WALTER MOSLEY

Teaches Fiction and Storytelling Right on Crime How Walter Mosley’s inventive writing and complex characters have breathed new life into classic detective novels

his story, like all great stories, that investigates the Black experience neighborhood of color that would be begins with a single sentence: in postwar . Its protago- the focal point of the 1965 riots. Even- T “On hot sticky days in south- nist, an out-of-work World War II vet tually, the family moved to Mid-City— ern , the fire ants swarm.” named Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, is an L.A. neighborhood, Walter says, In the mid-1980s, Walter Mos- hired to find a missing white woman that has always been in flux ley, a computer programmer, types all while navigating the deeply tar- “First, it was mostly white, mostly out these words in a quiet moment. nished and conflicted promised land Jewish. Then Black people moved in. He’s 34 years old. He’s never thought of Southern . Critics fall in When we came, it was mostly white about being a writer, but something love with the rich storyline, the evoc- people. After a while, mostly Black about the sentence stays with him. ative language, and the unofficial -de people lived here,” he recalled in a Los He thinks it sounds like something tective who is not the typical loner but Angeles Times interview. “But then, that could be in a book—and it's the a man deeply connected to friends, his the white people moved back, which first time he thinksmaybe I could be a past, and the city he has adopted. I thought was wonderful. I never saw writer. He’s been reading Alice Walk- Over the next three decades, this anything like that. And so it became er’s The Color Purple and is excited by first novel snowballs into an expan- truly mixed.” what that book opens up in his mind sive literary universe. Soon, there are In the Rawlins novels, Walter’s pro- about the kinds of stories one can tell. other kinds of Black male heroes in- tagonist also moves through the shift- He starts taking classes, he joins a habiting not only mysteries, but liter- ing neighborhoods of Los Angeles, writers’ group. He writes poems and ary fiction, science fiction, and young looking for new homes for his grow- short stories. He experiments. A teacher, adult novels. There is nonfiction, ing family. But the character’s reloca- the famed Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, comic books, political commentary— tion isn’t just an echo of Walter’s own encourages him to write a novel. And so in all, more than 60 books translated experience; it’s a way of opening his he writes what would later be seen as into 25 languages—a body of work fiction to broader concerns. This has the “first” novel in the world that Easy that earns both a PEN America Life- become, perhaps, the most essential Rawlins inhabits: Gone Fishin’. Fifteen time Achievement Award and the Na- element of Walter’s work: his desire publishers reject the work. Walter de- tional Book Foundation’s Medal for to share the neighborhoods and lives cides to adapt the lead character into Distinguished Contribution to Amer- that had been left out of the fictional a new manuscript, a mystery this time. ican Letters. chronicle, the lives that faced not only But he isn’t thinking of genre. He is Walter was born in 1952, the son of crimes that need solving, but racism thinking of the story he can tell about a Black man from Louisiana and a Rus- in all its social and financial forms, this character moving west. sian-Jewish file clerk who both worked and love in all its complications. The resulting novel, Devil in a Blue for the City of Los Angeles school dis- The terrain of the detective story, Dress, is a revelation: a detective story trict. His early years were in Watts, a according to the literary biographer

1  Frank MacShane, “can involve an ex- ries about what mattered, about the will get knocked down. But we’re all traordinary range of humanity, from hardships and losses ordinary people storytellers and, utilizing the right the very rich to the very poor, and can endured and fought. Those concerns tools, capable of shaping history encompass a great many different plac- also became a guiding principle of through works of fiction. The partic- es.” This makes the form fertile ground Walter’s work. He firmly believes that ulars of genre aren’t so important as to cultivate all kinds of heroes, men people are motivated to read novels overcoming the blank page, seeing it and women who might not otherwise not only for entertainment, but as a as an opportunity instead of the ene- have been seen as important enough to means to better understand human my. Your story, like all stories, begins stand up to injustices and corruption. nature. So he hopes you will take his with a single sentence. Perhaps a surprising source of in- techniques and philosophy—writing spiration to Walter was not so much habitually, invoking poetic language, other but the 19th- separating plot from story, turning the century French novelist Émile Zola’s setting into a character—and make Ready to develop your short story episodic novels. In his exploration them your own. into a novel and query an agent (or of the everyday lives of those with That might sound daunting. And just write a great first line)? Head little means or power, Zola told sto- Walter makes no bones about it: You over to masterclass.com.

