Credit...Richard A. Chance

How Easy Rawlins Built a Real Estate Empire, One Crime Novel at a Time

by · NY Times

About a third of the way through “Farewell, Amethystine,” the latest novel in the author Walter Mosley’s series about a private investigator named Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins, Easy sets out for a late-night meeting with a gun and a hunch.

The book is on a narrative precipice in which our gumshoe has knocked on enough doors and been told enough lies that both he and the reader understand that the simple missing-person case presented in Chapter 2 is about to become violent.

But before it goes down, Easy pauses the action to make a weird declaration: He doesn’t need this job. He makes more than enough money renting real estate.

Easy is a Black World War II veteran who fled the Jim Crow South for a better life in Los Angeles. In “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the 1990 classic that started both the series and Mosley’s career, Easy takes his first case so he can pay his mortgage and uses a windfall to add a rental property. The ups and downs of real estate continue as a recurring theme and story engine, especially in the early books, where the remedy for some tax lien or underwater mortgage is often to solve whatever mystery is driving the plot.

Now, two decades of buying and holding later, Easy is flush. As he explains in “Farewell, Amethystine,” his 12 buildings have a total of 101 rental units that a friend manages for a 0.8 percent fee. Subtract that commission along with mortgage payments and general upkeep, and his take-home is $26,000 a year in 1970 (the year the novel takes place), which, adjusted for inflation, would be about $217,000 today.

“I wasn’t rich,” Easy says. “But I sure didn’t need to be going out among the hammerhands and scalawags in the middle of the night.”

Let’s dispense with the obvious: Easy Rawlins is a fictional character. Nevertheless, I’m here to tell you that his story has much to teach us about small landlording — America’s most enduring side hustle.

Leave aside the dead bodies and the shady gangsters. Forget that his best friend, Mouse, is a heist man who kills frequently and without remorse. Beneath the multiple double-crosses and buried secrets is a story of a guy who wants to free himself from wage labor and builds a stream of passive income to do it.

Last year, about 7 percent of U.S. households received some kind of rental income. A sliver of them include the nation’s richest people. Most are more like Easy — people who started with a single house and built slowly, doing repairs and watching their pennies until the nest egg paid off for them.

More than almost any occupation I can think of, landlords occupy a uniquely conflicted place in American culture. Television and movies tend to portray anyone who collects the rent as the money-grubbing face of heartlessness. Back in the real world, the popularity of “how-to” real estate books and $5,000-a-day seminars on managing property, not to mention vast stretches of social media where attractive influencers give cheery advice on everything from evaluating aging buildings to removing problem tenants, tells a different story.

Easy Rawlins is neither a saint nor a caricature. Sometimes he evicts, sometimes he forgives. He likes money, but is not obsessed with it.

What real estate gives him is what many people want: the means to live more comfortably, to leave something for their children, to be their own boss.

I started reading the Easy Rawlins mysteries in 2003, and, earlier this year, I accomplished my longstanding goal of getting current on the series (now at 16 books). At first, I barely noticed the housing stuff. Now it’s all I can see.

That’s because my day job is to cover America’s housing affordability crisis. Mostly, it’s a dour story: homeless camps, overstuffed apartments, families who will never be able to afford the American dream.

Like Easy, I live in Los Angeles. But his city was a different place. In the L.A. I occupy, high housing costs are suffocating daily life and creating a steady outflow of families from California to cheaper states. Easy, by contrast, lives in a booming metropolis where rent is cheap and blue-collar workers own houses while he and his friends thrive in a changing economy.

I decided to ask Mosley, a Los Angeles native, about how he thought Easy’s story would look today. When I called his publicist to ask if he would get on the phone, she wrote back with an invitation to lunch. A week or so later, I walked into a seafood restaurant in Beverly Hills and found Mosley by the bar wearing a blue fedora and drinking a cognac.

“You’re early,” I said.

“I’m always early,” he said.

‘I’m Going to Own Something’

Walter Mosley has no interest in real estate himself, but saw how, for his parents’ generation, owning property was everything.
Credit...Oliver Farshi for The New York Times

Walter Mosley published his first novel at 38 while working as a computer programmer. Now he is 72 and the author of more than 60 books. (He writes about two a year.) His website lists four separate mystery series, six science fiction novels, six nonfiction books, two works of erotica, a handful of comics and a young adult novel.

Easy Rawlins is by far his most famous character and the main reason Mosley himself is, as he said, on the lower end of the 1 percent. That was as specific as he wanted to be about that. One consistent feature of my three conversations with Mosley is that he enjoys talking about money so long as money is treated as an idea and not something having to do with him.

