Walter Mosley's Blog, page 6

Novelist Walter Mosley Talks Luke Cage, Colorism, and Why Spider-Man Was the ‘First Black Superhero’

Walter Mosley, comics geek.
Photo: Desiree Navarro/WireImage

Whatever you think of Marvel’s Luke Cage, you can’t say it’s not literate. A bevy of books are either seen or name-checked throughout the latest Netflix superhero series, and one that gets a particularly bright place in the spotlight is Little Green, a novel by one of the most prolific and acclaimed living crime-fiction writers, Walter Mosley. In the second episode, two of the leads debate the comparative merits of Mosley and fellow African-American crime novelist Donald Goines — and the one going to bat for Mosley is none other than the title character. As it turns out, the feeling of respect is mutual: Mosley is a longtime superhero-comics geek and grew up reading Luke’s initial comic-book adventures in the early 1970s. We caught up with the author to talk respectability politics, the thorny issue of colorism, and why he thinks Spider-Man was the first black superhero.

You were a big Marvel Comics fan growing up, right?

Listen, I bought Luke Cage No. 1 in the store. So, yes. I also bought X-MenNo. 1 and Conan No. 1. I didn’t quite get Avengers No. 1 — but close.

X-Men No. 1 came out in 1963, so we’re talking the mid-’60s, here?

Way back. ’63, maybe ’62. I had been reading DC [Comics] before, but I gave up.

Why’d you give up on DC?

In DC, everybody looked alike. Everybody looked white. Marvel, way back in the beginning, had a black character, in Sgt. Fury, Gabe Jones. Everybody’s powers were so funnily designed that it didn’t feel real. Marvel had things I hadn’t even thought of, like hero-villains. You had somebody like the Sub-Mariner, who is a hero to his people, but an enemy to ours. Or the Hulk, who’s a pure being, but his emotions make him a villain or a threat. And you kinda go, Damn, that’s real.

The first black superhero is Spider-Man. He lives in a one-parent house — it’s not even a parent, it’s an aunt. He has all of this power, but every time he uses it, it turns against him. People are afraid of him; the police are after him. The only way he can get a job is by taking pictures of himself that are used against him in public. [Newspaper chief] J. Jonah Jameson says [to Spider-Man’s alter ego, Peter Parker], “Go out and take a picture that shows him with his hand in the cookie jar, that shows him stealing and being a villain.” That’s a black hero right there. Of course, he’s actually a white guy. But black people reading Spider-Man are like, Yeah, I get that. I identify with this character here. 

More generally, what was it about superhero comics that spoke to you in a way other literature didn’t? 

The complexity of human nature is expressed in the violence of adolescents’ hearts. You know what I mean? You could read Shakespeare, which actually does that, too, but it becomes very complex and intellectualized. In comic books, characters are like, The surface dwellers have destroyed my people and I’m gonna make war against them!

When you picked up the first Luke Cage comic in 1972, what’d you make of it?

It was wonderful. He’s a black man who’s been to prison — which is not unusual — who has come back to his home, who wants to do the right thing, and he has a conflicted heart. And he’s living in a black world.

Somewhat infamously, the series featured hokey and borderline-offensive replications of urban black patois. Did that stuff turn you off?

Let me put it this way. You’re 19 years old and you’re gonna go out on a date with somebody. And that person, regardless of gender, regardless ofyour gender, they’re fun, they’re beautiful. They might have buck teeth or bad breath, they might say things that you can’t quite understand because they’re mumbling. They might have all kinds of problems, but what you do is you surmount those problems. Because you’re with this incredibly beautiful person. Right? I thought Marvel had taken a big step in doing Luke Cage. They were trying to open a door, and they did open a door. Over the years after that, a lot of black people went through that door. To write comics, to draw comics, to manage the comics. It was great. It was wonderful. So, no, I didn’t have problems.

If you were into it, I’m assuming you were into the blaxploitation movies it was drawing from. Was that the case?

I’m gonna go a roundabout way of answering that question. When I was a kid, I used to watch Sgt. Bilko on TV. Every week. There are other things I could’ve watched. But I watched Sgt. Bilko because, in his barracks, there was one black soldier. That black soldier never spoke or did anything, certainly didn’t have any writing around him. But whenever they all got together, he was there. I watched Sgt. Bilko just so I could see him. ‘Cause here you are, a black person — almost everybody you ever see is black — but when you turn on the television, there are no black people. So just the idea of seeing that guy, you go, “Look! Look, look, Dad! It’s a black man!” So, blaxploitation, I was a fan of it because I had no other choice. It wasn’t like that kind of entertainment was gonna come from some other place. I could watch To Sir With Love or In the Heat of the Night, or whatever. But I’m a young man — I needed action. Blaxploitation was doing that. I think if I had a better choice, I might have liked something else more. But it wasn’t there.

What did you think of the way Luke evolved? After a while, he became something of a joke; after that, he was revived in comics, but was much more of a calm, respectable guy.