2 Book ’Em 10 essential Walter Mosley reads, from mystery to science fiction to political commentary

The Easy Rawlins books (1990–present) This 14-book series (and count- ing) follows the character of Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a family man and re- luctant detective, from 1948 to 1968. He traverses a Los Angeles fraught with crime, corruption, and racism.

RL’s Dream (1995) Walter’s first non-Rawlins effort fo- kind of hybrid species—if not quite Fortunate Son (2006) cuses on Soupspoon Wise, a Delta superheroes, then heightened ver- Walter again returns to Southern bluesman caught between his con- sions of themselves. California, telling the story of two ditional existence on the Lower East men—one Black and one white. Side of Manhattan and his dream- Workin’ on the Chain They grow up together and, after like memories of Robert Johnson, Gang: Shaking Off the Dead many years apart, reunite as adults, the highly mythologized real-life Hand of History (2000) offering contrasting realities of priv- 1930s guitarist. In his nonfiction monograph, Walter ilege and hardship. makes an elegant case for American The Socrates Fortlow books capitalism as a system of cultural The Leonid McGill books (1997–2008) and economic oppression—not only (2009–2020) These three collections of interwo- for Black people, but for everyone. For his third mystery series, Walter ven short stories revolve around takes on , which he the ex-con Socrates Fortlow. After The Fearless Jones books writes with gritty grandeur. Here serving time at an Indiana prison, (2001–2006) we’re introduced to Leonid McGill, Fortlow is in and Walter’s second mystery series also a former boxer turned private detec- trying, like so many of Walter’s pro- takes place in Los Angeles in the mid- tive adrift in a city—and a world—he tagonists, to live according to his 1950s. The hero is a detective, Fearless doesn’t quite recognize anymore. own moral code. Jones, but the story is told through a timid bookseller named Paris Minton. The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray (1998) These novels are lighter and looser (2010) Walter’s science fiction debut, set than the Easy Rawlins books, with After watching his mother struggle in the Bay Area, concerns an oth- plots that grow out of the collabora- through early-stage dementia, Wal- erworldly blue light that transforms tion between Jones and Minton rather ter conjures up a protagonist wres- many of the novel’s characters into a than self-protective solitude. tling with age and illness. In a novel

3  The Writ Parade Walter’s fiction and storytelling transcend genre. So do his inspirations. Here he gives you his abridged reading list

