Walter Mosley's Blog, page 9

Walter Mosley: Watts Riots ‘Paved The Way For A Lot Of Change’

Author Walter Mosley in front of his childhood home in the LA neighborhood of Watts. He’s standing with his father.

In this season of anger in many black communities that are reacting to police brutality, we’re remembering the largest urban riot of the civil rights era.

Fifty years ago this week in Los Angeles, the African-American neighborhood of Watts exploded after a young black man was arrested for drunken driving. His mother scuffled with officers and was also arrested, all of which drew an increasingly hostile crowd.

Novelist Walter Mosley was a boy at the time, growing up in Watts. He says of that time, “It’s a hot summer day, you know, in 1965 … and people are fed up with the last 500 years of oppression, and so there was a riot. You couldn’t have predicted it. It was just people said, ‘OK, today, I’ve had enough.’ ”

He shared his memories of the riots on Morning Edition. These highlights include some of the on-air interview, and some excerpts that did not air.

Interview Highlights

Remembering the first night of riots

When I was a kid — I was 12 years old — I belonged to an organization called the Afro-American Traveling Actors Association, and we did civil rights plays. The main night of that riot, the apex of the riot, we went down to the little theater on Santa Barbara — now called Martin Luther King — to do our play. But nobody came, because people were rioting. Either they were rioting, or they were in their houses, hiding from rioting. And we had to drive out, and driving out, we drove through the riots. It was an amazing sight.

And when I got home, my father was sitting in a chair in the living room — which he never did — drinking vodka and just staring. And I said, “Dad, what’s wrong?” He says, “You know, Walter, I want to be out there. I want to be out there, rioting and shooting. But I know it’s wrong. I want to do it, but I can’t do it.” And he was just … it tore him up, the emotions it brought out in him.

Most people didn’t riot, of course. … But everybody understood the anger and the rage, that the police could clamp down on you at any moment. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty.

On his father’s reaction

I don’t think there was a black man or woman in America who didn’t understand why it was happening. Most people didn’t riot, of course. … But everybody understood the anger and the rage, that the police could clamp down on you at any moment. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty. What matters is, if you were a white guy over in Beverly Hills, they wouldn’t be clamping down on you like that; they wouldn’t respond to you like that.

It’s the same thing that happens today; it’s just that we have social media. So, you know, a woman gets killed in Texas, and we say, “Well, why was she arrested?”; “Why was she in jail?”; “How did she die?” These are questions only people in the black community asked a long time ago, because we knew it, but nobody else knew it, because nobody covered it. … And, I want to add, as much as black people understood it, the white community was completely ignorant of anything going on in the black community. And it was such a shock, it scared them for the next five years.

On whether the riots scared him personally

I was scared, you know, because, No. 1, it was an interracial group. So there were a couple of white people in the car, and they were like, on the floor. And then you would see things, you know, people jumping out of windows. They were looting. I saw one guy just lying out on the street. I don’t know what happened to him. The police were driving by, four deep in the car with their shotguns held up, but they weren’t shooting. They were just passing through. You could feel the rage. You could feel that civilization at that moment was in tatters. I was nervous, but I didn’t know enough to be really, really scared. Which was lucky for me.

On how the unrest affected the neighborhood

It hurt the community in some way. But, you know, when all the stores in your community are owned by white people, and you burn down those stores, even though you’re hurt in a way, you’ve made a statement. Those people paved the way for a lot of change in the rest of America. And so, whatever was lost, I believe a lot more was gained. Because it was just expressing that anger. You’d ask, “Well, how many black people feel like this?” And, well, 99 percent of them feel like this, and another 1 percent are really mad. That would be the answer.

(via NPR.org)

BLK Book List: Nothing Says Summer Like a Good Read

Nothing says summer like curling up on the porch or the beach like a good read. There are plenty of new books by black authors, and great ones you might have missed. Just find yourself a cozy place, in the homestretch of summer to settle in and dip into the reading stash. What are you reading and loving this summer?

