled over when visiting the 1960s South, I found it shocking that I didn’t realize just how bad it was in the ‘50s and, of course, must be in certain police departments of the present era.

So, even if Fearless Jones had not been the amazing spiral downward of lose-lose situation after another that we associate with noir, it would have been an eye-opening…er…awakening piece of literature. There were times I had to stop and catch my breath from shock when I realized just how much black citizens had to walk a tightrope of conventional and submissive behavior just to survive. It should give any person who is not of color a bit of pause in considering what a pure “law and order” message signals and the trauma it may trigger.

Now, Paris Minton is the owner of a used bookstore which he has scrambled to build from scratch when he is immediately harassed by a police officer asking where he had acquired the books. When our protagonist answers that he got them from libraries, the officer immediately jumps to the conclusion that he has stolen the books (despite the “Discarded” stamps all over the volumes). Paris immediately has to pull out the documentation which he, as a black man, needed to prove his innocence. So, less than two pages into the book, I had to realize how different the fictional character’s experience with the law was from my own.

The narrator explains this more fully on page 210: “I’m an honest man as far as it goes, meaning I’d sooner make my own money as take someone else’s. I’m almost always on the right side of the law, but lawmen scare me anyway, they terrify me. I have always believed that more black folks have been killed by those claiming to be enforcing the law than by those who were breaking it.”
In typical noir fashion, the avalanche of misfortune started with the appearance of a femme fatale and features a wild chase after a vast fortune.

The chain of events precipitated by the appearance of the beautiful and dangerous woman in the bookstore leads Paris to bail his old friend, Fearless Jones, out of jail to help him out of trouble. The irony is that, according to the narration, in previous encounters Paris had gotten Fearless out of trouble. When his bail bondsman and friend Milo asks Paris what he had done to get into trouble, Paris reflects: “I had asked it a hundred times of Fearless Jones. I couldn’t believe the trouble he’d get into and all he would say is, I didn’t do nuthin’, Paris. I was just mindin’ my own business. But what had I done?” (p. 39)

Matters are complicated by the involvement of the classic noir crooked cop and the considerable inconvenience of corpses piling up all around the two longtime friends. Fortunately, there are exceptions to the rules of those Caucasians who felt it necessary to demean all those of darker pigment using the derogatory “N” word and those who automatically assumed black skin required being up to illegal activities. Yet, in the worlds of Paris Minton and Fearless Jones, those decent (and rational) folks were few and far between.

Fearless Jones does make use of a few stereotypical characters: illiterate blacks, sham ministers, crooked cops, dangerous women, and intolerant neighbors. Yet, in the midst of such ordinary fill-in-the-blank characterizations are exciting and honest descriptions. “Three blocks away I pulled to the curb. There I took in great gulps of air, trying to bring my spirit back into alignment with my body—because that’s how it felt, as if my soul were somehow trying to flee the flesh, as if I had been so close to death so often in the last few days that the ghost was ready to bolt. That’s how it goes with me. I face danger and survive it, acting just fine, but as soon as it is over and I’m alone, I break down.” (p. 254)

For me, though, the best news was that, unlike the last few noir novels I’ve read, Paris Minton was a character for whom I could have real empathy. Maybe it’s because of his love for reading and for books, but my identification with a man from a very, very different cultural environment made me truly care what happened. I genuinely wanted him to succeed. You’ll have to see for yourself if he did.

[Amyiw · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 1/2
This starts at a run with the action and very colorful characters. You feel that it fits right in the time of the 50s in California. I ended up liking the two main characters Paris and Fearless quite a bit which is a big part of whether I end up liking a story. I think I ended up liking this more for the picture that it painted, and the characters and personalities, than the mystery. The mystery ends up being very convoluted and for me, took away from the story of the characters and life.

So the mystery, is about more than who burnt down Paris's store, a lot more. It really ends up hard to keep parts of it straight and much ends up being explained in a telling of why. For me this was the least interesting part of the over all picture and got a little much. Frequent action and violence then explanation was a bit dragging compared to the interaction.

