A Little Yellow Dog

“I read Devil in a Blue Dress in one sitting and didn’t want it to end. An astonishing first novel.”

—Jonathan Kellerman

“The social commentary is sly, the dialogue fabulous, the noir atmosphere so real you could touch it. A first novel? That’s what they say. Amazing. Smashing.”

—Cosmopolitan

“Richly atmospheric…. A fast-moving, entertaining story.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

GONE FISHIN’

“It is, in some respects, the best of Mosley’s novels…. Mosley displays a pitch-perfect gift for capturing the cadences of black speech that rivals the dialogue in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.”

—Time

“A powerfully raw, lyrical coming-of-age story…. This late encounter with the early Easy offers an extra dimension to readers who have met, in previous stories, the man he grew to be.”

—Publishers Weekly

BOOKS BY WALTER MOSLEY

PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS

Devil in a Blue Dress

A Red Death

White Butterfly

Black Betty

A Little Yellow Dog

Gone Fishin’

WALTER

MOSLEY

A LITTLE YELLOW DOG

AN EASY RAWLINS MYSTERY

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

NEW YORK  LONDON  TORONTO  SYDNEY  SINGAPORE

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Washington Square Press Publication of

Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1996 by Walter Mosley

“Gray-Eyed Death” copyright © 2002 by Walter Mosley

Published by arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address W. W. Norton & Company7, Inc.,

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

ISBN: 0-7434-5180-5

eISBN: 978-1-4516-1249-3

First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing November 2002

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are

registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Cover art by Don Kilpatrick III

Printed in the U.S.A.

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

IT WAS THE DOG’S FAULT.