If you are a Walter Mosley fan, you know about Easy Rawlins. But this summer check out his Leonid McGill series. The newest book is And Sometimes I Wonder About You, but if you want to settle into a series you can’t put down, start at the beginning with the first book, The Long Fall.

(via NBCNews.com)

Patter and Patois

by WALTER MOSLEY

New York Times Sunday Book Review

Literary Landscapes

I am what you might call a grandchild of Louisiana. My father was born there as were many of his friends and relatives. Most of my neighbors in Los Angeles came from there too — black rural folk who had traveled west through southern Texas on their migration to escape the South’s heavy hail of racial hatred. They came to California for the tattered shelter of mocking freedom that the Golden State had to offer people like them, poor people willing to work hard.

My father and his family brought the Deep South with them — barbecues and gumbos, dirty rice and soul food. They brought their strong accents and multiplicity of tongues, their histories from Africa, France, Native America mingled with generous drams of so-called white blood, European blood.

Louisiana flowed in that blood and across those tongues. Louisiana — a state made famous by Walt Whitman and Tennessee Williams, Ernest Gaines and Arna Bontemps, Kate Chopin and Anne Rice. These writers, from many eras, races and genres, took the voices of the people and distilled them into the passionate, almost desperate, stories that opened readers to a new kind of suffering and exultation.

I could talk about any or all of these writers with respect and admiration. But my relationship to the literature of Louisiana goes deeper, back to my childhood. Almost everyone in Watts came from Louisiana or Texas. They’d gather around kitchen tables, eating raw oysters swimming in Tabasco sauce, telling stories of the old days when death shadowed their every step.

There was the story of Alberta Jackson, bitten by a harbor rat and saved by a backwoods auntie who used the sliced-open body of a special toad to draw the toxins from the wound. There was my cousin Helen, who took my father’s knife intending to kill the man he was getting ready to fight. She swung at the man but stabbed my father by mistake. Hearing the story again, 20 years later, my father laughed and laughed at the memory.

Another cousin, Willie, got a job as a porter on the Panama Limited that traveled between Chicago and New Orleans. When he got his first check, he proudly told his mother he was going to use it to buy a new pair of pants. “She socked me so hard,” he told us one night, “that by the time I came to she had already cashed the check and spent it at the general store on Bywater Street.”

They talked of sugar cane fields and light-skinned cousins who would stay once a year in fancy white hotels without getting caught. They told of lynchings — and retribution too. They talked about Africa, Italy, France and Germany, where their men had been shipped off to fight for freedom.

That war was won, but the conflicts at home, in Louisiana and Texas, continued to rage. Even up North, where black labor was vital, black skin was despised. My father told me that he returned home after the war to find that most of his neighbors had died, whereas most of the black men that shipped off to the largest conflagration in human history had survived. The tragedy of war played second fiddle to the experience of my people, most of whom were born near some bayou.

These people created an orally transmitted literary life out of a soil drenched by the blood of slaves and ex-slaves, Creoles, Cajuns and the French. Louisiana is my literary grandsire, the source of the content and dialect of my early stories. It is no surprise that, even though I was born in Los Angeles and then moved to New York, my first words in fiction were, “On hot sticky days in Southern Louisiana the fire ants swarmed” — or that the first character I created was Easy Rawlins.

Easy was born in early-20th-century New Iberia and knighted by the hard knocks of racism and poverty. His life maps the progress of a man struggling to maintain not only his personal dignity but also the nobility of his people, their inimitable tongues and stories, the fights and failures and victories that left their souls blasted and their bodies scarred.

Louisiana is my ancestor and the great mother, the Mississippi River, bore him slowly, out of sediment and over eons. For most of that time, the river has transported, fed and terrorized its residents. Hurricane Katrina was only the most recent catastrophe to challenge these people.

Recently I went down to New Orleans to accept an honorary Ph.D. from Tulane University. While hanging out around the Warehouse District I was reminded of how deeply my roots run among these people — the music in the accent and the mixtures of races, classes and cultures that appear to flow together as seamlessly as the currents of the Mississippi.

