Friday Fiction: Walter Mosley

--by Hanje Richards

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Walter Mosley was born in, Watts, Los Angeles, in 1952. He was an only child whose mother was a personnel clerk and whose father was a supervising custodian at a Los Angeles public school. Mosley attended and then dropped out of one liberal arts college in Vermont and then earned a political science degree at another. Abandoning a doctorate in political theory, he started work in computers. While working for Mobil Oil, Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem. One of his tutors there, Edna O'Brien, became a mentor to him and encouraged him.

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Mosley started writing at 34 and has written every day since, penning more than 33 books in a variety of categories, including non-mystery fiction, Afro-futurist science fiction and non-fiction politics, often publishing two books a year. His work has been translated into 21 languages. His direct inspirations include the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, and Raymond Chandler. Mosley made publishing history in 1997 by foregoing an advance to give the manuscript of Gone Fishin' to a small, independent publisher, Black Classic Press in Baltimore, run by former Black Panther Paul Coates. Mosley's fame increased in 1992 when then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton, a fan of murder mysteries, named Mosley as one of his favorite authors.

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Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned - Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his huge, rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working for the Bounty supermarket, and moving perilously close to invisibility, it is Socrates who throws a lifeline to a drowning man: young Darryl, whose shaky path is already bloodstained and fearsome. In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.

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Bad Boy Brawly Brown - Easy Rawlins is out of the investigation business. But living around desperate men means life gets complicated sometimes. When an old friend gets in enough trouble to ask for Easy's help, he finds he can't refuse.

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Young Brawly Brown has traded in his family for The Clan of the First Men, a group rejecting white leadership, history, and laws – and they're dangerous. Brown's mom, Alva, needs to know her baby's okay, and Easy promises to find him. It takes everything Easy has just to stay alive as he explores a world filled with promises, betrayals, and predators like he never imagined.

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Black Betty - Mosley's distinctive black investigator, Easy Rawlins, has moved from Watts to West L.A. with his two adopted children, but trouble still follows him. Hired to locate a sultry female acquaintance from his early days in Houston, Easy searches for her gambler brother and questions her Beverly Hills employer, unwittingly provoking racist police harassment. Meanwhile, friend Raymond ("Mouse") has been released from prison and vows revenge on the snitch who put him there. Mosley, as usual, describes a historically correct ethos in deft, literate prose.

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Blonde Faith - Easy Rawlins comes home from work and finds more trouble on his doorstep in a day than most men encounter in a lifetime.

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A friend has left his daughter at Easy's house without so much as a note. Clearly this friend, Christmas Black, a veteran of Vietnam, fears for his life and his daughter's.

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Easy's closest friend, the man known as Mouse, has disappeared too – and his wife tells Easy that he is wanted for murder. Mouse has been a thorn in the police's side for so long that Easy is convinced that this time they will kill him as soon as they find him.

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Worst of all, Easy's longtime lover tells him that she plans to marry another man. In a world of hurt, Easy strikes out on his own to try to find one friend, save another, and save himself from the pain that is driving him out of his mind. On his path he meets drug dealers, corrupt officials, every manner of criminal and con – and a woman named Faith who may hold the key to more than one life.

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Cinnamon Kiss - It is the Summer of Love and Easy Rawlins is contemplating robbing an armored car. It's farther outside the law than Easy has ever traveled, but his daughter, Feather, needs a medical treatment that costs far more than Easy can earn or borrow in time. And his friend, Mouse, tells him it's a cinch. Then another friend, Saul Lynx, offers him a job that might solve Easy's problem without jail time. He has to track the disappearance of an eccentric, prominent attorney. An assistant, of sorts, the beautiful Cinnamon Cargill is gone as well. Easy can tell there is much more than he is being told... Robert Lee, his new employer, is a suspect in the attorney's disappearance. But his need overcomes all concerns, and he plunges into unfamiliar territory, from the newfound hippie enclaves to a vicious plot that stretches back to the battlefields of Europe.

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Devil in a Blue Dress - Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs...