Luke really disappeared for a while. And then they started bringing him back, and it was really hard for them to figure out, Well, how do we do this? The way comic books were drawn and written changed a lot: The story isn’t as simple or basic, and there have to be these underlying psychological or identity revelations. I didn’t hold it against anybody that it happened. I’m less interested in Luke Cage as a character [now]. Which is why I think [Luke Cage showrunner] Cheo [Hodari] Coker, in doing [his show], goes back to the original one. He’s living in the ‘hood. He’s come out of prison. He has all this power.

Here’s a guy who has not benefited from the American dream.

And the reason he has power was because they did illegal experimentation on him in prison.

Which is not that far off from things that have actuallyhappened.

No, not at all. With those, you don’t get superpowers. You get cancer. But it’s the same thing: Here I am, you’re killing me, and when I fight back, you condemn me. I think that’s true in the show. That sense is true. The inner turmoil and confusion is true. Later on [in the comics], it’s less inner turmoil, especially when he gets to be in the Avengers. It’s more, Well, I’m a superhero with conflicts, and I have this white girlfriend, and I’m going to fight the bad guys. That’s like, You could live like we live. But the thing is, people are still living in the ‘hood today. Know what I mean? There are millions of black bodies in prison. And so with that as a fact, the old Luke Cage speaks more to today than the new Luke Cage, I think.

How well do you know Coker?

Oh yeah, I know Cheo, I’ve talked to him before. I mean, I’m a Hollywood guy. I do things out there. I had no idea he was doing this for a series. It wasn’t until it happened that I knew about it, but it’s kind of wonderful for my book to be in the show.

When you heard about the show, did you call him up to talk about it?

No. There’s so many shows, so many of the Marvel shows coming out on Netflix, I knew he was doing it, and I probably ran into him once and asked him how it was going. But the thing is, it’s television — you wait to see it. You don’t want to jinx it with anybody. So you say, “What are you working on?” “Oh, I’m working on the new Luke Cage.” “Well, that’s great.” And then you just hope that it appears. I think Cheo did a wonderful job. He’s a good choice. From the first moments, you think,Okay, here we are, we’re in Harlem. It’s black people and Hispanic people and a couple of white people, and some are criminals and some are lawyers and some are doctors and some are just nice guys. It went where I expected it to go, so I wasn’t surprised, but I was happy.

When did you find out that you were going to get mentioned inLuke Cage?

Somebody told me before it was on the air, but not that long before it was on the air. [Laughs.] Somebody I knew in Hollywood had seen a premiere or a preview or something and they said, “Man, your book is in there.” I went, “Oh. That’s good. That’s great.” That made me happy. [Laughs.] And really, I can see where it would be there. I mean, I write about black male heroes. This show is about a black male hero. I can understand why Cheo made that choice.

But do you think the show fits into the genre of crime fiction, as the book they’re discussing does?

Not really. This is a superhero comic, based and oriented in an African-American world. Because he has superpowers, there’s a thing about him being a hero that goes all the way back to Gilgamesh and Hercules. That kind of hero who has a lot of power but who needs incredible courage to use that power to succeed.

Something that’s been criticized is the show’s take on respectability politics. Morally compromised characters use the N-word, but Luke himself derides it as something to be ashamed of. What did you make of that?

The fact that they used it meant that they weren’t being too prejudiced. [One of the villains, Cottonmouth] is like, “Listen, man, I’m a nigga, people underestimate a nigga.” That’s real. This political-correctness thing, it’s so interesting. Inside the black community, you have the fellas who’ve appropriated the word, but then you have people from another generation who think the word is terrible and it’s awful and you should never use it. Cheo decided, “Well, I’m gonna be the one to use it.” I think it’s great.

The show also takes on colorism within the black community: Alfre Woodard’s character, Mariah, gets furious with Cottonmouth when he insults her for having dark skin.Colorism is something that’s getting talked about in mainstream discourse as of late — for example, there was a lot of criticism lobbed at the casting of the relatively light-skinned Zoe Saldana as the dark-skinned Nina Simone. Do you see colorism as a major issue?

Huh. To begin, you have to understand that I don’t really believe in the existence of white people. If you went to Europe before trips to the “New World,” they didn’t call themselves white people. They were the Vikings, they were Greeks, they were Spaniards, they were Basques. If you compared one to the other, they would kill you. If you told a Viking that he was just like the Greeks, he’d cut off your head. It wasn’t until they came to America and they were killing the so-called red man and enslaving the so-called black man that they needed their own identity. So they called themselves white people.

With the idea of white, it’s like black — it doesn’t mean anything. It just doesn’t. You look at somebody and they’re dark brown or light brown or light-skinned like me. Somebody’ll say, “You’re black.” Okay, I’m black, but I’m not literally black. It’s just a word that you are fixing to me. Do I believe in colorism? Probably. But on a much larger palette than the context that you’re asking in. My mother, that whole family is Jewish. When somebody’s Jewish and they come to me and say they’re white, I say, “Man, are you crazy? Do you know your history? You’re going to call yourself white and they’ve been killing you for a thousand years in Europe?” Everybody, not just Hitler, called the Jews another race. But they’ll say, “I’m white.” I look at them and I go, Is that like when I say I’m black? You can look at me and you see I’m not black, right? I understand racism and I deal with it. I speak in those terms, but in an ideal world, we’re all just people, right?