Breath, Eyes, ery writer. Freud did it it through a world Memory with a place that ex- that doesn’t care if he by Edwidge Danticat ists in our souls—the makes it or not.” “Born a French speak- unconscious. If any er, Ms. Danticat came writer can approxi- Four Quartets to America, learned mate this feat she will by T.S. Eliot English, and proceed- have immediate en- “I’ve read this slen- ed to translate into trée into the canon.” der volume 100 times. fiction the most com- I’ve never understood mon experience of the The Stranger all of it, but with each American imagina- by new reading, I under- tion—that of the emi- “The North African stand a little more. It’s grant soul.” existentialist novel. a deftly written quar- In a world dominat- tet of poems that Living My Life ed by corporations, contain within it past, by Emma Goldman despots, and cultur- present, future, and “A memoir that is at al fads, we find our the universe at large.” once wild, feminist, deeply flawed hero that recalls some of the dynamics anarchist, and a view fighting, and maybe Belly Song from RL’s Dream, the character un- of America and the dying, for the right to by Etheridge Knight dergoes an experimental treatment Western world that be himself.” “Etheridge was in for dementia, unlocking difficult— few authors would turns a heroin addict, and unavoidable—memories. dare to imagine, much One Hundred thief, con man, con- less live.” Years of Solitude vict, and poet. And, Down the River Unto the Sea (2018) by Gabriel García man, was he a poet. Recipient of a 2019 Edgar Award The Bluest Eye Márquez The only American I for Best Novel, this standalone fol- by “This beautiful nov- would compare him lows Joe King Oliver, an ex-cop from “We all know Toni— el experiences the to is Walt Whitman.” Brooklyn once framed for rape, who through her writings, world the way the must solve both his own case and that is. This is her first writer does: through Kapital that of a Black militant accused of offering and one of laughter and tears, by Karl Marx killing two NYPD officers. the best. She could fallacies and truth, “Forget communist take a small section of lies and beliefs. You and socialist labels. a small city and make won’t find a better What Marx did was a world out of it.” writer—anywhere.” to describe the im- Learn how to outline your first pact of a free econo- novel, with archetypal characters The Interpretation The Simple Stories my on the everyday and compelling villains, at of Dreams by worker. No one had masterclass.com. by Sigmund Freud “Jesse B. Semple nar- done this before. He “What is it like to rates, through dozens created a vocabulary discover a place that of short stories, how of the modern world. doesn’t exist? This is the everyday blue- Isn’t that the main job the conundrum of ev- collar citizen makes of any writer?”

4 Killing Time

Devil in a Blue Dress is adapted for the screen and stars and Don Cheadle; Walter’s short story “The Thief” Walter writes his appears in Esquire Gone Fishin’ is first novel, Gone magazine. published by Black Fishin’, in six weeks; Classic Press, an indie it remains unpub- 1995 group dedicated lished until 1997, but to preserving Black he decides to cast Now a major literature; Walter the main character, motion picture! forgoes an advance and Easy Rawlins, in a donates his royalties detective story. to the publisher.

1987 1997

1990

New York 1994 1998 Times Nota- ble Books New York Times Anisfield-Wolf of the Year! BestSeller! Book Award Devil in a Blue Walter's fourth novel, Winner! Dress, the first Black Betty, sells more HBO adapts Easy Rawlins than 100,000 hardback 1996 Walter’s book book, is pub- copies; he signs a Always Outnum- lished by W.W. multi-book deal to “The Thief” wins bered, Always Norton & Com- continue writing the an O. Henry Prize; Outgunned into pany. Easy Rawlins series. Walter becomes a movie starring the inaugural art- Laurence ist-in-residence at Fishburne. New York Uni- versity’s Africana Studies Institute.

5  Tracing Walter’s rise to the top of crime fiction—and beyond

Walter res- urrects Easy Edgar Rawlins in Award for Little Green, Walter’s nonfiction The Long Best Mys- a book set monograph, Workin’ Fall intro- tery Novel against the on the Chain Gang, duces a new Walter’s stand- political up- is published as part detective, alone crime heaval of the of the Library Leonid book, Down late 1960s. of Contemporary McGill, the River Unto Thought series. launching the Sea, arrives a six-book to critical ac- series. claim. 2000 2013 2009 2018

2002 2016 2007 After a Walter five-year Blonde Faith receives the hiatus, Easy concludes Grand Master 2020 2001 Rawlins with Walter Award for killing lifetime returns in Walter is award- off Easy achieve Walter wins Bad Boy - ed the Medal for Rawlins—or ment and a Grammy Brawly Distinguished does he? consistent Award for his Brown. Contribution to quality from album liner American Letters by the Mystery notes for the National Book Writers of Richard Pry- Foundation, joining America— or’s …And It’s the likes of Joan the organiza Deep Too! - Didion, Norman tion’s highest Mailer, and Maxine honor. Hong Kingston.

