The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Walter Mosley has written some fine crime novels, most of the featuring Easy Rawlins. The Rawlins books explore the plight of American blacks in Los Angeles in the post-war, great migration era (I'm reading a book on that subject now, review to come). The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey also explores the life of a man who grew up in the deep south and saw the indignities and barbarity of how his people were treated. It is also, technically, a crime novel in that a crime is committed and solved. But the "detective" is someone altogether different.

Ptolemy Grey is 91-years old. When we first meet him he's also completely lost to dementia. He lives in a filthy apartment--the toilet is so backed up it won't flush, so he pees in a coffee can. He leaves the radio and TV on 24 hours a day, and doesn't even bother going into the bedroom--it's too full of junk. A great-grand-nephew sees to his needs, but then a different nephew shows up, which confuses him. This nephew takes him to the bank, but steals from him.

Ptolemy drifts in and out of time. His mind takes him back to when he was a small child, when a beloved playmate died in a fire and he could not save her, and when his mentor, a man he called Coydog, acts like his Uncle Remus, filling him with wisdom (My favorite aphorism is: "Trustin' a woman is like walkin' in California," Coydog would say. "You know there's bound to be a quake sometimes, but you just keep on walkin' anyways. What else could you do?")

Ptolemy learns that his nephew, Reggie, has been shot to death. He's told it was in a drive-by gang shooting. His niece sends over a teenage-girl she has taken in, Robyn, to care for him. Robyn is quite a creation, in that she is the embodiment of every male fantasy that has ever emerged. She's seventeen, hot, and forms an instant and undying attachment to a 91-year-old man. I didn't for one moment believe she could exactly exist, but went with it. Mosley, like all men getting older, is entitled to his daydreams.

Robyn eventually hooks Ptolemy up with a doctor who has an experimental treatment for dementia. Ptolemy gets the treatment, in exchange for willing his body to science. Ptolemy sees this as a deal with the devil; instead of exchanging his soul, he's exchanging his body, which he is willing to do. His mind and memory back, he remembers that he has a cache of gold coins, a legacy to him from Coydog, who paid for them by being lynched and burned to death. Ptolemy uses his sharper senses and the money to plot to avenge Reggie's murder.

Certainly an nontraditional crime novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is elegiac in tone. Much of the book is Ptolemy's memories concern life in the Jim Crow south. He also flashes back to his second wife, beautiful and much younger, who strayed on him frequently but always came back. Mosely's prose effectively handles Grey's shifting consciousness without confusing the reader.

There's also the satisfying sense of justice and loyalty present in the book. Though Robyn is too good to be true, she earns from her filial devotion. Some scenes of a neighborhood junkie who has preyed on Grey during his dementia are also satisfying.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey might not be what Mosely's fans expect. It is less a detective novel than a meditation on age, dementia, and the evils of segregation. In a certain sense, though, it has the essential element of all good detective fiction--the spirit of redemption.