JOE IDE'S IQ

Isaiah Quintabe is a detective, a community problem-solver in the run-down East Long Beach area of LA. He doesn't get paid much, some muffins, a chicken, whatever. But one day his former friend Dodson, a small-time hustler with big-time attitude, brings him a case with a juicy payday: a drug-addled rap star whose life is being threatened, whose entourage contains nothing but suspects, and an attempted murder by a trained giant pit bull who recalls an urban Hound of the Baskervilles.

IQ is not a black Sherlock Holmes, of course: just listen to his lecture about inductive versus deductive logic. But he's as close as it's going to get in Los Angeles, and with Dodson as his even-more-unlikely Dr. Watson, he's soon caught up with a vicious killer for hire who has him firmly in his sights.

If this were simply a Holmes pastiche dressed up for modern LA, this first novel would be nothing memorable but two things make it stand out. First is Joe Ide's deft handling of character and dialogue, which allows the characters space to make the story move, rather than letting it be driven solely by plot. But even more impressive is the way Ide structures the story, taking it back to Isaiah's childhood, the death of his older brother, and his former relationship with Dodson, to fill in not only how he became IQ, but the wider picture of the environment, the hood, and the lives of the people who live there. There is a good analogy with the Holmes stories: part of their enduring charm is the portrayal of the world around Holmes and Watson, and the ways in which they navigate it: Ide had done much the same thing for IQ and his LA.

This is as impressive a first novel as I've encountered in years; which is not a daring thing to say as it was nominated for the Edgar for Best First Novel. I got the same sort of buzz I did when I read Walter Mosley's first, for much the same reasons. Easy and IQ are a nice comparison, though no one is a Mouse. It works because IQ is not a gimmick detective, but because for all his exceptional skills, he is a real character, one smart enough but not quite as worldly as you might think, which allows the rest of the cast to bounce off him. Which, when you think about it, is what Holmes does too. Though Watson is no way as hip as Dodson.

IQ by Joe Ide

Weidenfeld & Nicholson £8.99 ISBN 978147460718 

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

BILL NUNN: THREE NOTES, AND AN OLD ARTICLE ABOUT HIS DAD

Bill Nunn's signature role was as Radio Raheem in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. Nunn and Lee were buddies from Morehouse College in Atlanta, and he was regular in Lee's movies. In a way, the brilliance of his Raheem was a curse more than a blessing; it's a nuanced performance combining intelligence, ego, and depth along with anger, rage, and potential violence. Much of Nunn's career would see him cast in roles that reflected only the angry part of the character, almost as if producers thought he were Bill Duke, or a younger version of him.

My favourite of Nunn's parts (though I can't claim to have seen them all) came in the wonderful Fallen Angels series which aired on Showtime in the mid-90s, and intermittently at odd hours in Britain (sometimes with the silly title Perfect Crimes) after that. They were 30 minute adaptations of hard-boiled detective stories, with top-flight writers, directors, DPs, and actors. Nunn played Walter Mosley's character Fearless Jones in an episode called 'Fearless', alongside Giancarlo Espositio and the much under-valued Cynda Williams. You can watch the three of them onstage in that lovely scene from Mo' Better Blues, Nunn on bass, Esposito on piano, giving the spotlight to Wesley Snipes and Denzel, while Cynda sings 'Harlem Blues'.

Fearless was directed by Jim McBride and adapted by Richard Wesley, who also wrote Uptown Saturday Night, and the adaptation of Native Son. Although there's often little difference in Mosley's various leading men, especially on film, Esposito's Paris Minton is very much an Easy, while Nunn's Fearless captures the ironic nature of his name, in an almost classic noirish pairing. Oddly, Nunn also had a part in Always Outnumbered, a TV movie made for HBO three years later, in which Lawrence Fishburne played another Mosley hero, Socrates Fortlow, and Mosley wrote the adaptation. Interestingly, Bill Duke was in that one too.


But one thing you probably didn't know was that Bill Nunn was a ball-boy for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and he and Art Rooney, who's now the Steelers' owner, once stole Mean Joe Greene's car. The ball-boy job came about because Nunn's father, Bill Nunn, Jr., was the sports editor of the Pittsburgh Courier (owned by William Nunn Sr.) which was one of America's leading black newspapers. Bill Nunn Jr knew more about black college football and its players than anyone. Dan Rooney, the son of the then-owner of the Steelers, was curious about why Nunn never came to Steelers' games, and was told it was because the team ignored players from black colleges. Rooney was intrigued, they became friends, and eventually Nunn became a full-time scout for the team. It was Bill Nunn who brought many of the stars to the Steel Curtain Steelers of the 70s, including Greene, so it wasn't surprising his son and Rooney's son would be ball boys together.