What made it great was the descriptiveness of, how the racist cops were, how there were some without preconceived racism even with pushes from the cops, how women might have been thought to get ahead in these situations, how some that barely knew them helped them out, and then how the friends next door can leave you dry. This is what made this book alive and a good read.

25% in--------------------
I've been meaning to read a Walter Mosley book for ages. I don't know how I decided on this one as Devil in a Blue Dress is the one I've known of for ages and was written in 1990. This one was written in 2001 but is set in Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles during the 1950s, before the Watts riots. I think I'm glad I started with this as it is probably less dated though since it is historical, although not distant, might not matter. Still it starts off right into the running. We get Paris, a bookshop owner in Watts, who live atop of his store. A woman comes into his shop asking for a man and quickly hide in the backroom when a big bruiser comes in looking for her. She is no where to be found and Paris pays the price, all the while thinking of his friend, Fearless Jones, a street tough also, who has pulled him out of these situations in the past but is currently serving time. The girl is found and only creates more issues and over and over Paris thinks about Fearless finally needing to bring him into help. These characters jump off the pages at you, we know Paris, or someone like him. We know the woman or someone like her; we know not to trust her too. And we get to know Fearless through Paris's thoughts.

[Jay French · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Fearless Jones” is more, in this first episode of Mosley’s series, the “Paris Minton” show. Here, Mosley divides his normal heroic non-detective detective into two people, one, Minton, representing brains, and the other, Jones, representing brawn. Minton, a meek bookseller with occasional brushes with danger and intrigue, teams with friend Jones, former Army hero and muscle-bound female attractor, to deal with an odd story of artwork stolen by Nazis morphed into a bearer bond that touches more hands than a retail politician at a chicken dinner. The plot is extremely convoluted, and the body count is quite high for a mystery. And much of the action occurs offstage, with our hero, Minton, being advised of the plot twists in a long monologue at the end of the book. Despite those weaknesses and excessive splashes of blood, the characters are interesting, as is Mosley’s sense of time and place, and I’m likely to continue reading the series as I already have acquired the two follow-on books on audio. Given the naming convention of the series, focusing on the Fearless Jones character, I would expect to see Jones become more of a lead in these upcoming episodes. Otherwise, I am kind of lukewarm to this.

Favorite line in the book. After the police savagely beat Paris Minton, especially his face, he's told to stand for a police lineup. Another fellow in the lineup sees him and says "Just goin' on ugly, you the one to pick."

[Mysticpt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I would give one of the other Mosley series a try and I'm glad I did. This one takes place in the 50s and features a couple of good new characters. The plot is always secondary for me in a book by Mosley, it's more about the characters and the great writing of which there is plenty in this one, featuring also a not bad plot. 4 stars

[David Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story moves rapidly despite a myriad of convolutions, twists, turns and surprises. I hadn't read Mosley before but I can't wait to read the next Fearless Jones mystery.

"I think this could be the start of a beautful friendship."

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walter Mosley is a very good writer.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first Fearless and I liked it a lot. I have read previous ones and did not know he lost his shop like that. Good read, love the characters.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thumbs up on the first book of this new series.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

4 stars and change, rounded up. We'll call it a bonus star for being my first Walter Mosley book.

So Paris Minton is sitting in his bookstore, minding his own business, when a woman walks in looking for a church. Moments later, a very large thug comes in looking for her. Within the space of a few pages, Paris has been beaten up, in a car chase, shot at, robbed, and had his car stolen and his store/home burned down. The situation needs sorting, and Paris, a small man, enlists the aid of his friend Fearless Jones. This is the 1950s and the investigation involves a missing Swiss bond, and an old Jewish couple...

This is a very different view of 1950s Los Angeles than the one I'm familiar with from other detective stories taking place in this setting, and I enjoyed that aspect of the story a lot. But even more appealing was the dynamic between Paris Minton and Fearless Jones.