I met a man who told me how the hurricane had forced him to choose between his wife and his mother. He ended up staying in New Orleans during Katrina to protect his mother, who refused to evacuate, while his wife and young daughter made their way to safety. Everyone survived though the marriage faltered. But the man did not lament his loss. He said his teenage daughter comes down every summer to live with him, and she shares her dreams of a future in medicine or in the military. He explained to me how important it was for her to have a life and how brilliant she was, how talented.

Listening to him, and how the music of my family pulsed through his words, I remembered why I had loved the stories of my upbringing — those stories, no matter how brutal, were told by people who loved me, who wanted to share with me their experience. Like that man I met, my family made their way through the tragedies that gave form to the modern world so that I could tell their tales of heroism; tales that languished for centuries in shadows and darkness and enforced silence.

Sunblocked: A Sunday afternoon in New Orleans, 1941. Credit Marion Post Wolcott/Corbis

For me there is little difference between the blazing sun, the nighttime jazz, the human flaws, the bound novels or the oral tales of this heroic land. It all comes together in my heart. The black man whose mother survived and whose child now thrives expressed a loving pride, an endurance and bravery, that has been kept a secret from the rest of America, even from my own people, sometimes.

This is the literature of Louisiana. It has a beating heart and a spring in its step, eyes that watch the world and a real voice that reverberates in the word “home.”

New Orleans, Lake Charles, New Iberia and a hundred other towns and parishes are my home. They hold my history, wait for my return, remember the stories of voodoo and fine cuisine, the Gulf of Mexico and a road that brings us back again and again.

I am frequently asked to name the writers that have most influenced me. It’s a question that the reader hopes will illuminate the common ground between us. But the firmament that connects readers and writers is older than the literate world; it goes all the way back to those stories that your relatives and family friends told when you were a child who saw writing as funny-looking chicken scratches on paper better suited for finger painting, when storytelling still had a voice and timbre, love and warning, a warm touch and lots of laughter.

Everyday life in Louisiana is rife with wonderful storytellers, some of whom have read very little, if at all. Guys hanging out on street corners; old aunties who are the repositories of all the stories of the ancestors — they are all writers of a sort and part of a powerful oral tradition. Homer and some heroic poets were illiterate. Certain forms of poetry came into being because the repetition made the verses easy to remember without having to write them down. This is the germ of literary appreciation: when children are regaled with tales of wonder — how Uncle George survived when he fell down a well in eastern Tennessee; or the strange foods Aunt Loretta encountered in Peru and Paris.

Later, they begin reading on their own — “Treasure Island” and “Little Women,” “Winnie-the-Pooh” (my personal favorite) and “Peter Pan.” Reading becomes internalized, and its power, for some, is so great that the experience rivals and echoes the upheavals of the biology and instincts of adolescence. Some young men and women find all the secrets and dangers that their bodies whisper about between the covers of books. The wrenching passion of love, the fear and heroism of war, and how lonely these hungers and dreads are in children’s often isolated and alienated experience of life.

One by one, these books form a chorus of trusted voices that accompany readers into adulthood. When others succumb to the cacophony of modern life, readers can rely on personalized internal guides that cause them to pause and wonder and question — often at just the right moments. Their reading becomes a virtual map, an internal GPS system that guides them away from the prefabricated and canned production line that so many are shunted toward.

I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I’m saying it helps. Artists, musicians, naturally empathetic children and people born to the beat of a different drum often embark on more original lives than the Company Store wants for us. They’re naturally more resistant to the forces of big business and big government.

But readers don’t have to be all that special. They have the guidance of a thousand stories to help them make their way. They are never alone. They are equipped to challenge (or ignore) the expectations laid down by standardized testing, fifth-grade bullies and parents that gaze upon the present-day world with eyes that only see the past. They can envision alternatives to economic and political systems that have no heart, art or true ­humanity.

Most readers stop here. They gather their ever-widening circle of favorite writers and read and reread their beloved books. But some are compelled to become writers. The stories they were told or read kindle an obsession that cries out to be heard. Like minor gods, they rummage in the mud looking to make characters with whom to explore their dreams, and nightmares.