6 troduces a young detective, Juniper Song, who idolizes Philip Marlowe and romanticizes her own investi- gations—until real danger shows it- Forensic self. That danger is physical but also emotional; in her work, Cha expert- ly traces the line between desire Bibliophiles and necessity, as well as the divide of perception and reality. Several writers of color have, like Walter, Then there’s Naomi Hirahara, made detective fiction their own—and have who writes about Mas Arai, a Jap- anese American detective who sur- kept the genre from becoming stagnant vived the bombing of Hiroshima and became a gardener in Pasadena, giv- ecades after its publication, Walter can’t be directly compared ing him the access necessary to solve remains to Himes, whose writing stings with a crimes. Gary Phillips has published Done of the more startling- type of anger and disillusionment spe- a host of novels and comics since ly original debut mystery novels in cific to his era. But both authors are his first,Violent Spring, appeared in history. Even so, when Walter wrote innovators, cracking open the con- 1994; it involves a Black private in- the book, he was operating with- ventions of genre, acknowledging lit- vestigator named Ivan Monk and, in the boundaries of some long- erary roots while push- like Your House Will standing literary traditions: first, ing into new terrain. Pay, unfolds in the af- that of hard-boiled crime fiction, While the bars and juke But wait, termath of the Rodney as pioneered during the 1920s and joints of Devil in a Blue there’s King beating. 1930s by authors like Raymond Dress echo Chandler’s more! And it’s impossible Chandler; second, that of the crime 1940 classic Farewell, The anthology to forget about Attica writer of color, less recognized in My Lovely, Walter writes Spooks, Spies, and Locke. Locke has pub- 1990 than today (but essential all them out of a larger am- Private Eyes: Black lished five novels since Mystery, Crime, the same). bition. The idea is not 2009, including Pleasant- and Suspense If one of Walter’s progenitors was only to create a clever Fiction of the 20th ville, winner of the Harp- Chandler—whose books were based mystery but to also trace Century, edited by er Lee Prize for Legal Fic- on a certain moral architecture as a way of life. Crime, and Paula L. Woods, tion; The Cutting Season, well as the idea of the detective as detection, offers a lens gathers works which received the Er- a knight—then the other was the through which to look at of crime fiction nest J. Gaines Award for by Black writers Black crime writer the city and the culture dating to 1900. Literary Excellence; and (below), whose 1945 novel, If He as a whole. Here are a the Edgar Award–win- Hollers Let Him Go, traces WWII- few more modern crime ning Bluebird, Bluebird. era racism with a penetrating eye. writers of color who are Locke’s novels unfold in Himes later expatriatied to Paris, doing the same. Louisiana and Texas, and her work is where he began penning new crime It’s difficult to imagine a writer sharply rendered and concerned with fiction in the late 1950s. His cele- like Steph Cha—whose 2019 nov- social justice, although never at the ex- brated eight-book Detectives el, Your House Will Pay, examines pense of narrative. Her books are as- series, written into the late 1960s, is the legacy of the 1992 Rodney King tonishing in their ability to spin stories riddled with absurdist riots in L.A. through that evoke a sense of place, highlight- violence that could be the lives of two South- ing the complexity of character and seen as holding up a ern California fami- the influence of a given setting—not mirror to the absurdity lies—working without unlike the pioneering work of Walter. of racism; nonsensical Walter’s oeuvre on her criminal acts, including bookshelf. She, too, re- those committed by the considers Chandler’s antihero protagonists road map to pave a Want to know more about writing while on the job, are en- new avenue through internal monologue and first- couraged by a nonsen- the genre. Cha’s debut, person perspective versus another

sical system. Follow Her Home, in- point of view? Visit masterclass.com. AFRO AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS/GADO/GETTY IMAGES