Have you been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s run on the Black Panther comic?

I haven’t even seen Black Panther yet. I’m looking forward to seeing it. Ta-Nehisi’s father and I are, like, best friends. Paul Coates. Paul Coates was the head of the Black Panthers in Baltimore, back in the day, in the ’60s. When people say, “Have you seen Black Panther?” I’m like, “No, but I know the original Black Panther, Ta-Nehisi’s father.”

If you’ve known Ta-Nehisi that long, did you ever talk comics with him? Did he talk to you for advice about writing fiction when he got this assignment?

Never. No, we never talked about comic books. Now and then we run across each other. I look forward to seeing [Black Panther]. It’s kind of like television shows: Some television shows I like, I wait until the first season is over, then I watch the whole thing all at once. It’ll be great. I know he really loves doing it.

Any closing thoughts about the show?

I think there are some really important things about Luke Cage. Some guy got out of prison and he’s going to work in this barbershop and people are after him. You couldn’t make that story without making it a comic-book story first. It’s really brilliant of Cheo to figure that out.

(via Vulture.com)

Walter Mosley on the mysterious future beyond the frames of capitalism and socialism

“We have to recognize the failure of capitalism. We have to recognize the impossibility of socialism. We have to recognize what it is that we’re working for in the world, which is basically as good a life as we can get in this brief span that we have. And we have to recognize who we are in relation to these things – and not allow these incredible, large systems which govern us, but don’t care about us – to take over.”

Author Walter Mosley explores the mysteries of life, labor and freedom in the 21st century – from the failures of global capitalism and the impossibility of socialism, to technology’s toll on humanity’s understanding of itself, its needs and its limitations – and explains why building a future that serves humankind starts with destroying the ideological frames that reduce people to servants of a system, not masters of their potential.

(via thisishell.com)

THE NYPL Podcast #127: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Walter Mosley on Empire, English, and Beethoven

Six-time NBA champ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar may be best known as the leading scorer in professional basketball of all time. Yet Abdul-Jabbar is also a major editorialist and an author books such as Mycroft and Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White. Recently, he joined the prolific novelist Walter Mosley at LIVE from the NYPL. For this week’s episode of the New York Public Library, we’re proud to present Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Walter Mosley discussing depictions of the British Empire, a lifelong love of English, and how Beethoven inspired concentration.

Mosley spoke admiringly of Abdul-Jabbar’s reframing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work, placing Mycroft Holmes at the center of his novel and moving him to Trinidad:

“The wonderful thing about Doyle writing about Sherlock Holmes is that Sherlock Holmes was very aware of the empire, only the empire only occured in London. So there are all these people from all over the world. There’s somebody from India and somebody from Pakistan and somebody from the Caribbean and someone from African and someone from the colonies. But they were all in England. It was very rare. I think there was one story where he went to America, but it’s almost like turning him on his head, saying, okay, I’m going to take this Holmes character, Mycroft Holmes who is not only his older brother but his smarter, older brother, who you take to Trinidad which is really kind of wonderful when you take a body of literature and actually turn it inside out.”

Asked about his transition from athlete to author, Abdul-Jabbar explained that, in fact, his personal evolution worked in the opposite order:

“I enjoyed reading and writing a long time before I was any good at playing basketball… All the things I’d written when I was kid inspired me to attempt writing. The nuns at my school thought they saw some talent there. They encouraged me. They entered me in essay contests they had. The Catholic Diocese here would have essay contests, I represented my school. So I always had a little penchant for it, and when I got to UCLA I was an English major and again got encouragement from my teachers. That was in place long before I knew anything about basketball, and plus, my first love was baseball anyway. Brooklyn Dodgers!”

Abdul-Jabbar compared his work ethic to that of his father. Specifically, he spoke of the way that his hook shot belonged to a legacy of discipline in his family:

“My dad went to Julliard School of Music, and he was a trombone player. In order to get out he had to take piano. He had to play Moonlight Sonata. I think it’s Beethoven. I’m pretty sure. And he’d be practicing it all the time. I ended up where I knew it by heart just listening to him practice all the time, and I remember I’d be in my room, and he’d be out practicing, and I’d be like, ‘When is he ever going to stop playing that song?’ but I went on ahead and practiced my hook shot in the same way and same determination to make it, to get into high school, to get a scholarship to high school.”

You can subscribe to the New York Public Library Podcast to hear more conversations with wonderful artists, writers, and intellectuals. Join the conversation today!