I read the other day that New Orleans was the best city in the nation for people looking for jobs in creative fields. This didn’t surprise me. It is a city of artists, musicians, storytellers and dancers. Its architecture is like the miles-long fresco of a big party that will never end. Street paintings everywhere celebrate the color and creed of creativity if not creation. Since Katrina, New Orleans feels even more vibrant, even more alive. And this too is a testament to a people who are victorious in their survival; people who are not only the grist for the story but who are telling it, living it, sharing it, a living literature.

Walter Mosley is the author of more than 50 books, including the Easy Rawlins mystery series, and the recipient of an O. Henry Award, a Grammy and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. His most recent novel is “And Sometimes I Wonder About You.”

Buzzed Books #29: And Sometimes I Wonder About You

by John King

I am primarily a reader of literary fiction. It is where the joys and the fun of reading tend to be for me. Like many literary readers, I have a deep, complicated affection for hard-boiled detective fiction, à la Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The blunt brutality, bold psychology, and flourishes of purple style are compressed into a lovely textual cocktail by the form of the mystery, the plot that is itself a chase after a question mark. Characterization is both impressionistic and elusive—precisely as elusive as the mystery, usually.

One of the hallmarks of contemporary detective fiction is the shortness of chapters, which makes the form even more compressed. This would seem to deepen the challenge of the genre even more than classic hard-boiled detective fiction—or highlight the genre author’s flaws.

If the plot is not elusive enough, then the reader—this reader, anyway—feels cheated, inhabiting an imaginative world that is too neat, more lazy than minimalist. That is how I felt reading Carl Hiassen’s Skin Tight, a novel in which the characterization from start to finish seemed, well, skin deep. With such short chapters, the world doesn’t cohere into much more than a farce mocking the human condition, and being a literary reader, I would rather go with true masters at that: Beckett, Ionesco, Kafka, Gogol, or (today) John Henry Fleming, Alyssa Nutting, and Gary Shteyngart—writers who are not above the characters and humanities and realities they mock.

I don’t want my detective fiction to be a guilty pleasure of glib storytelling. I could watch reality television if I had such an appetite.

In more conscientious hands, contemporary detective fiction works like narrative poetry: emotions and thoughts are conveyed evocatively, with the aim to make each unit quickly digestible while still retaining the surprise of reading. This is something I learned with Terry Cronin’s Skinvestigator series, featuring a dermatologist (skin, again) who consults for the Miami police.

Cronin’s chapters do hasten by, but are so much more vivid, believable, and memorable than Hiassen’s.

More recently, I have read the last three “Easy Rawlins” novels of Walter Mosley. These stories are neo-noir, lively throwbacks to Hammett and Chandler, as told from the point of view from Easy Rawlins, an African-American P.I. in Los Angeles. His exploits stretch over thirteen novels. Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) is set in 1948, during the actual era of original hard-boiled detective fiction itself. The series has expanded to thirteen books, most recently Rose Gold (2014) set in 1967, which I had the pleasure of discussing with the author back on episode 136 of the podcast).

The “Easy Rawlins” novels I’ve read are companionable, addictive stories. Mosley uses the different time periods to reflect on the existential plight of his detective, and in those I’ve read the imaginative world features a populace of recurring characters and several enigmatic plots that spin and spin, eventually intersecting one another. These characters have such long histories, yet Mosley can keep those histories as context without losing momentum. And Rawlins is a philosopher and is capable of great internal monologues as he recounts each story.

Mosley also writes contemporary detective fiction. And Sometimes I Worry About You is the fifth Leonid McGill novel. Being so fond of Easy Rawlins, I was thrilled to find that I liked this McGill novel just as much as Easy, despite how very different these characters are.

In the hands of Mosley, the compressed form of these short chapters sparkle—with up to three “case” plots, not to mention the tangled conflicts with his family and his lovers. It is sort of like reading a great sonnet sequence.