Our first lunch lasted two and a half hours. Through appetizers, halibut and coffee, we talked about the awkwardness of asking for money and the way investors talked about rates of return as if they were laws of physics that had nothing to do with human choices. There was a digression on the origin of private property. Then, when I asked Mosley if he owned any rental property himself, the answer was a swift no, and he seemed bored for the first time.

“Doesn’t interest me,” he said.

He owns a condominium in New York and now spends enough time in Los Angeles to rent an apartment by the beach. The inspiration for Easy’s rental business came from Mosley’s parents, small landlords who went from a single-family house to owning three apartment buildings with 30 units.

“My father loved it,” Mosley said.

Leroy Mosley, Walter’s father, provides the narrative backbone for Easy Rawlins. Like Easy, he moved to Los Angeles from Houston in the late 1940s.

Postwar California had become an economic North Star where the expanding industrial base created a new class of Black homeowners who worked in car factories, petroleum plants and the budding electronics industry that we now call tech. Easy is a stand-in for Black Americans like Mosley’s father who moved to the West Coast from the South during the second Great Migration.

Leroy Mosley, who died in 1993, was not a private detective. He did work as a school janitor (which Easy does for a few years) and once knew a guy who killed someone over a nickel craps game (a story that became the germ of Mouse). Walter’s mother, Ella, who was Jewish, worked as a clerk at the same school as Walter’s father. In addition to real estate, Easy Rawlins mysteries often revolve around a biracial character caught between the Black and white worlds.

Walter Mosley was born in 1952 and spent his early childhood in a single-family house in South Los Angeles. He reeled off the house’s $9,500 purchase price as if it were some crucial fact he had memorized. Easy’s first home would have been about three miles away.

“‘This property is like my beating heart’ — that’s what these people are thinking,” Mosley said of his parents’ generation. “‘I’m going to own something.’”

In “Devil in a Blue Dress” (which was made into a 1995 film starring Denzel Washington), Easy says the thought of paying his mortgage makes him feel “as good as any white man.” His front yard has an avocado tree surrounded by St. Augustine grass. He loves being a homeowner so much that he has even come to relish the sweepstakes scams that are shoved through his front-door slot with other junk mail.

The book begins with Easy struggling to pay his mortgage after losing his job at an aircraft factory, where he refused to grovel to his white boss. For $100, he agrees to look for a missing woman for a man with a slithery handshake. After the requisite series of plot twists and gunfights, Easy gets $10,000 from a cache of stolen money and uses it to buy a rental house. In the final chapter, he’s watering his dahlias and telling a friend that he’s done working for anyone else.

“Working for people doesn’t work out for Easy,” Mosley said. “So in the beginning, he had to assure his income.”

When Mosley was about 12, his parents sold their house in South Los Angeles. Instead of trading up to a fancier place, they bought a four-unit building.

“They were going to buy another house, and I don’t know who convinced them, but they said, ‘Oh, why don’t you buy this apartment building, and then you can live in one and the other three can pay off the mortgage,’” he said. “Which is the smart thing to do.” (Investment influencers now refer to this as “house hacking.”)

Over the next several years, the family added two more buildings with two dozen units run by a property manager. Mosley’s father did maintenance work and made no attempt to correct tenants who assumed he was the help.

This ruse drives the plot of the second Easy Rawlins novel, “A Red Death.” Easy buys a 12-unit building where he pretends to work for a property manager who actually works for him. When a corrupt I.R.S. agent discovers the true ownership, blackmail and chaos ensue.

The vulnerability of a Black person with money is a perennial theme in the Easy books. In “White Butterfly,” the third novel, Easy becomes so secretive about his holdings that even his wife doesn’t know how he seems to find so much extra cash. His business-owning friends use frontmen and dummy corporations to hide their operations and proprietorships.

“They came from a centuries-old history of people taking everything away from them,” Mosley said. “Easy, and certainly my father, didn’t want anyone to know they had anything.”

Rental income made it possible for Mosley’s father to buy a new Cadillac every two years. But he mostly drove to his work as a school janitor in Mosley’s mother’s car — Mosley remembers it being a Ford Galaxie.

Then, one day, his mom’s car broke down.

“He told me about it,” Mosley said. “One of the teachers came out as he’s getting out of his new Cadillac, and he said, ‘Mosley, what’s this?’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah. It’s a Cadillac.’ The guy said, ‘And you’re driving it?’ He said, ‘Well, yeah, it’s mine. I bought it.’ And my father repeated him with intonation. He goes, ‘But Mosley, I can’t even buy a Cadillac.’”