Walter Mosley On The Stories Of LA Told Through Easy Rawlins

In 1990, Walter Mosley first told the story of black postwar LA through Easy Rawlins, an Army vet turned private eye. It became Mosley’s best-known series. He discusses Easy’s creation and journey.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

A quarter of a century ago, Walter Mosley introduced the character Easy Rawlins, an Army vet turned private eye, to tell the story of black postwar Los Angeles. Today, Easy Rawlins is a literary icon. Mosley is one of America’s best-known writers. His newest book in the series is called “Charcoal Joe.” Karen Grigsby Bates from our Code Switch team talked with Mosley about Easy’s creation and journey.

KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: Ask Walter Mosley what he does, and he’ll say simply, I’m a writer, and he’s written a lot.

WALTER MOSLEY: I’ve published 52 books and maybe 30 short stories and another 30 or 40 articles.

BATES: Most writers specialize in one or two types of books, but Mosley refuses to be constrained. He’s written mysteries, science fiction, erotica and young adult fiction, plays and opinion pieces and essays. He’s even penned a slim book that instructs would-be fiction writers on how to get started. And it’s not always about the money.

MOSLEY: I have all these things. I’m continually writing them and, you know, people say, well, I can’t sell that stuff. Well, that’s OK. We’ll just publish it. Don’t give me any advance and we’ll see where it goes, you know, because the idea of writing – if you want to get rich, you go into real estate.

BATES: But it’s his Easy Rawlins series that made Walter Mosley famous.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WEST SIDE BABY”)

T-BONE WALKER: (Singing) I’ve got a west side baby. She lives way…

BATES: The Rawlins series begins in 1948 when Los Angeles is adjusting to its new population of black migrants from the South who came to work in war-related industries. Those experiences are vividly portrayed in the novel “Devil In A Blue Dress” in 1990 and later in the 1995 movie version. In this scene, Easy, played by Denzel Washington, has just been let go from his job at one of the city’s many airline factories. He’s not happy about it, and he tries to get his boss to reconsider.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS”)

DENZEL WASHINGTON: (As Ezekiel Easy Rawlins) I need a house to live. I need to put clothes on my back, Mr. Giacomo. I need the job.

STEVE RANDAZZO: (As Benny Giacomo) I’m sorry, fella. I got to get back to work.

WASHINGTON: (As Ezekiel Easy Rawlins) My name’s not fella.

RANDAZZO: (As Benny Giacomo) Huh?

WASHINGTON: (As Ezekiel Easy Rawlins) My name’s not fella. My name is Ezekiel Rawlins.

BATES: Mosley’s tale of love, political corruption and racial intrigue became a bestseller. Bill Clinton famously became one of his biggest fans. And the series has brought him honors. Mosley was chosen as the 2016 grand master of the Mystery Writers of America, their highest honor. The Lifetime Achievement Award puts him in the company of past grand masters like John le Carre, Ross Macdonald and Agatha Christie. David L. Ulin, former book critic for the Los Angeles Times, says the Rawlins novels are fine mysteries but Mosley goes beyond the genre.

DAVID ULIN: I think he’s operating in the tradition of writers like Balzac or Dickens who wrote sort of broad social novels with large casts of characters moving across a variety of classes and social spheres and also in which the city, Paris or London or in Walter’s case Los Angeles, becomes a character in its own right.

BATES: In the Easy novels, the city is important. The people, even more so. Mosley said he had a very specific objective. He wanted to write about the lives he saw around him growing up in LA. It was part passion, part mission.

MOSLEY: One of the things that I understood is that you don’t exist unless you’re in the literature, and that doesn’t include history books. And the black people in California, they just weren’t remembered. They – nobody was telling their stories.

BATES: Fortunately, there were stories aplenty. As a boy, Mosley listened to his father and his father’s friends talk over backyard beers about politics, music and finessing the city’s notoriously racist police. Those stories helped shape the Easy novels and enabled Mosley to paint a vivid portrait of LA’s evolving black community. Critic David Ulin says the book spanned a critical period in LA’s evolution.

ULIN: Many, many things changed from ’48 to ’68 in Los Angeles and particularly in terms of race relations, racial culture, racial divisions, et cetera, which are at the essence of what the Rawlins books are tracing.

BATES: The novels move from the pre-civil rights era to the late ’60s, when Easy has a steady day job but still occupies much of his time seeking answers for people who can’t or won’t go to the police. By “Little Scarlet,” the ninth book, Easy has become a private eye and the Watts riots have reduced his old neighborhood to ash. But after “Blonde Faith,” the eleventh book, Mosley was stuck. The novel ended with Easy driving off a Malibu cliff. Fans were devastated. Mosley didn’t see a way around it.

MOSLEY: I had no future for Easy, and so I decided I was going to stop writing him. I didn’t think he was really dead, but I did think I was going to stop writing him.

BATES: And he did. For six years, Easy was just gone. Then Walter Mosley had an epiphany.

MOSLEY: My father and his family’s story had kind of come to an end at that point for me. And it was now my story. And if Easy was going to go on, I would have to put down these other people’s interpretations of the world and use my own.