In his first case, Leonid finds himself representing a femme fatale who stole a mobster’s engagement ring, and she is a seductress whose lust Leonid cannot entirely resist. In his second case, he is trying to extricate his son from his undercover work for an underworld boss who uses children as his work force. In his third case, he represents a stripper whose boyfriend was killed over her accidental possession of a wealthy family’s secret heirloom.

Besides his family—his unfaithful and severely depressed wife, his long absent and infuriating father, and his wayward, loving children—Leonid also has a memorable cast of friends and associates that make this New York City seem believable, and meaningfully complex.

With all of these moving parts, one might think that the stories might have to be superficial, but the first-person voice of the novel carries all of these elements almost effortlessly. Mosley makes the whole thing flow and offers such surprises of characterization and such wonderful turns of thought along the way. There are passages like this, for example:

From time to time there’s a Rembrandt on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, twenty inches wide and maybe two feet high. It’s an oil rendering of a peasant girl who is looking beyond you into a history of pain and loss. She’s beautiful and you could tell that the artist and many others had fooled themselves that they could love her and that that love would be a good thing. But the longer you sit watching those haunted and haunting eyes, the more concepts like love and beauty drain away; all that’s left, if you look at that painting long enough, is the awareness of the hopelessness that eats at the human soul.

Leonid thinks about boxing, violence, family, love, truth, and manages to be both a merciless investigator and a man at the mercy of his own desires and needs. While Leonid can out-strategize all of his foes by his ability to read their characters, his own character is something he cannot quite read. And it is to Mosley’s credit that this lapse is so compelling.

Walter Mosley comes to Liverpool in Transatlantic 175 week

Acclaimed American author is Writing on the Wall guest as part of One Magnificent City

American author Walter Mosley is making a rate UK appearance when he comes to Liverpool next week as part of the Writing on the Wall festival.

The 63-year-old is making a special trip from his home in New York to take part in ‘An Evening With’ event at Liverpool Town Hall as part of the American Dreams programme to celebrate Cunard’s 175th anniversary through the One Magnificent City programme.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been to Liverpool,” says the man himself. “I’ve been to a lot of cities in England and Ireland in general, but never Liverpool.”

So what has he got planned for the ‘evening with’?

“I have absolutely no idea!” Walter laughs. “I have a book (And Sometimes I Wonder About You), so probably I’ll read a little bit from it. But I never read very much you know, I love talking to people, so I’ll talk to them.

“There are a lot of writers you know who will talk about their books, and they’re trying to sell their books. And it’s not that I don’t want people to buy my books, but the idea of selling them, if I was selling stuff I’d be in real estate and I’d be rich.

“Instead I write books and if you want to buy it that’s good, and if you don’t well that’s OK.

“But then I’m very opinionated, I talk about other things.”

According to Writing on the Wall, I say, the event will explore a shared literary heritage and transatlantic experiences of race, class and equality.

“That’s easy,” he says. “I can do that in my sleep, have that conversation. Race, class and gender, and religion in today’s world.

“We’re connected to the whole world but still our experiences are very isolated, because they’re controlled by where the information comes from.

“Everybody else is bad and we’re really good. I think everybody in the world thinks that.”

He may not like to read too much from his books, but he has enough to choose from. The prolific author, who only started writing in his 30s, has penned around 50 books, including the major best selling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins, and Devil in a Blue Dress.

“I thought I’d love to be able to write a short story from beginning to end, and that was just my goal.”

His work has been translated into 23 languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O Henry Award, a Grammy and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

He reveals: “The reason I wrote my first novel, which is Gone Fishin which came out number five I think, about Easy (Rawlins) and Mouse coming of age, that was because I was taking a class with Edna O’Brien and Edna O’Brien said to me ‘Walter, you should write a novel’.

“So I did what she said.

“I started in my mid-30s, and I thought I’d love to be able to write a short story from beginning to end, and that was just my goal.

“The idea of becoming a successful writer….I mean I know people have ideas like that, it’s interesting for me because it’s such a big idea.