7  something, re-creates a landscape. It Worldbuilding animates a narra- On Location is particular, rooted in the real. These tive, connecting it to larger concerns. How cities can become transferences occur regularly in lit- The novelist E.M. Forster called this literary characters erature. Take James Joyce’s Ulysses, the “buzz of implication,” the way whose plot unfolds across Dublin, great novels come encoded with Ireland, over the course of a single a portrait of their place and time. Literature takes place in the world, day. The author once joked that if the There’s another aspect, too: a col- and that world must be built and de- city were destroyed, his novel would lective vision, in which we read and veloped. It needs to be believable and allow it to be rebuilt brick by brick. It’s recognize cities not as monoliths or real. “When you’re a writer, making not that his text is a guide but that the abstractions but as accumulations of up different ways of seeing the world, place has infiltrated the fiction. human toil and blood. Every city, af- understanding the world, considering The same could be said of William ter all, is a ghost story, populated by what happened, what didn’t happen,” Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the living and the dead. Its residents says Walter, “you are actually chang- Nikolai Gogol’s St. Petersburg, and move through the present by moving ing the world.” ’s London. In Our Mu- also through the past. He’s not speaking figuratively. Of- tual Friend, Dickens’s tale of working- Walter, like so many authors be- ten, the setting operates as a char- class life in Victorian England, the fore him, understands that setting is acter unto itself; the weight of place author tells us: “It was a foggy day in a powerful device. How will you use can influence the action. Walter has London, and the fog was heavy and it in your work? played with this idea from the very dark. Animate London, with smart- first sentence he ever jotted down as ing eyes and irritated lungs, was a capital-W Writer: “On hot sticky blinking, wheezing, and choking; days in southern Louisiana, the fire inanimate London was a sooty spec- For more about cultivating mood ants swarm.” tre, divided in purpose between be- and atmosphere, and how descrip- Why is that such a good sentence? ing visible and invisible, and so being tive writing can improve your story, The answer is specificity. It shows us wholly neither.” visit masterclass.com.

8 POURED was born and raised in Los Angeles; he’s aware of its obscuring surfaces. And, as a Black man in America, he knows the narratives that have been forgotten or were never told. West of theWest “If you want to be in the culture,” Walter says, “in the history of the cul- The endless appeal of Los Angeles ture, considered in that history, then in detective stories you have to exist in the fiction.… If you don’t exist in the literature of that country, your people don’t exist.” He’s talking about communities ike Davis, the Southern is as it seems. What better setting for of color, but he’s also talking about California social historian, so many of Walter’s mysteries? Los Angeles—the “nowhere city,” Mcalled it “the master dia- L.A.’s complexities drive the tor- as the novelist Alison Lurie once lectic of sunshine and noir.” He was mented heart of crime fiction, which called it. If that’s the case, though, addressing the sensibilities of crime is, in essence, a desperate art. Of how can L.A. exist if it doesn’t pop fiction and how they seem inextri- course, a character like Easy Raw- up in literature? It’s a signature cably woven into the broad tapestry lins sees the defining contradictions concern for Walter, most evident in of Los Angeles’s identity. The genre of his surroundings, which are by his Easy Rawlins books. Rawlins is speaks to the promises that Califor- turns paradisal and chaotic. It re- a protagonist through whom we are nia makes but cannot keep—and L.A. quires a deft hand and a keen eye to invited to trace a different history of is a city, it often feels, where nothing investigate these ideas, but Walter Southern California in the decades

