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 Los Angeles. 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 Louisiana, 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 California. 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 detective fiction 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 New York City, 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 South Los Angeles 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 Blue Light (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 Albert Camus 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.