“To have that kind of expectation. It’s like going down to the corner store and saying ‘well today I’m going to win the lottery’.

“But it just kind of turned out that people liked my writing and Edna asked me to write the first book and then I wrote the second one, and then I was off.”

In recent years he has also started to write plays, which he describes as “the hardest things to write” and recently travelled to LA to take part in a TV writers’ room.

“I sold a couple of shows, and well you sell them it doesn’t mean they’re going to be on the air, it just means the network is interested,” Walter explains.

“I’m doing the plays, and some television, and I’ve written a movie for Sam Jackson, we’ll see if it happens.

“I just keep doing things. Mostly in writing, but very different things in writing.”

(via liverpoolecho.co.uk)

Seattle Times: New crime fiction

By Adam Woog, Special to The Seattle Times

This month’s selection of crime fiction features two memorable private eyes and a square-jawed veteran of World War I.

Walter Mosley is renowned for his Easy Rawlins mysteries, but And Sometimes I Wonder About You (Doubleday, 288 pp., $26.95) falls into one of this prolific author’s other series — and it’s equally exhilarating.

Leonid McGill is a gumshoe with a past: The “post-black” P.I. grew up on New York City’s mean streets and is forever seeking to atone for past sins. He’s also got a remarkably messy personal life (many kids, mentally unstable wife, multiple affairs, politically radical father, etc.).

McGill, powerful but short, also has a strange mental tic: precisely describing the height of every man he meets. (Full disclosure: I am also height-challenged, but I like to think I’m not as preoccupied about it as McGill is.)

The book’s plot includes a gorgeous woman in danger, a Fagin-like mastermind with a network of child criminals, and a murdered homeless guy. Mosley doesn’t resolve these complex stories neatly, but then he’s never been as interested in plotting as he is in creating vivid characters and bracing, rat-a-tat prose — both of which are in abundance here.

(via Seattle Times)

Leonid McGill juggles perils of personal, professional life

BOB CUNNINGHAM 

Blade Staff Writer

If there’s anything that defines the modern world, it’s the ability to multitask.

The better you are at it, often the better your professional life is for it. Not your personal life, mind you. That’s a different story.

When the two are intertwined and depend on your broad shoulders, even though you’re only 5-foot-6? You better know your way around the ring, as well as Manhattan.

Meet Leonid McGill, Walter Mosley’s modern-day, New York-based private investigator. In And Sometimes I Wonder About You, McGill has even more on his plate than usual.

For starters, McGill’s wife, Katrina, is recovering in a sanatorium after a suicide attempt. His revolutionary and mysterious father, Tolstoy, whom Leonid hasn’t seen since he was a boy, is lurking somewhere in the shadows.

McGill’s son and partner, Twill, has taken on a much-too dangerous case and needs his father’s help. Plus, there’s Hiram Stent, a sad sack of man who tried to hire McGill to find his cousin for a vast sum of money. McGill turns him down and Stent turns up dead, which ultimately puts Leonid on the case.

Am I missing anything?

Oh yeah, while traveling for another case, McGill meets the beautiful con artist Marella. She makes his heart ache for his old ways as a fixer in the crime world. A few other friends — Gordo, Mardi, and Bug — have their issues. Even pal Hush, a former assassin, needs McGill’s life advice.

All in 272 pages.

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was Mosley, not McGill, who’s the former boxer — the way he bobs and weaves from chapter to chapter, sidestepping deadly blows and delivering his own devastating combinations.

In last year’s standalone Debbie Doesn’t Do It Anymore, I compared Mosley to Thelonious Monk because of his unmatched rhythm. But with McGill — And Sometimes I Wonder About You is the fifth book in the series — boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson may be the better comparison because pound for pound there’s no one who can touch him. Certainly not McGill’s enemies and not the police trying to cash in debts past due. He outwits those who underestimate him and he overpowers his aggressors, and he knows how to get answers when he’s short on time and tired of the hustle: by putting his gun on the table.