Bill Nunn Jr. died in 2014, at just about the same time as Steelers' coach Chuck Noll. I wrote a piece about the two of them for nfluk.com, but the link to the article seems to have expired. So here is that piece; it's a shame that Bill Nunn III has gone so soon after.

NOLL AND NUNN: THE HEART OF THE STEELERS  (May 2014)
 

In a sense, Chuck Noll's death on June 13^th caught us by surprise. He was 82, of course, but we had the image of the rock-hard Noll implanted on the Pittsburgh Steelers' sideline not so long ago. That's because Noll was succeeded by the even more granite-jawed Bill Cowher, and Cowher by the kinder, gentler visage of Mike Tomlin, and as far as the Steelers are concerned, that was it. Dan Snyder goes through more coaches in a decade than Dan Rooney has in 45 years.

But another Steeler great died just a month before Noll. Bill Nunn Jr, their longtime scout, died May 6^th, drawing somewhat less attention. But Nunn's role in the transformation of the Steelers from also-rans to dynasty was crucial, and his story and Noll's, and for that matter Dan Rooney's, are tightly entwined, and worth telling here.

I'm not sure where Noll fits in the rankings of top coaches ever, which is just about the first thing everyone asked when he passed away. If you are what your record says you are, then he's certainly among the very elite, and one of the things I'd like to point out is that his career as an assistant gives him extra points in the scoreboard of eliteitude. Lots of people mentioned the innovation Noll and his defensive coordinator Bud Carson brought to the 4-3 by lining up Joe Greene at an angle off the center's shoulder. If you never saw Greene, think of Warren Sapp in the Tampa 2 during the seasons he was in great shape and fully motivated. And realise that for Greene that was every season.

But what was overlooked was that when Noll was the coordinator for Sid Gillman's San Diego Chargers in the AFL, he began to use an offset 4-3 by lining up The Big Cat, Ernie Ladd, directly over center. Ladd was 6-9 315 and as Patriots' center Jon Morris once said, 'when he lined up over you he blocked out the sun.' Those Chargers had the original 'Fearsome Foursome': Ladd, Earl Faison (a great forgotten star), Bill Hudson and Ron Nery, but that was overshadowed by Gillman's innovative offense. Noll was a defensive guy but when he built the Steel Curtain Steelers, he kept Gillman's offensive innovation in mind, and the need for a Lance Alworth-type deep threat receiver.

Before he got to Pittsburgh, Noll went to the Colts, as defensive coordinator for Don Shula, with whom he had played on Paul Brown's Browns. In 1968, those Colts went 13-1, with a defense built around MLB Mike Curtis, but they lost the Super Bowl to Joe Namath's Jets. Patriots' owner Billy Sullivan displayed his usual talent for understanding football, and hired the Jets offensive coordinator, Clive Rush as their head coach, leaving Noll for the Rooneys.

When Noll arrived in 1969, Nunn was the sports editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper with a national profile, and a part-time scout for the Steelers. His father, Bill Nunn Sr. was the paper's editor; perhaps Dan Rooney recognised something in Nunn, something about the way they worked hard to avoid the tinge of nepotism which always has been a part of the NFL. Bill Nunn Jr was a fine basketball player at Westinghouse High, where is father had been the school's first black football player. Nunn went to West Virginia State, playing with Westinghouse's Chuck Cooper, and with Earl Lloyd. Cooper became the first black player drafted by the NBA, and Lloyd, by virtue of the schedule, would become the first black to actually play in the NBA. Nunn was good enough to get an offer from the Harlem Globetrotters, who in those days had talent worthy of an NBA team, but he went back to Pittsburgh and became his father's sports editor.

Every weekend in football season, Nunn covered a different game played by black colleges, and while he did he built a network which enabled him to in effect scout the entire country. Thus, he began picking the Courier's black college All-American team. There is a famous story of the Giants drafting Roosevelt Brown simply because Wellington Mara had followed his progress in the Courier. Nunn chose Tank Younger to his team in 1948; Younger would star on one of the great offensive teams of all-time, the early 50s Rams, before becoming a scout. It was Nunn who tipped Younger to David Jones, a defensive lineman expelled from South Carolina State for taking part in civil rights marches. Jones was playing for Mississippi Vocational College, and running down wide receivers thirty yards downfield. At the Rams he would be nicknamed Deacon, and you know the rest.

Younger, who played at Grambling, had been the first player in the NFL from an historically black college. The AFL, desperate for talent, was quicker than the NFL to scout those schools, with Lloyd Wells of the Chiefs prominent. One day in 1967, Dan Rooney asked a Courier reporter why Nunn never came to Steelers games, and was told Nunn didn't like the way the Steelers seemed to ignore black colleges. Rooney arranged a meeting and hired Dunn to work for the team part time. When Noll arrived, the two clicked, and Nunn left the Courier and became a full-time scout. In their first draft together, their first pick was Joe Greene, from North Texas State.