BATES: Which is exactly what he did.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BATES: In 2013, Easy returns in “Little Green,” a story about a black teen who disappears into a hippie commune after a bad trip. The setting was the legendary Sunset Strip. It was a time when disaffected youth, activists, runaways and dropouts turned Sunset Boulevard into a roiling scene each night. Mosley saw it all with his own eager teenaged eyes.

MOSLEY: Ten thousand hippies every night are marching barefoot up and down the street, getting high, talking about new philosophies and religions and notions and trying to create a new culture as they say, a counterculture.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “PURPLE HAZE”)

JIMI HENDRIX: (Singing) Excuse me while I kiss the sky.

BATES: In this book, “Charcoal Joe,” Easy has settled into life. He’s the co-owner of a detective agency. His two adopted children are doing well, and he has a fiance, a beautiful flight attendant. But when a black Stanford graduate student goes missing, the kid’s uncle, a feared gangster known as Charcoal Joe, asks Easy for help. Of course complications ensue. Part of Easy’s attraction is his humanity. Old school private eyes did what they wanted, consequences be damned. Mosley says Easy doesn’t have that option.

MOSLEY: You arrest, you know, Sam Spade and he just says, well, you know, I’ll just stay in jail. I don’t have to answer you. But if you have a child at home that needs to be fed and protected, you have to figure a way to answer that policeman’s question and also get yourself out of jail.

BATES: The next Easy installment will probably focus on the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It shouldn’t be long. Mosley’s quick and prolific.

MOSLEY: I only write three hours a day, but I write three hours every day, 365 days a year. I just, like, write and write and write.

BATES: Which makes Walter Mosley’s legion of fans happy because now they can just read and read and read. Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.

(via npr.org)

Walter Mosley: ‘Donald Trump is a lazy, spoilt guy’

As his latest detective novel drops, the writer muses on Obama, the Clintons, and how his own father is like his celebrated protagonist, Easy Rawlins

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton flashed a copy of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress and proclaimed the writer his favorite novelist, shooting Mosley to mainstream fame. Now Mosley’s legendary Los Angeles detective Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins, played by Denzel Washington in a 1995 film adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress, is celebrating his 25th anniversary in Mosley’s new novel, Charcoal Joe.

“Bill was a really smart guy. He knew my books better than I did,” Mosley says in his soothing baritone, talking to me from St Louis on Charcoal Joe’s release tour. “He read them very closely. We were sitting at dinner one day and he was talking about how the books were about migration. Clinton was talking about how these characters had moved, and in that new place had created a place of power.” Mosley says that he strongly disagrees with some of Clinton’s policies, though he remains a supporter.

In fact, Mosley believes Toni Morrison’s contention that Clinton was America’s first black president, partly because Clinton grew up poor and disadvantaged, was on the money: “Working-class, southern, very close to being black … deeply influenced by black culture.”

But he is fonder of the country’s actual first black president. “I know Barack Obama must really be virtuous. I know the Republicans have hired 10,000 detectives to find one thing he did wrong in his life. And they haven’t done it in eight years. I’m amazed.” Obama’s legacy is gathering momentum, Mosley says. “He’s been the most clearly committed president to bring together the disparate factions of American democracy, to form and forge a better America and a better world. He failed at that, but he really tried. He’s a black man who got elected as president, twice. That’s outrageous.

“Obama’s really smart. Obama’s attacks on Trump are incredibly eloquent. It’s bad enough that we’re running around saying Muslims did this, Muslims did that, like it’s [all Muslims are] one guy. It’s one isolated group in the Middle East [Isis] that we created through our warmongering.”

Mosley also believes black people will mobilise to elect Hillary. “Hillary is not Bill. They’re two different people. I don’t think the identity is the same. [But] very few people of color in the United States see Donald Trump as a valid option. Bill supporting Hillary, coming out and getting out the vote, will be very useful.”

He agrees Trump’s campaign symbolises Philip Roth’s old contention that American reality out-fictionalises fiction. “It’s hard to believe that this person is running for president. I don’t believe Donald Trump has enough awareness of anything outside of himself to actually be racist. You actually have to think about other people in order to be racist. I don’t think Trump is capable of that. He’s a lazy, spoilt guy.”

Mosley evangelists now range from Samuel L Jackson to Junot Díaz, the latter of whom once called Mosley “a national treasure” in the Austin Chronicle. His 50 books include the political nonfiction tracts 12 Steps Towards Political Revelation, What Next: A Memoir Towards World Peace, and Workin’ on the Chain Gang. His best known work – his 14 Easy Rawlins novels – raise the issue of police brutality. “I’ve been writing about it for 25 years. For 450 years, the police ran rampant on black individuals, black souls. They would attack them, beat them, kill them … if you don’t have a camera image, then you don’t know what is happenin’.”

