East LA Investigations

A black unofficial private investigator on the mean streets of LA. Many readers will think immediately of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, but Joe Ide’s IQ deserves to stand on its own pedestal.

IQ stands for Isaiah Quintana, a young man who stands out in his East LA neighbourhood because of his ‘freakishly large brain’. IQ is an extraordinary student in high school, headed for Harvard, supported ad encouraged by his beloved older brother Marcus. Then Marcus dies in a hit-and-run, and IQ freewheels into depression, drops out of high school, and then, slowly, finds a place for himself, though not in the Ivy League.

Beaumont [the corner store owner] was there when Isaiah was the wonder boy and when his brother Marcus was killed and the war terrorized the neighbourhood and he’d seen Isaiah rebuild his life and become a man everybody but the hoodlums admired.

After Marcus’ death, the sixteen-year-old IQ needs to make a living. At first, he rents a room to his fellow high-schooler, Juanell Dodson. Later, the two start robbing stores, using IQ’s insight that offbeat highpriced items such as dog medicines and hair extensions are sold in stores with little security (unlike the high-security common targets such as jewellery stores).

His informal investigative business starts when people in the neighbourhood begin asking him for help.

Isaiah didn’t have a website, Facebook page, or a Twitter account but people found him anyway. His priority was local cases where the police could not or would not get involved. He had more work than he could handle but many of his clients paid for his services with the sweet potato pie or cleaning his yard or one brand new radial tire if they paid him at all.

The author, Joe Ide, is Japanese-American, and grew up in the very same neighbourhood of East Long Beach where his novels are set. IQ himself speaks more standard English but the other characters have distinctive language. To my (ignorant) eye and ear, the dialogue in the novels seems completely of the place and time.

“It’s a hustler’s world, son,” [..] “and if you ain’t doing the hustlin’? Somebody’s hustlin’ you.”

“When Tupac said thug he meant a brutha that had nothing but still held his head up, didn’t take shit from nobody, and did what he had to do.”

The n-word is plentiful, and at one point a TV journalist asks a black gangster: “How come it’s ok for you to use the N-word but it’s not ok for someone like me?” The answer is both entertaining and opaque.

There are notable parallels to the Sherlock Holmes novels. Isaiah’s ability to observe and his all-but -idetic memory are distinctly Sherlockian. He has an occasional collaborator called Dodson. There is an enormous dog, bred by an evildoer, in one of the novels. There are probably several such other such shout-outs to Arthur Conan Doyle that I simply didn’t notice, which in itself is a statement about these novels. They are not mere rip-offs playing on the Sherlock theme, but they pay a tongue-in-cheek homage to Holmes while being completely, distinctively original.

Dodson, for example, is far from being the admiring sidekick that Watson is to Holmes: Dodson is a personality in his own right, arrogant, opinionated, and sometimes quite at odds with Isaiah.He can see Isaiah’s intelligence, but is not in awe of Isaiah. He is also quite aware of his own unique abilities: street-smarts, connections from his lengthy illegal career, the way he can read a person and convince them to do something.

The books can be funny too. In Smoke, Dodson is pushed by his wife to get a steady job that does not involve violence or danger. He needs to practice ‘proper speech’, and the recommended approach is to binge-watch Friends. His mother-in-law gives him body language lessons.

“Don’t stick your legs out and sit up straight,” she said. “No, don’t cross your arms over your chest. You look like you’re waiting for your parole officer.”

In Smoke, the 5th IQ novel

What kind of respectable job will suit a street hustler? Advertising, of course.

Hustling and advertising were the same things except the goods were legal and actually existed. Kale is a superfood. Oh really? You mean like collard greens? If that was the case, black people would be leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

And Dodson turns out to be very very good at advertising. The scenes in the ad agency are sharp and hilarious, and provide a welcome break from the violence of his normal activities.

Ide’s women characters are strong, opinionated, and unapologetic. Deronda appears in all the novels; she is one of the neighbourhood girls, with a famously large rear, who assumes that getting crowned Miss Big Meaty Burger by a restaurant is her ticket to fame. While waiting for celebrity, she makes ends meet as a stripper. Yet Deronda has no hint of the victim: she is sassy and tough throughout. Dodson’s wife Cherise often has her ‘You and I are going to have a serious talk’ expression on, where she lays down the law. His mother-in-law, Gloria, treats Dodson with contempt.

There is a pleasing character development from book to book. IQ is brilliant, focused and soaks up knowledge like a sponge, but the continuous stress and physical danger of his work wear him down. By book five he is exhausted and on the run. Dodson is a small-time street hustler in the first book, and his collaboration with IQ waxes and wanes along with the changes in their own lives. By book 5, the dynamic Deronda has become a food truck tycoon. New characters appear in each novel: in Wrecked (book 3), IQ falls for his client, a young white woman painter called Grace who wants to find the mother who vanished twenty years ago.

In the Easy Rawlins books, Walter Mosley describes the skin colour of each character as they are introduced. Joe Ide takes a different approach: the reader is often not told whether the character is black until later in the story. Both approaches are interesting and thought-provoking.

In Charcoal Joe, by Walter Mosley:

Our receptionist, butter-skinned and quite beautiful.

His face was medium brown.

[Mouse] was light-skinned and light-eyed.

She was lighter in color than her mother, but still a strong brown.

Some characters from Joe Ide’s IQ:

Just a regular two-hundred-and-forty-three-pound guy in a lime-green muscle shirt and beaded dreadlocks, jagged scars under both cheekbones, his right ear shredded to nothing and an arm bent like he was escorting a date to the prom.

A homeless guy was sitting on a parking block holding a cardboard sign that said HUNGRY.[..]It was hard to tell what he looked like underneath the dirt and the wig. You’d have a tough time picking him out of a lineup, which was no doubt the point. Even so, you knew right away that something was off about him. It was the eyes — twinkling and vicious.

[Harry’s] fierce dark eyes glaring through the Coke-bottle bifocals resting on his great beak of a nose, his snow-white hair sticking up like a toilet brush.

Mosley’s writing makes the reader aware of the many shades of skin colour that are grouped into ‘black’ in America. Whereas Ide’s descriptions leave the reader conscious of how we expect to identify a character by race; I was surprised to find how often I puzzled over whether a character was white or black.

As with Mosley’s books, the main characters are aware of the tension, exhaustion, danger and likely short lifespan of the work they do. Once they have girlfriends or wives, they also realize the constant danger that their own work puts those women in. Sometimes those relationships break under the weight of this tension. But even when the men want to go straight, it is often not possible — they are dragged back into the lifestyle by historical events or their own abilities. The reader sympathizes, but would also miss IQ if he managed to swing himself back to a life of the straight and narrow.