The Steelers had no GM, as such. Dan Rooney ran the scouting, and Noll knew the kind of players he wanted, focused on athleticism. Rooney, Noll, Nunn and the other scouts were all on the same page. Nunn looked for the same thing; he often went to campus dances on Saturday nights after games, to watch players he scouted on the dance floor and check out how light-footed they were. Dancing was different in those days.

Of course 1974 was the Steelers' signature draft, and Nunn was crucial to it. He had scouted Johnny Stallworth at Alabama A&M, but word got out. When scouts arrived to time Stallworth, the field was wet, and his 40 time was slow. They left; Nunn stayed and found a dry field somewhere in Huntsville. He also dug up film for Noll to watch (this wasn't an automatic thing as it is today). When Stallworth played at the Senior Bowl, they moved him to cornerback, and he looked like a receiver moved to corner (think of how Richard Sherman he might've been today). So Stallworth was off other teams' radar, but Noll was so enamoured of what he saw on film he wanted to take him in the first round.

Nunn persuaded Noll to wait. The Steelers grabbed Lynn Swann, a bigger name from USC, in round one. In round two, Nunn again talked Noll out of 'reaching' for Stallworth, and they took Jack Lambert from Kent State instead. The Steelers didn't have a third-round pick, and by the time the fourth round came around, they used their earlier pick (acquired from the Cardinals) in the round for Stallworth. Nunn breathed a huge sigh of relief. He hadn't been quite so confident as he had let on that Stallworth would still be there. In round five they added Mike Webster of Wisconsin: four Hall of Famers from their first five picks (the second choice in round four was Jimmy 'Spiderman' Allen, who played on two of the Super Bowl teams). Nunn's influence extended even after the draft's 17 rounds; the Steelers signed Donnie Shell undrafted out of South Carolina State.

Mel Blount (Southern), LC Greenwood (Arkansas AM&N), Ernie Holmes (Texas Southern) and Frank Lewis (Grambling) are some more of the key members of those Steeler teams Nunn drew from traditionally black colleges. Another was Joe Gilliam, the quarterback from Tennessee State, who certainly had the talent to star in the NFL, but whose career spiralled out of control after Terry Bradshaw took the starting job away from him.

Nunn worked for the Steelers for 46 years, like Noll staying on the team's books right til the end. You might recognise his son, Bill Nunn III, an actor who made his name in his fellow Morehouse College alumnus Spike Lee's early films, most notably as Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing.

Bill Nunn Jr leaves a tremendous legacy, one that fits into the Steelers' story perfectly. He once explained that Dan Rooney and Chuck Noll 'ignored the dots', which were little stickers teams put on their draft board identifying the race of the player. It was an issue then. Men like Noll and Nunn made that an anachronism. Dan Rooney went a step farther with the Rooney rule. When you watch Mike Tomlin on the Steelers sideline, think of Chuck Noll and Bill Nunn, and where the Steelers and the NFL would be without them.

 -Friday Monthly Tight End, May 2014, nfluk.com

WALTER MOSLEY'S ROSE GOLD

In Walter Mosley's last Easy Rawlins novel, Little Green (see my review here), Mama Jo had brought Easy back from the dead, and he investigated the disappearance of a young black man who'd been led astray by hippies and LSD. It's still 1967, Easy's still alive, and moving into a big new house with his children had left him somewhat vulnerable when he's approached by mysterious law enforcement types to investigate the kidnapping of Rosemary Goldsmith, the daughter of a powerful arms contractor. They think she's been taken by a former boxer, Bob Mantle, who's black, and Easy might have entry into Mantle's world.

Of course, nothing is the way it seems, but having introduced the drug scene, in this book Mosley moves into the parallel world of protest and revolution. The story is intricate, and not made easier, so to speak, by being off-stage, in the sense we know as little as Easy about what's really going on, both among the people he's chasing and the ones who are, in effect, chasing him.

The references are obvious; this is an inversion of sorts of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and Rose Gold's father is a sort of reclusive Howard Hughes figure. A black revolutionary, Uhuru Nolice, is part of the plot, and quite early we learn that he is what Bob Mantle has become.

In one sense, this novel is disappointing, because the denouement is primarily an offstage event; Easy's concern is saving one character, not doing what he was hired to do. What is most interesting, as it was in Little Green, is Mosley's perspective on these times of rapid change, and how different a world this makes Los Angeles for its black community.