Mosley’s complaints, like Easy’s, include America’s prison-industrial complex and “war on drugs”. “It’s ridiculous,” he exclaims wearily. “You have millions of people in prison in America, and three times that number cycling in and out of prisons … some guy when he was 28 years old who was selling some meth somewhere. Alright, that’s not so good, but … how much money do I have to pay to keep them incarcerated?”

In fact, Easy’s post-second world war migration from southern poverty to stylish private detective in Los Angeles, fighting for “for justice in an unjust world”, echoes Mosley’s father Leroy’s journey from Louisiana to southern California. Leroy remains the 64-year-old New Yorker’s biggest inspiration. “My father was a great guy. He had an indomitable spirit. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo.” Leroy cooked their family’s dinner every night. “Because my father’s entire life was so hard, he self-medicated, in a lot of different ways,” Mosley adds. “He loved cooking; it always made him feel better.”

Leroy Mosley also had the playful sense of humour that his son displays in our conversation. Mosley won a Grammy writing liner notes for Richard Pryor collection And It’s Deep Too! “Richard Pryor was a great thinker. He really understood society, and he understood it through his own pain,” Mosley says. “Richard Pryor’s politics are always about love … His relationship to the crack pipe and Jim Brown trying to pull him out of that misery. I don’t really know any contemporary comedians who get as close to the bone as Richard Pryor.”

Mosley himself is a former alcoholic and cigarette smoker. What did he replace those habits with? “Meditation.”

In Charcoal Joe, Mosley’s empathy toward the sex workers Augusta Tryman and Lolo Bowles is striking. American capitalism has “enslaved all workers”, Mosley says, energized by the subject of politics. “All I know is when you’re in America, there is no retirement. You are going to work until you die. I was talking toKareem Abdul- Jabbar last night, and he was saying that his grandfather was working in construction at a big building downtown, and he died at work, of colon cancer.

“Now, you know how much colon cancer hurts? And he was at work! At the very end of colon cancer. He just fell dead. That’s where we are again.”

(via theguardian.com)

Walter Mosley Refuses to Be Boxed In

The prolific author of the Easy Rawlins series writes what about whatever he wants, even if he has to switch publishers to get it done.

BY: RONDA RACHA PENRICE

Posted: July 10, 2016

Walter Mosley’s website lists books he’s written. Right now there are 48: 43 fiction and five nonfiction. And later this year, he’ll add to the list—a highly intellectual book titled, Folding the Red Into the Black: Developing a Viable Untopia for Human Survival in the 21st Century, which is due out in October. “It’s a repudiation of both capitalism and socialism on another level,” he explains.

Charcoal Joe, his most recent work of fiction, which came out last month, is perhaps more familiar territory for most of us. It is Mosley’s latest from his Easy Rawlins mystery series. Back in 1995, Denzel Washington played Easy, and Don Cheadle, in a breakout role, played Mouse on the big screen in Devil in a Blue Dress. The last book in the series, Rose Gold, was published two years ago, and Rawlins is picking up from there. It’s Los Angeles in the late 1960s, where race and life intersect. Mosley has visited Rawlins’ life for 14 books now, and he hasn’t felt stuck.

“When we started off, he was 19 in Gone Fishin’, which was published by Black Classics Press [owned by Paul Coates, father of Ta-Nehisi], and then he was 28 in the first mystery, and now he’s 48 in the current mystery. So it starts off in 1939 and goes into 1948, and now he’s in 1968. Not only is he older; the world has changed. For black people, the difference between 1939 and 1968 is magnificent,” Mosley explains.

As a writer, Mosley, 64, has refused to be boxed in. The Los Angeles native, who has lived in New York most of his adult life, loves being both prolific and versatile. “Writing Charcoal Joe was lots of fun, so I’m happy about it,” he says. “But I’m also happy about the science fiction book I just wrote. I wrote a one-off of a mystery novel recently called Detective, Heal Thyself.” He also has a new “semisurrealist memoir,” The Graphomaniac’s Primer, which is only available on Black Classics Press.

Ask him if he has themes that ring true for most of his work and Mosley responds, “I just write books.” He also admits, “I’m sure there are many similarities in my books, but I don’t know what they are. I know that I write about black male heroes mostly. That’s what I do. It wasn’t a decision. I wrote five books and I said, ‘Wow, they’re all about black male heroes; that’s interesting,’ and I wrote some more books and they were still about black male heroes. I was like, ‘Wow, that must be what I’m doing.’”

Black men, he says, do get represented in the mainstream these days, but “there’s not one representation. There are a few and they are very powerful. There’s hip-hop,” he offers. “It’s as much modern culture as blues was to our culture a hundred years ago.

“There’s Barack Obama,” he continues, “which is this giant thing. There’s sports and, to some degree, Hollywood, but there is sports. The major heroes in the major sports are black.”

Does the Black Lives Matter movement affect his writing? “I’ve been writing about it the last 30 years,” he quips. “It’s about black lives and they all matter,” he says of his work.