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Diablerie - Mosley probes the human condition through Ben Dibbuk, a black man whose name evokes the dybbuk of Jewish folklore. A 47-year-old computer programmer for a New York City bank, Dibbuk is married to Mona, the editor of a new cutting-edge magazine, Diablerie, which can mean either mischievous or evil. He has a daughter at NYU and a 21-year-old Russian mistress whose apartment and graduate school tuition he pays for. Then a woman he doesn't remember threatens to shatter the shell Dibbuk has built to protect himself from his troubled, alcoholic past. When Dibbuk discovers Mona is having him investigated, he realizes he risks being charged for a murder he can't remember but may have committed. As Dibbuk struggles to escape the emotional vacuum of his life, he may not be free to enjoy his reawakening.

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Fear Itself - Paris Minton doesn't want any trouble. He minds his used bookstore and his own business. But in 1950s Los Angeles, sometimes trouble finds him, no matter how hard he tries to avoid it. When the nephew of the wealthiest woman in L.A. is missing and wanted for murder, she has to get involved – no matter if she can't stand him. What will her church think? She hires Jefferson T. Hill, to track him down and prove his innocence. When Hill goes missing too, she tricks his friend Fearless Jones and Paris Minton into picking up the case. Paris steps inside the world of the black bourgeoisie, and it turns out to be filled with deceit and corruption.

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Fear of the Dark - When his cousin Ulysses S. Grant IV comes knocking, Paris Minton would rather keep the door shut, because "Useless" is a snake who brings bad luck wherever he goes. But trouble always finds an open window, and soon there's a man murdered on his bookshop floor, evidence of blackmail is discovered, and Useless has vanished. To get out of this mess, Paris turns to his solid-hearted but quick-fisted friend Fearless Jones. Traversing the complex landscape of 1950s Los Angeles, where a wrong look can get a black man killed, Paris and Fearless find desperate women, secret lives –and more than one dead body.

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Fearless Jones - Set in the deadly back alleys of 1950s L.A.... Bookshop owner Paris Minton is minding his own business when a brief encounter with a beautiful stranger gets him beaten, shot at, robbed, and then burned out of store and home. Paris needs help but his secret weapon – brave, reckless WWII hero Fearless Jones – is in jail. Vowing to dish out some heavy justice, Paris plots to get Jones back on the street. But when these two men come together, they'll find themselves trapped in a bewildering vortex of sex, money, and murder – and a dicey endgame that's littered with dangerous players...

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Fortunate Son - In spite of remarkable differences, Tommy and Eric are as close as brothers. Tommy, a delicate black boy, is cursed with health problems and drawn to trouble more often than not. Eric is a Nordic Adonis, graced by a seemingly endless supply of good fortune. When tragedy rips their makeshift family apart, the two boys are set on courses that diverge astonishingly. In a riveting tale of resilience and redemption that traces their parallel lives, Tommy and Eric ultimately reunite after years apart and draw on their childhood bond as they confront together the forces that threaten to destroy them.

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Gone Fishin’ - In the beginning... there was Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and Raymond "Mouse" Alexander – two young men setting out in life, hitting the road in a "borrowed" '36 Ford headed for Pariah, Texas. The volatile Mouse wants to retrieve money from his stepfather so he can marry his EttaMae. But on their steamy bayou excursion, Mouse will choose murder as a way out, while Easy's past liaison with EttaMae floats precariously in his memory. Easy and Mouse are coming of age – and everything they ever knew about friendship & about themselves is coming apart at the seams...

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Killing Johnny Fray: A Sexistential Novel - When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act that he witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. He wants revenge, but also something more. Killing Johnny Fry is the story of Cordell’s dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. It will surprise, provoke, inspire, and make you blush. Above all, it is about a man questioning the rules we take for granted – and the powerful and sometimes disturbing connections that occur between people when these rules are removed.

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Known to Evil - Leonid McGill is still fighting to stick to his reformed ways while the world around him pulls him in every other direction. He has split up with his girlfriend, Aura, because his new self won't let him leave his wife – but then Aura's new boyfriend starts angling to get Leonid kicked out of his prime, top-of-the-skyscraper office space. Meanwhile, one of his sons seems to have found true love – but the girl has a shady past that's all of sudden threatening the whole McGill family – and his other son, the charming rogue Twilliam, is doing nothing but enabling the crisis.

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Meanwhile, Alfonse Rinaldo, the mysterious power-behind- the-throne at City Hall, the fixer, has a problem that even he can't fix – and he's come to Leonid for help. It seems a young woman has disappeared, leaving murder in her wake, and it means everything to Rinaldo to track her down. But he won't tell McGill his motives, which doesn't quite square with the new company policy – but turning down Rinaldo is almost impossible to even contemplate.