When I asked Mosley how he felt when he heard this story, he noted that his father had genuinely liked his job. It came with a good pension, and he found cleaning classrooms to be necessary and valued work. The color line, however, was still clear.

“His relationship with people at work was based on them feeling that they were somehow doing better than him,” Mosley said.

Farewell, Postwar America

Mosley belonged to the first generation of Black children for whom that story was even plausible.

Until 1940, the median Black family had zero wealth, meaning it was either in debt or living hand-to-mouth, according to a recent study of the Black-white wealth gap by Ellora Derenoncourt, a professor of economics at Princeton University, and her co-authors. Then, from 1950 to 1970 — roughly the period of Mosley’s childhood — the wealth gap between the median Black family and white family narrowed significantly. Property is central to that story.

This is not to say postwar Los Angeles was some equal-opportunity utopia. Then, as now, there is basically no economic measure — the homeownership rate included — in which white households were not substantially better off than Black ones. Easy can barely enter a restaurant or office building without being interrogated by a maître d’ or security guard who doesn’t think he belongs there — scenes that might as well be nonfiction.

And yet, he manages to buy 12 buildings. Easy’s friend Jackson Blue, a math prodigy, rises from a bookie to an executive at an insurance company. Jackson’s wife, Jewelle, is now a developer building hotels. (Mouse is still a robber and a killer, albeit one with the sense to launder his loot through legitimate businesses like the generations of businessmen before him.)

These fictional successes contain a kernel of insight into the Los Angeles that Mosley grew up in. Bigotry abounded and inequality was (and remains) severe, but a virtuous mix of rapid growth and expanded civil rights protections had given people like Leroy Mosley their first breath of economic oxygen.

“It was like immigrant energy,” Mosley said. “It was possible to make wealth.”

The breath turned out to be more like a gasp. The wealth gap between Black people and white people stopped narrowing when Mosley was a teenager and has made virtually no progress since. (By some measures, it has become worse.) Good luck buying a California bungalow on a janitor’s salary: They are now luxury homes.

If someone were to update Easy Rawlins for a modern telling, that person would most likely find that, while the mysteries and political scandals might survive the time travel, Easy’s forays into Los Angeles real estate no longer made sense. Today’s Easy would be a rent-burdened tenant making a reverse migration from California to the South in search of cheaper housing. If he did own a home in Southern California, it would probably be because he had inherited it.

“Farewell, Amethystine” is the first Easy Rawlins mystery to take place in the 1970s, which historians and economists regard as the inflection point between postwar prosperity and the more unequal America we have today.

That decade was the start of the now-familiar story of how factory jobs with a pension were replaced with unstable hourly jobs in retail and the service sector, a pattern that played out over the next several decades and fueled the blue-collar rage seen in the last several presidential elections. The shifting economy is an undertone of the book: Easy talks about white men losing faith in institutions and observes class becoming a more salient identity alongside race.

“That period foreshadowed this moment,” Mosley said of the ’70s. “You watched it get worse and worse.”

Mosley’s essays and novels are deeply critical of modern capitalism. His science fiction features dystopian inequality while his political monographs describe the market system as an inhuman force that turns people into “economic zombies,” whose hunger for profit “grinds all that is good about us into sausage.” Such broadsides often find their way into Easy’s interior dialogue, which I’ve always found discordant with Easy’s success with property.

When I asked Mosley about this — I mean, isn’t Easy a pretty successful capitalist? — he rejected the question as the kind of reductionist logic that would label a person who worked for a king as “a monarchist.” When Easy began investing at the end of “Devil in a Blue Dress,” private investigations were a means to the end of achieving financial freedom. Now that he has it, he’s free to solve cases for friends and acquaintances, often free of charge, becoming a kind of neighborhood superhero who helps people in a jam — “trading favors,” as Easy calls it.

He isn’t trying to overthrow the system. Instead, he lodges the more modest protest of realizing he has enough and using his good fortune to work for his community. It just happens that his version of community service is solving murders and disappearances.

“Easy helps people,” Mosley said. “He’s a good guy. He tries to do what’s right. He helps his friends — but that’s it. To have an expectation beyond that is to doom him to failure.”

Easy may be an anticapitalist in his heart, but he is not a famous writer critiquing the system. Just a guy trying to live in the world as it is.

Read by Conor Dougherty

Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.

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