9  following WWII. Rawlins is a Black man in a white L.A., I Love You world, and he must think through Five scribes whose fiction captures every incident, every encounter. In the essence of Southern California an early novel, he’s confronted by young racists in Santa Monica; his very existence is at risk. That tone lowesque PI with an air of tragic reverberates throughout the series, It all starts with Chandler. During gravitas. even more so after he becomes an the 1930s, he developed the char- adoptive parent. Rawlins is left car- acter detective Philip Marlowe and, Joseph Wambaugh ing for two children in a city that is along the way, a signature voice Still an LAPD detective when his at best indifferent and more often for Los Angeles: wise but weary, first novel, The New Centurions, ar- outright hostile. cynical but engaged. Marlowe is a rived in 1970, Wambaugh is known Because of his family situation, knight errant, a loner who must live for writing about police from the Rawlins—not unlike Walter’s par- by his own solitary code. inside. His characters are flawed, ents—has no choice but to think be- beset by personal and emotion- yond himself, looking for opportuni- James M. Cain al issues, driven by the pressures ties, for the places where the city has Perhaps the greatest of all the of the job. He has penned several a bit of give. His navigation of Los American crime writers of the nonfiction books, too, most notably Angeles, then, becomes a mystery as 1930s and 1940s, Cain was an The Onion Field, a dark and striking all-consuming as any he confronts acute social observer and a pro- true-crime account. in the business of sleuthing. It de- pulsive storyteller. His early books mands detection of another kind. (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and, especially, Connelly is best known for his Mildred Pierce) are masterpieces, books about Harry Bosch, an L.A. in which trouble is everywhere and detective with a chip on his shoul- nobody gets what they want. der and strong, personal opinions about justice and authority (many Dorothy B. Hughes Bosch books provided storylines Hughes began her career as a for an Amazon show called, aptly, poet (her first book, Dark Certainty, Bosch). But the author has intro- published in 1931, was selected for duced several other protagonists the Yale Series of Younger Poets) and often brings these characters before moving into novel writing. together in his plots. Over 35 nov- Her 1947 tour de force, In a Lone- els, Connelly builds an expansive ly Place, tells the story of a genial and nuanced fictional universe. Southern California psychopath. The 1950 feature film adaptation, Denise Hamilton starring Humphrey Bogart, dulled Her 2001 debut novel, The Jas- down the book’s razor edge: In mine Trade, introduced us to the Hughes’s treatment, there’s an at- detective Eve Diamond, kicking mosphere of true menace. off a five-book arc. Two expertly edited anthologies of L.A. noir (re- Ross Macdonald leased in 2007 and 2010) bookend Born Kenneth Millar, Macdonald her standalone The Last Embrace, was the first great inheritor of the a beguiling 1940s period piece. Chandler tradition: a spare and piercing writer with the ability to make landscape a character in his work. Beginning with The Moving Interested in writing a crime Target, published in 1949, he wrote fiction novel (or mystery and 18 novels about Southern Califor- suspense stories) of your own? nia detective Lew Archer, a Mar- Head over to masterclass.com.

10 Ten-Point Plan Walter’s tips for writing your novel

1. “A novel isn’t putting the left 6. “There are so many different kinds front tire on the Volkswagen on the of genres, but in the end, writing is production line. The novel is creating writing. It’s the same language, it’s the a whole new mode of transportation, same words, it’s the same grammar.” a whole new mode of understanding the world.” 7. “If you follow your heart, if you do what you love, if you get to the place 2. “Write your truth and believe in where you succeeded, and starting it. And if your mother doesn’t like it, from the beginning of a novel and get- too bad.” ting to the end of the novel, then you’re doing the best you can do. You’re living in the best moment of your life.” 3. “The beautiful thing about any day is that this is the day that ‘it’ can happen. Today, all of a sudden, you 8. “The blank page makes no judg- realize, ‘Hey, my wheels aren’t spin- ment on you.” ning anymore. They are spinning, but I’m actually moving forward. I’m not sitting in place.’ ” 9. “It has to be a story that speaks to us, that helps us understand our world and ourselves. And if it lasts, 4. “You will find, if you write every it’s great literature.” day, that the next day, ideas have bub- bled up from some place that you had no idea were there.” 10. “If you write a novel…you have created something. You have made something. You have started from 5. "Any person who wants to do the beginning and gone to the end of anything with writing—from the something that is a transformation great novel to a love letter—needs to itself but also has transformed you in understand poetry.” the making of it.”

For more tips on writing fiction— and finding a writers’ group to help support you—visit masterclass.com.

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