I noticed a number of reviews referencing Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, and I don't agree with that comparison at all. Sure, on a very superficial level you've got a book/series named for one character and narrated by another, but honestly I don't see why this book is named for Fearless Jones, other than it being a more marketable name than Paris Minton. Years ago, when I read the Sherlock Holmes stories, I thought of Watson as an annoying, bumbling moron, and mostly just wished he'd get hell out of the way and let me get closer to Holmes. Holmes is the star of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Watson a shabby magicians assistant, unable to sell a single ticket on his own, and there in no small part simply to keep us from getting too close to the magic.

Fearless Jones is very much Paris Minton's story. Fearless may be the handsome hero, the one who draws the ladies' attention, but this isn't the story of some cheesy "alpha male" and his "lesser" companion. Nor, by means of giving Paris the brains in the story, has Mosley simply split one "ideal man" into physical and intellectual halves. It may be that Paris gets more out of the pair's friendship than Fearless does, we see them through Paris' eyes, so it's hard to say, but even if so, I reject the idea that that makes Fearless the star of the show.

There is humor here, and a convoluted mystery. Honestly, I didn't try to follow the logic of the mystery closely enough to be certain it's free of holes, but none jumped out at me. The interplay between the two men, its effects on Paris, who he was on his own, and what Fearless brought out in him, was the highlight of this book. I look forward to more Paris and Fearless, and to sampling Mosley's other work as well. Recommended.

[Ellen Behrens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bond, bond, who's got the bond?

All Paris Minton wants to do is sell used books and try not to think about his buddy Fearless Jones, who's in jail on a bad rap because Paris refused to loan him the money to cover the fine for release. In strolls a lovely Elana Love and his whole world is about to go up in smoke.

What follows is plot I can only describe as being like the shell game where someone hides a small ball under one of three identical cups, then switches them around and around and your job is to try to follow the one with the ball in it so you can guess correctly which cup it's under. In this case, Paris and Fearless are in search of a bond purportedly worth thousands of dollars and they're checking those cups for the ball/bond that seems to have vanished.

A long list of characters complicates matters, and although many of them are thinly described, some are so well developed I'm sure they're alive and well somewhere (okay, despite the time warp).

Set in 1950s Los Angeles, Paris and Fearless navigate territory familiar to them, but foreign to me. That world opened up for me when I saw it through Paris' eyes, and I'm grateful for Mosley's ability -- and willingness -- to write in a way that makes it possible.

Shame on me for waiting so long to read a Walter Mosley novel. Thankfully, there are many more to devour!

[Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book fit right into my fiction wheelhouse. I've been an unabashed fan of Mosley's Easy Rawlins series forever, and have always loved how Mosley scripted Easy's interaction with the Jews of mid-century Los Angeles, a group who experienced very different, but still profound, racism from the general populace. Fearless Jones inhabits the same Los Angeles that Easy Rawlins does. Easy doesn't make an appearance, but there are a few references to his associates that make reading this novel feel like meeting up with an old friend after a long time apart.

Fearless Jones opens with an epic, film noir-worthy heaping pile of steaming shit delivered on the rickety doorstep of one Paris Minton by femme fatale Elana Love. In no time at all he's been beaten, shot at, sought by the police, robbed, and victimized by arson, so he cashes out his saving account and bails out his best buddy/bad MF Tristan "Fearless" Jones from jail and starts his adventure into a Jewish neighborhood of 1950s Los Angeles, where they are received about as well an one would expect with one notable and fortuitous exception.

Mosley's peerless prose practically leaps off the page as protagonist Paris describes LA and his travails in literate detail. Mosley's ability to make the reader feel, and seethe at, the institutional racism that blacks of the era endured, and still endure, is powerful and profound. Adding antisemitism to the equation just ups the ante for a Jewish reader like myself.

I am likely a bit biased, but I loved this book. Highly recommended.

