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In less talented hands this could have become a heavy-handed tract, but Mosley never stoops to propaganda. And while his characters often verge on the bizarre, they are leavened by a reaffirming dose of humanity: Domaque, the hunchback with a thirst for reading; Miss Dixon, a half-crazed white spinster whose whims determine the fate of black families unlucky enough to live on her land; Momma Jo, the hoodoo priestess who forces herself on Easy in a hilarious seduction scene. But overshadowing them all is the enigmatic Mouse, who combines terrifying bloodthirstiness with naive romanticism; he murders his stepfather so that he can inherit the money he needs for his wedding. As Easy observes in a typically terse but pungent passage, Mouse "was an artist. He always said a poor man has got to work with flesh and blood."
In his renderings of a black preacher's rolling sermon or the colorful chit-chat among the locals in a general store, Mosley displays a pitch-perfect gift for capturing the cadences of black speech that rivals the dialogue in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Mosley, the son of a black maintenance supervisor and a white Jewish mother, has, like Ellison, a nuanced appreciation for black-white relationships that goes beyond the stereotypes that mar much recent fiction by black authors. Gone Fishin', of course, is not in Invisible Man's league; few novels are. But it firmly establishes Mosley as a writer whose work transcends the thriller category and qualifies as serious literature. The big mystery is why any publisher would ever have turned it down.