“I think it’s very important for the audience to identify with the characters in a sense deeper than they’re victims because the idea of thinking of yourself as a victim is just problematic by itself,” he continues. “To think you’re a victim, that’s a problem, because really, you’re a hero.” Ultimately, “who is the person inside, and what are they thinking and how do they feel?” is what matters most.

Despite his incredible productivity and considerable track record—which includes plays (Lift, which premiered at Crossroads Theatre Co. in 2014), erotica (2006’s Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel) and science fiction (1998’s Blue Light)—Mosley says that the publishing process is not any easier for him, even decades later.

“The publishers, they’re very hard on me,” he sighs. “I have to change publishers every few years because all they want me to do is write mysteries. When I wrote Debbie Doesn’t Do It Anymore [about a porn star who leaves the industry], I had an argument with my editor for nine months.” The publisher wanted him to write noir, but Mosley refused. Eventually they published it the way he intended, but Mosley doesn’t delude himself.

“He is not going to accept another book like that from me, so I’m going to have to find another publisher for the next one like that,” Mosley explains. He is honest enough not to pretend that he has more say-so than he does.

“Power,” he explains, “I can make him publish it. I don’t have that, so what I have is I just have to find another publisher. That’s what you do. You just go to somebody else.”

From experience and his work in political theory, Mosley knows that he has it better than most. “The people who build your buildings don’t live in those buildings. The people who grow your food don’t share in your wealth. The people who make your clothes don’t get to own your clothes. That’s a fact. So OK, now I’m accepting the fact, and how does that change? My book Folding Red Into Black talks about that change, but still, it’s just very difficult.”

A pure artist not swayed by fame and praise, Mosley is quite serious about not keeping track of public opinion. “I don’t know what people think about my work, and as a rule, I don’t listen. I’m going to do my work anyway, regardless of what people think,” he vows. And that’s whether anyone is in line to publish it or not.

(via theroot.com)

Good Day Book Club: Charcoal Joe

NEW YORK (FOX 5 NY) – Author Walter Mosley has written 52 books that have been translated into 23 languages.

The prolific writer and the author behind the wildly popular mystery books, ‘Easy Rawlins,’ is out with his 14th installment of the series, ‘Charcoal Joe.’

“I like this book. I am very happy about it. This one is a good mystery. All the major characters from the Easy Rawlins sphere are in the book,” said Mosley.

Best-selling author Walter Mosley “I was not a good student”

Despite his success over the past several decades, Mosley’s rise to the top did not come in a traditional fashion.

“I’m not a big fan of research. I was not a good student and school is research, right? It turns out I am a good writer, but I did not start writing until I was 34. I got published when I was 38,” said Mosley.

The former computer programmer was sitting at work when he wrote: “on hot sticky days in southern Louisiana the fire ants swarm.”

The line was the beginning of his fiction writing career.

“I started writing. I met some people. One guy gave my book to his agent and he said let’s do it,” said Mosley.

Fans can meet the writer during the International Thriller Writers conference taking place at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan through July 9. For more information, visit THRILLERFEST.COM.

(via fox5ny.com)

How Orlando media coverage helps Trump! Walter Mosley

Political columnist Matt Rozsa opines on the impact of media coverage of the Orlando massacre–he says it’s helping Donald Trump. PLUS: comic Negin Farsad, with her new book How To Make White People Laugh. PLUS! Walter Mosley talks about his new Easy Rawlins mystery. With host Kris Welch.

(via kpfa.org)

5 New Books to Read this Week: June 14, 2016

Every Wednesday, we here at Criminal Element will put together a list of Staff Picks of the books that published the day before—sharing the ones that we are looking forward to reading the most!

Check back every Wednesday and see what we’re reading for the week!

Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley’s indelible detective Easy Rawlins is back, with a new detective agency and a new mystery to solve.

 Picking up where his last adventures in Rose Gold left off in L.A. in the late 1960s, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins finds his life in transition. He’s ready—finally—to propose to his girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, and start a life together. And he’s taken the money he got from the Rose Gold case and, together with two partners, Saul Lynx and Tinsford “Whisper” Natly, has started a new detective agency. But, inevitably, a case gets in the way: Easy’s friend Mouse introduces him to Rufus Tyler, a very old man everyone calls Charcoal Joe. Joe’s friend’s son, Seymour (young, bright, top of his class in physics at Stanford), has been arrested and charged with the murder of a white man from Redondo Beach. Joe tells Easy he will pay and pay well to see this young man exonerated, but seeing as how Seymour literally was found standing over the man’s dead body at his cabin home, and considering the racially charged motives seemingly behind the murder, that might prove to be a tall order.

Between his new company, a heart that should be broken but is not, a whole raft of new bad guys on his tail, and a bad odor that surrounds Charcoal Joe, Easy has his hands full, his horizons askew, and his life in shambles around his feet.