[Larry Piper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last summer I read through the last three of the Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley. Apparently, Mosley has had second thoughts and has resuscitated Easy, but the new book isn't yet available on kindle. So, I figured why not try a different Mosley series, the one featuring Fearless Jones. This is the first of them in which we are introduced to the narrator, Paris Minton, a second-hand book seller who is in the business primarily because he gets to sit around all day reading books, and his friend Fearless Jones, an army-trained killer, who has a strong sense of honor, but who keeps getting into scrapes of one kind and another, and who seems always to enmesh poor Paris in his trials.

This book was fast-paced and interesting. It was set in 1954, and has much to say about the problems of racism. I think that might be one of my primary interests in reading Mosley, he's an acute observer of the problems and effects of racism. Basically, he is opening up a mostly unknown world to me despite my having been brought up in Baltimore before the Civil Rights era (believe it or not, I never knew about slavery in my home state until I read Frederick Douglass a few years ago. WTF?).

I found the story itself a bit convoluted and am not sure it makes a whole lot of sense, we have Nazis, Israeli spies, crooked cops, ambitions and wanton young women, crooked store-front preachers, etc. all involved in essentially the same scam. Whatever, Paris and Fearless eventually survive repeated attempts to kill them and more-or-less figure out the reasons they kept coming across dead bodies.

[Nanette Bulebosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've written before about how much I love Paris Minton and Fearless Jones, Mosley's intrepid accidental investigators. Part of my attraction is just the satisfaction of being exposed to such different personalities than the ones I find in small-town Wisconsin in 2010. Paris and Fearless solve the cases thrown their way in the less-prosperous sections of L.A. in the early 1950s. They're also African American, which means the cops suspect them of everything, even when it's clear they had nothing to do with the crimes. They're resilient and good-humored, though, and they fully enjoy their moments of freedom and the rare occasions when they have more than a few dollars in their wallets.

This book has a poignant scene in a segregated library, where Paris as a youth encounters a particularly spiteful and mean-spirited librarian. When this woman is finally convinced that he really can read and that he is a genuine book lover, she takes him into the beautiful (to him), high-ceilinged building only to lord it over him.

"You will never, never be able to read these books," she tells him. "You will never be welcome here."

This scene is written so well, I can't help wondering if it is based on something that really happened to the author. I'd like to believe that most librarians, even Southern ones, were working to end discrimination, not reveling in it 60 or more years ago. But I know that small-minded people can be found in all professions, even mine.

[Emmett R]

A lot of books take to time to actually get exciting and eventful. Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley, is definitely not one of these books. Right from the start there is lots of action and excitement. This continues throughout the book which keeps the reader enticed not wanting to stop. As all these things happen Walter Mosley does a great job of showing how the events affect the characters. This is especially true for the main character Paris Minton. Paris goes through a lot of stuff in a short period of time. This of course affects him in a deep way which Walter does a great job of expressing. I won't give away the book for people who want to read it but it is a great and exciting book that I would recommend to anyone.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mosley can't seem to decide whether he wants to write slice-of-life drama or noir, so he splits the difference and gives us a hybrid. But what results is something too meandering and lacking momentum to be an effective mystery, and too tied to genre conventions to stand as social observance. Mosley loves his characters, there's no doubt about that; he has a deep love for them. But his ability to walk the line between these two styles and successfully merge them together appears to slipping with each subsequent effort. The early Easy Rawlins novels still remain the best of his work.

[Mike Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was very hard for me to follow with all the characters it had. Mr. Mosley was constantly explaining who was who, but I still couldn't keep all of them straight.

There was no way I could have possibly figured out the ending. Being so complicated, I got dizzy trying to understand it all.

I will probably not read another "Fearless Jones" mystery from the series.

[Sherry Molock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay

Of bad but I like the Easy Rawlings series much better. I actually like Fearless better but the story focused on Paris, the narrator. Also had so many characters and subplots that it was hard to follow.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book was o k but near the end it began to get boring to drawn out .
i have read this author before and he is good just this book was not as good as the others .