It isn't until about halfway through the novel that the white man, Anniston Bennet, arrives for his incarceration. This picture of a man trapped by his own helpless indolence rings true you feel that only a miracle, or a deus ex machina, could save him, and one arrives: a "small, bald-headed white man" (Serpent's Tail wisely does not reproduce the cover of the US Little, Brown edition, which appears to show, puzzlingly, a slightly built white man with a full head of hair), who offers him a huge sum of money to keep him imprisoned in his basement for a couple of months. It's in, as he puts it, "a secluded colored neighborhood", and while his house may be large and ancient, Blakey himself is coming apart at the seams: he is a shiftless, already washed-up man who can't hold down a job, drinks too much, alienates his friends with his puerile behaviour and, without handouts from his increasingly intolerant aunt, would lose the home that has been in his family for generations. Our hero and narrator is Charles Blakey, a young black man who lives, perhaps improbably, in a 200-year-old house in (I think) Connecticut. Here the two concerns come together in a most bizarre and fascinating novel. Mosley has always, obviously, been finely attuned to matters of race but he has also been interested in evil, or warped morality.
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