(via Criminal Element)

More ‘Easy’ detective work

Crime writer Walter Mosley to appear at Kepler’s to talk about newest mystery

by Michael Berry / Palo Alto Weekly

Life rarely goes smoothly for Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins. Chaos, racism and tragedy are part of the package of being a fictional African-American private detective in post-war Los Angeles.

Acclaimed crime novelist Walter Mosley has chronicled Easy’s ups and downs in 14 novels,

beginning in 1990 with “Devil in a Blue Dress.” The series starts in the Forties, but in the latest installment, “Charcoal Joe,” Mosley has brought his signature character up to 1968.

Mosley will appear in conversation with T. Geronimo Johnson, author of “Welcome to Braggsville,” at Kepler’s Books on June 16. The event is in partnership with 100 Black Men of the Bay Area and the NORCAL branch of Mystery Writers of America (MWA).

The author of 50 books, Mosley is a native of Los Angeles and resides in New York. In April, he was designated a Grand Master by the MWA, the first writer of color to be so recognized since the award was established in 1955.

Reached by phone in Los Angeles and asked about what accounts for Rawlins’ enduring appeal, Mosley paused before answering.

“I would say Easy represents one of the primary characters in the American drama of the 20th century. But he hasn’t been allowed entree onto the stage. He’s one of those people who live there in the background — they’re serving you a drink or sweeping the street — but they never become anywhere near central in the drama unfolding,” Mosley said.

“These are people you don’t know about. There are many people like that in America, and Easy is one of them.”

In “Charcoal Joe,” Easy has some money at his disposal for the first time in a long while, allowing him to send his adopted daughter to a private school and to set up a new detective agency for himself and two partners. At the urging of Mouse, his dangerous childhood friend, Easy reluctantly agrees to meet with Rufus Tyler, an old convict known to everyone as “Charcoal Joe.” Joe has a friend whose physicist son, Seymour Brathwaite, has been arrested for the murder of two white men. Joe wants Easy to exonerate the young man, a request with repercussions that will bring the detective to the brink of death and back once again.

Mosley said his father was a “black orphan from Louisiana”; and his mother “a Jew from the Bronx.” His father’s stories of life in postwar L.A. informed the early Easy novels, but there came a time when Mosley fully intended to kill off his detective. In 2007, “Blonde Faith” ended with Rawlins’ car plunging down a ravine, presumably taking the detective to his death. “I realized it was because the baton was being passed from my father’s life and his experience into mine,” Mosley said. “I really couldn’t put my father in my present, the present of 1968, 1969 and 1970.”

Nevertheless, six years later, Mosley resurrected Easy in “Little Green.” The author has since maintained a steady rhythm in producing further adventures.

“I find that whole period, from ’65 to ’80 to be — I don’t want to say more interesting than any other period [because I don’t want to sound like people who think their experience is the only one — but it’s one that I know very well. In writing about it, I’m exploring myself.”

He’s also exploring issues of race in America. The prejudice Easy faces in the novels hasn’t gone away. Mosley said that readers tell him, in the wake of the violent deaths of black men such as Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Freddy Gray, “Look what’s happening to black people. It seems to be happening every day now.”

His response?

“The answer is, ‘Well, yeah, it is happening every day, and it has happened every day for the past 400 years.’ ”

What’s changed, Mosley said, is technology, which allows anyone with a smartphone to capture events as they happen.

“You only believe it because you’re seeing that video,” he said.

Mosley isn’t content to remain within a single literary genre. In addition to a second mystery series featuring modern-day PI Leonid McGill, Mosley has published mainstream literary fiction, science fiction, erotica and essays about race and politics. Although all his mysteries address political issues, there are times when he puts aside the trappings of the genre. “I have a book coming out in September, ‘Folding the Red into the Black,’ a criticism of capitalism and socialism, both. I’m not going to write a mystery about that. Trying to figure out who did the crimes – the capitalist or the socialist? That would be silly.”

Nevertheless, Mosley acknowledges, “I don’t think anyone wants me writing anything but mysteries. [But I write what I want to write.

“It’s not caprice that makes me write these kinds of things,” he said of his work outside the crime genre. He points to his “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” which deals with dementia, as an example that needed no whodunit hook. “You can write a mystery about dementia, but it’s almost like you having to add an extra novel,” he said. “It’s like putting a hat on a hat. You don’t need a hat on a hat; you just need the hat.”

As for his writing regimen, he makes it sound simple. “I wake up every day, and I write for three hours,” he said. “That’s the whole definition of my writing life. It’s never changed.”

Asked whether the task of writing has become easier as he’s matured, Mosley countered, “It’s like weight lifting, right? Has the lifting gotten easier? No, the weights have just gotten heavier. If weight lifting gets easier, you’re not doing it right.”

Mosley is prolific and maintains a consistent schedule, but his approach to writing is anything but lockstep. There might be another Easy Rawlins novel at some point, but the details are extremely sketchy.

“I met a writer the other day who says he has his whole series planned out,” Mosley said. “He knows the last line of each novel – sixteen books.Wow! That’s ridiculous! Me, I just meander.”