Along those lines, Easy appears to be gathering a crew here, including an American Indian, Redbird, who works for Rosemary Goldsmith's mother, and acts as a kind of Hawk to Easy's Spenser. Rawlins drops a line about opening a detective agency, and he's got an ex-cop, his con-woman girl friend, a hippie chick in love with Mama Jo, and various other people to draw on. Which may make LA even more interesting as it moves toward 1968, and the biggest crime since the Black Dahlia in that city's lurid history. Rose Gold may move in circles, as Easy does, for too long, but as always with Mosley, the insights keep the story moving.

Rose Gold by Walter Mosley

Weidenfeld & Nicolson £18.99 ISBN 9780297871750

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

EASY IS BACK! WALTER MOSLEY'S LITTLE GREEN

Walter Mosley left Easy Rawlins for dead at the end of his last novel, but Little Green opens with Easy coming back from the dead, reviving from a coma and into the land of the living. It was Mouse who, prompted by the sixth sense of Mama Jo's juju, found and saved Easy, and now Mouse, the deadly Raymond Alexander, has something he wants Easy to do for him in return, namely locate a young boy named Evander who's gone missing on Sunset Strip, and whose mother is worried sick. But Timbale, the mother, despises Mouse, and would neither ask for nor accept his help. So Easy stumbles out of the sick bed and back into the land of the living, fuelled by Mama Jo's gator juice, a brew that appears to turn him into something like a super hero, at least for brief periods of time.

That's some set up, and this novel serves to remind readers like me, who may have drifted away from Mosley's work, feeling it had lost some of the urgency which made it so effective when Easy first came on the scene, of exactly how good Mosley can be when he is on. It's 1967, and Easy is in his mid-40s. Los Angeles has been hit by the counter-culture; Evander disappeared on a trip, taken almost on a dare, to see the hippies on Sunset Strip. This heralds a new age, of sorts, new attitudes whose depth remains to be challenged. Because this is also Los Angeles still feeling the aftermath of the Watts riots,and it here where Mosley is so good, because there are two different perspectives to the Sixties, black and white, and through Easy we are reminded of how they differ.

In that sense, Mosley often reminds me most of the documentary film maker Ken Burns, whose major projects, on the Civil War, on baseball, and on jazz, have all actually been about the centrality of race in the American experience, and that is Mosley's theme as well. The mystery at the heart of his first novel, Devil In A Blue Dress, whose backstory comes up in Little Green, was one of racial identity, and he revisits that powerfully here. What Easy has always done, for the reader, is to mix the values American society purports to cherish, especially those of family and education, and which Easy shares, with the reality of how hard it is to actually draw the benefits of such values in a racist society. Surviving in Easy's America means being part Easy and part Mouse, and even in the Sixties, with some attitudes changing, there are many more that are not. Indeed, you might argue that Mosley's best novels have all been concerned with sociological history, and in that sense he's probably closer to Ross MacDonald than any of the other great LA crime writers.

I like the way Mosley has taken his characters through post-war LA, like a much less apocalyptic Ellroy, or like Max Allen Collins' Nate Heller without the big events of history. In fact, Heller and Easy would make an interesting partnership around, say, the RFK assassination or the Hearst kidnapping and the SLA. Just a thought. He's also aware of his own place in detective fiction, at least by proxy. There's an interesting exposition on the importance of Chester Himes,and his being more important than Ralph Ellison, for the precise reason that he was more productive; Invisible Man, perhaps unfairly, gets seen as the book white literature accepted partly because it was a 'one-off'. You can't help but think Mosley is talking about himself when he talks about Himes.

Anyway, Evander's been given LSD by a friendly hippie, and he's become a literally unknowing accomplice to the rip-off of some big time drug dealers—the drug being pot in this case, underscoring the dark side beneath the groovy vibe of the Strip. As Easy returns to life, bit by bit with the help of Mama Jo's gator blood, he reassembles his family, and he even reunites with Bonnie, the love he thought lost forever. Which doesn't prevent his getting his first experience of the free love era. Free love would not faze a black man in Los Angeles, not as much as the lack of racial barrier. But barriers are starting to fall, which is something Mosley approaches with commendable caution. For Easy, it's simply good to have been 'recalled to life', as the phrase once went.

Little Green by Walter Mosley

Weidenfeld & Nicholson/Orion £18.99 ISBN 9780297870067

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ON THE CHEEK: WALTER MOSLEY'S CINNAMON KISS

Another seeming relic from the Crime Time vault (we could have a show called Crime Time Team, uncovering lost reviews!), but this review of Walter Mosely's Cinnamon Kiss actually appeared first in CT48! Anyway, it has just been posted on the CT site, here. Bill Clinton made Mosely a household name (and pimped Dennis Lehane and Stephen Hunter too), but Bubba Bills' mojo didn't carry over through the eight years of the Bush regime. Maybe Barack can bring him back, though I wonder if a great Chicago writer like Eugene Izzi might be due for an Obama-boost too?