Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer
BEEN WRONG SO LONG IT FEELS LIKE RIGHT: A King Oliver Novel. By Walter Mosley. Mulholland Books. 336 pages. $29.
“You been wrong so long it feels like right to you.” That’s just one of the great sentences in book three of Walter Mosley’s Joe King Oliver series, in which Joe admonishes his father, Chief Oliver, after tracking him down. Chief abandoned Joe and his mother when Joe was a child, getting himself sent to prison. Now, Joe hunts him down because Joe’s grandmother wants to see her son Chief before she undergoes a dangerous operation. Joe has mixed feelings when he finds him — “Wanting to be with my Dad was like wanting to look into the sun” — but has even more difficulty when he finds out Chief is wanted on a murder charge. Somebody killed somebody that Chief said he was going to kill. Joe has to find the real killer before the police catch up to Chief. The search takes him all the way from Chief’s past to Joe’s present, entertaining the reader with the usual cast of colorful characters Mosley comes up with.
Mosley adds a second thread to the narrative when Joe takes on the case of a hunted woman and her child. Instead of turning her over to her husband as he was hired to do, Joe takes her under his wing, at once protecting her and setting a trap for her dangerous spouse. Joe’s tactics take us into a New York underworld that only Mosley could imagine, full of off-beat characters, hidey holes and safe houses all around the city. The cat-and-mouse narrative complements the convoluted path Joe takes to prove Chief innocent.
The story is accomplished with one great sentence after another. Some of the best ones come from Joe’s many assignations with women. (He falls in love with four of them.) When one of them asks him how is he doing, he replies, “I’m just tryin’ to stay alive long enough to get to know you better.” After kissing another woman, he thinks of “…my mother and father in shadow on the outer edges of my hungry heart.” No mystery writer comes up with as much good writing as Mosley does. He takes us deep into the life and loves of his characters. He’s the best.