Hard-boiled.

A Profile of Walter Mosley 

Walter Mosley strides in through the door of WRIF's studio in Detroit dressed all in black--pants, shirt, and wide-brimmed hat. Combined with a new mustache and goatee, he looks as much like a tenor player in a very hip jazz combo as an acclaimed mystery writer. Mosley is best known for his novel Devil in a Blue Dress (W.W. Norton, 1990), a dark tale of race, murder, and corruption set in late 1940s Los Angeles, which was turned into a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington.

Mosley settles in and speaks animatedly about his work. "I write because I love telling stories," he says. "But every time I write something, it gets put into a ghetto when they say, `Well, he's a black mystery writer.'"

He is much more than that. His works echo the concerns of Albert Camus, Franz Fanon, and Ralph Ellison. For whites, his books can function simply as bang-up stories that incidentally have a black man as a central feature. For blacks, however, they cut closer to home, as Mosley imbues his characters with ethical dilemmas that are often life-defining.

The forty-seven-year-old has written five best-selling novels featuring his amateur but gritty inner-city sleuth, Easy Rawlins. He has also had success with his recently introduced Socrates Fortlow series about a black street-corner philosopher. Mosley has published in eighteen countries, ventured outside the private dick genre with a play, an HBO presentation, a novel about the blues, and a science fiction story Blue Light (Little, Brown, 1998).

His latest work is a nonfiction effort entitled Workin' on the Chain Gang (Ballantine, 2000), which he describes as "a nonaligned attack on capitalism." In it, he urges people to "say the truth once a day." However, he adds, "You shouldn't be telling the truth all the time, because it will kill you."

Mosley doesn't shy away from politics. He's on the board of Trans-Africa and is a member of the executive board of the PEN American Center.

"I write about black issues and political things," he says. "Black history is American history. It's mass oppression for mass production, and black people have experienced that more than any other people."

Mosley is of mixed parentage with a white, Jewish mother, and a Southern-born, black father. He was raised in Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s in African American neighborhoods. There he learned the colorful and lyrical street talk of L.A.'S poor districts, which he conveys with an authenticity that belies his sophisticated manner.

"Every once in a while, you run into a black person who has been isolated from the way people talk in the inner city or the way people talk in the South, but it's very rare," he says.

Mosley's books are usually set in the ghettos of Los Angeles, and he sees Watts as a window on the larger world in which all of us address questions of race, sex, violence, and economics.

His main characters are working class and often dirt poor African Americans. Whites rarely appear except as villains, cops, hoods, or in small supporting roles. His texts often provide whites a peek into black working class culture they are not normally privy to.

Mosley completed his first literary effort, Gone Fishin, after he moved to Greenwich Village, where he worked as a computer programmer. The book featured Easy and his psychopathic but somehow lovable killer sidekick, Mouse, in a coming-of-age novel set in the South in 1939. Mosley laughs, remembering how publishers told him the novel was very good but not commercial.

"They told me, `White people don't read about black people, black women don't like black men, and black men don't read,' "he recalls. (Mosley finally published Gone Fishin' in 1996 with Black Classic Press, a small African American publisher.)

Undeterred by his early rejection, Mosley wrote Devil in a Blue Dress, his first book featuring Easy Rawlins in a mystery genre. Through four subsequent mysteries, Mosley follows Easy, all the while using as backdrop the black migration from the South into Los Angeles through the late 1940s, the McCarthyite 1950s, the civil rights movement, and the Kennedy assassination.

The Easy Rawlins stories, though exciting and compelling, present a bleak picture of life in the L.A. ghetto. Often, after the mystery has been solved and the bad guy punished, even Easy comes off looking like not a very admirable person.

"Well," the author observes, "life is pretty hard, and I'm writing about characters in a hard-boiled genre, and that life is bleak. You run into a lot of bad people and you run into a lot of good people who turn out to be bad people in that life. It's never easy."

In 1997, Mosley introduced his Socrates Fortlow character in Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (W.W. Norton), a book he adapted into an HBO movie starring Lawrence Fishburne, Natalie Cole, and Cicely Tyson. He wanted to write about a black philosopher, "a guy who hasn't sucked up the Western notions of right and wrong, good and bad--Western notions of philosophy--but someone who is just a guy who says, `I want to do what's right.'"

By portraying such a character, Mosley wanted to bring into focus the moral dilemmas of life in the inner city. "It seemed to me that people kept on thinking that black people didn't think," he says, "that black people aren't part of the contemplation of the moral and ethical pressures on individuals, which are really tight on you when you're poor and when you are oppressed."

Socrates Fortlow is an improbable hero. He's a sixty-year-old ex-con, nine years out of the joint, where he served most of his adult life for a double murder and a rape. He lives in a makeshift shack in Watts along with his two-legged dog, Killer. As in the Easy series, Socrates mentors a young boy but realizes that he can't help his protege unless he seeks redemption for the crimes that still haunt him. This means working a full time job, ignoring constant police harassment, and maybe even entering the middle class.

"He doesn't know if he wants to, because in America, material life and spiritual life are almost always in conflict," Mosley says. "Either you are going to do what's right, or you are going to do what your job demands."

In Walkin' the Dog (Little, Brown, 1999), Mosley has Socrates extend his moral search.

"My Socrates is looking for answers to simple questions, such as what do you do if you find a wallet filled with money. But that's a big one if you don't have $2 in your pocket," he says.

Sometimes the questions are more loaded. In one of the twelve riveting stories in Walkin' the Dog, Socrates and a group of friends discuss whether black people have the right to hate whites. "For Socrates and his friends, the questions not only entail smaller ethical decisions about returning a lost wallet, but one as potent as whether to use violence against a brutal, racist cop," he says.

Mosley's writing style is gripping. Here's the opening from the last story in Walkin' the Dog, called "Rogue":

"He stood in an alley across the street from Denther's Bar and Grill on Normandie. It was drizzling slightly but Socrates wore a canvas hat and a water-repellent army surplus fatigue jacket. His hands were in his pockets, each of them holding a pistol.

"There were two small wood framed windows in the wall of the stucco building. In one the word Cafe shone in neon blue. In the other Open burned red. Beyond the lights Socrates could see men and women laughing and talking and touching. The sight of all that happiness and warmth sent angry tremors through Socrates's big hands. He had to release the guns for fear of shooting himself in the legs.

"There was one white woman that he could see at the corner of the right window, near the bottom of the n. She had hair that was golden and lips drawn red. She was smiling and moving her head to music that Socrates could not hear. The man she was with was a policeman, Socrates knew that. All the men who went to Denther's were cops: It was, Socrates thought, a world of cops. Your good men, your fools--your killers too.

"The ex-con took a deep breath to keep his nerves down. In each of the fourteen pockets of his jacket there was a clip full of bullets."

Mosley denies that his presentation of shady characters parading through his books reinforces negative stereotypes of blacks. Referring to Walkin' the Dog, he says, "I think it's a wonderful presentation of the black community. What I'm interested in is how people's hearts speak. You have people who live in the middle class who never do anything heroic or evil, but that's not very interesting." Plus, he says, a mundane life in the middle class can be connected to larger evils that one might not even realize.

"At least Socrates knows he did something wrong," he says. "Others around him are doing things wrong, and they don't know it."

Peter Werbe is a longtime staff member of the Fifth Estate newspaper, which traces its origins to the underground press movement of the 1960s. Sample copies are available from 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, MI 48201. He is also the public affairs director for WCSX-FM and WRIF-FM in Detroit. His interviews are broadcast via the Internet at works.coy and writ.coy in Real Audio, Sundays at 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., respectively.