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Little Yellow Dog - November 1963: Easy's settled into a steady gig as a school custodian. It's a quiet, simple existence – but a few moments of ecstasy with a sexy teacher will change all that. When the lady vanishes, Easy's stuck with a couple of corpses, the cops on his back, and a little yellow dog who's nobody's best friend. With his not-so-simple past snapping at his heels, and with enemies old and new looking to get even, Easy must kiss his careful little life good-bye – and step closer to the edge...

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Little Scarlet - At the height of the riots that cripple LA in the summer of 1965, a white man is pulled from his car by a mob and escapes into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a red-headed woman known as Little Scarlet is found dead in that apartment building – and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. The police ask Easy Rawlins to investigate. What he finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around race and passion. Rawlins's hunt for the killer will reveal a new city emerging from the ashes – and a new life for Easy and his friends.

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The Long Fall - His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGill’s an old-school P.I. working a city that’s gotten fancy all around him. But like the city itself, McGill is turning over a new leaf, “decided to go from crooked to slightly bent.”

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New York City in the twenty-first century is a city full of secrets – and still a place that reacts when you know where to poke and which string to pull. That’s exactly the kind of thing Leonid McGill knows how to do. As soon as The Long Fall begins, with McGill calling in old markers and greasing NYPD palms to unearth some seemingly harmless information for a high-paying client, he learns that even in this cleaned-up city, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be constantly tested.

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The Man In My Basement - Charles Blakey is a young black man who can't find a job, drinks too much, and, worst of all, stands to lose the beautiful home that has belonged to his family for generations. Charles's fortunes take an odd turn when a stranger offers nearly $50,000 to rent out Charles's basement – and soon, as the boarder transforms the basement into a prison cell, Charles finds himself drawn into circumstances almost unimaginably bizarre and profoundly unsettling.

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The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow - Living in south central L.A., Socrates Fortlow is a sixty-year-old ex-convict still strong enough to kill men with his bare hands. Filled with profound guilt about his own crimes and disheartened by the chaos of the streets, Socrates calls together local people of all races and social stations and begins to conduct a Thinkers’ Club, where all can discuss life’s unanswerable questions.
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Infiltrated by undercover cops and threatened by strain from within, the Thinkers’ Club doesn’t have it easy. But simply by debating racial authenticity, street justice, and the possibility of mutual understanding, Socrates and his unlikely crew actually begin to make a difference.

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RL’s Dream - Recounting his memories to a young white woman who is also a refugee from a painful Southern past, Soupspoon Wise, a dying blues performer, describes a brief encounter with a famous performer that still haunts him.

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This Year You Write Your Novel - No more excuses. "Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls," bestselling novelist Walter Mosley advises. Anyone can write a novel now, and in this essential book of tips, practical advice, and wisdom, Walter Mosley promises that the writer-in-waiting can finish it in one year. Mosley tells how to:

..- Create a daily writing regimen to fit any writer's needs – & stick to it

..- Determine the narrative voice that's right for every writer's style

..- Get past those first challenging sentences & into the heart of a story

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Walkin’ the Dog - Socrates Fortlow is a former jailbird doing his best to go straight in a seamy Los Angeles full of temptation, and the novel is an examination, as powerfully relaxed as Socrates himself, of how his life works. He lives in a tiny shack in a back alley in Watts, tries to stay out of the way of the ever-suspicious cops, does a little loving (the cheerful sensuality of Mosley's writing about sex strikes exactly the right note), unwittingly acts as a role model for an unhappy teenager, and eventually becomes a national symbol for his placard-wielding protest against police brutality. Where some writers would make this the pivot of their plot, it is no more than incidental to this tale, as Socrates continues to go on his quiet, unostentatious way until the fuss dies down.

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Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Contemplating Our Chains at the End of the Millenium - Slavery was outlawed in this country more than a century ago, but Americans still wear chains. Each one of us, black and white alike, is shackled by a system that values money over humanity, power over truth, conformity over creativity. Race has undeniably made the problem worse, but race is not the root of the problem. Indeed, as black novelist and activist Walter Mosley brilliantly argues in this impassioned call to arms, though the chains might be more recognizable in the lives of blacks, the same chains restrain us all. Only when we understand this truth can we begin, black and white together, to cast off the shackles.