No, he’s not above scare tactics to achieve his own personal justice. And yet he’s a big softy when it comes to the many women in his life, as well as his family.

Leonid McGill is someone you want in your corner.

Contact Bob Cunningham at bcunningham@theblade.com or 419-724-6506.

(via The Blade)

Shelf Awareness for Readers “And Sometimes I Wonder About You” Review

In 2009, when Walter Mosley launched his Leonid McGill detective series, there was some question as to how well the historical ambience of his Los Angeles and the in-your-face investigative style of his Easy Rawlins would travel to a new protagonist in contemporary New York City. With And Sometimes I Wonder About You (his fifth McGill novel, after All I Did Was Shoot My Man), Mosley proves that his talent and feel for the city streets–their violence, outsiders, racism, sex and chicanery–travel just fine. McGill is a short, mid-50s PI with a checkered criminal past, a pugilist’s big hands, friends in high and low places, and a tendency to find trouble when a pretty woman catches his attention.

In this book, his wife, Katrina, has been institutionalized after a suicide attempt; his long-time girlfriend, Aura, has told him to stay away out of respect for Katrina’s struggles; and a ravenous new young client, Marella, gives him all the bedroom action he can handle. Since running off with her big-bling engagement ring, Marella is hiding from her former fiancé’s hired thugs who have been threatening her life to get it back. Meanwhile, McGill’s adopted son, Twill, is in danger from a subterranean juvenile crime ring, led by a ruthless gangster, Pied Piper. And a laid-off accountant needs protection from Boston assassins because of the seedy dirt he accidentally uncovered about their wealthy boss’s son. McGill sums up his predicament: “There were three groups of killers after me or mine and three women I had feelings for. None of these people stayed in the right place or were likely to wait their turn.” Bodies pile up, wrongs are righted, lessons are learned. When Mosley’s good, he’s really good. And Sometimes I Wonder About You is one of his good ones.

—Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Discover: Mosley’s fifth Leonid McGill mystery features plenty of New York City crime and McGill punishment to keep readers going late into the night.

Doubleday, $26.95 hardcover, 9780385539180

(via Shelf-Awareness.com)

Book review: ‘And Sometimes I Wonder About You’

Never a dull moment with McGill

BY DREW GALLAGHER/FOR THE FREE LANCE–STAR

“And Sometimes I Wonder About You” is Walter Mosley’s 49th novel. Odds are that most readers will be only fortunate enough to read a handful of Mosley’s books, and that’s if their reading schedule allows them to ever read any at all. They should make room in that schedule. In fact, just about every time I finish a Mosley novel I think that a year spent reading only his books would be an interesting way to spend “A Year of Walter Mosley,” if you will.

But if you don’t have the time or inclination to read all 49 Mosley novels, “And Sometimes I Wonder About You” can serve as an example of what Mosley does exceptionally well—entertain the reader.

“And Sometimes . . .” is the fifth Leonid McGill mystery and finds that, although the New York City-based private investigator may be slowing down, his caseload is not. Work always seems to find McGill and with it usually comes a healthy dose of trouble and a muzzle or two placed on his temple or in his rib cage.

“I was beginning to detect a pattern in my life. This model of behavior was a hybrid of capitalist necessity and proletarian existentialist angst; or, more accurately, modern-day potentates and their anger-driven gunsels.”

Though McGill and his cases are always interesting, a lot of the fun in reading Mosley comes from his descriptions and language. For example: “. . . and a love seat made for very small lovers or maybe one fat-bottomed solipsist.” Shakespeare would have been proud of that line.

McGill always seems to be juggling three or four cases at a time, and when “And Sometimes . . . ” opens, it looks like he’s about to enter a short expanse of leisure time with nothing on his day planner—until the most beautiful woman he has ever seen takes a seat next to him on a train.

He knows she’s trouble from the moment he sets eyes on her, but McGill figures we all have to die someday, and there are much worse ways of going than in this woman’s company.

Of course the woman in the train comes with the anticipated trouble and then there’s his son, Twill, an aspiring PI like his father, who seems to have uncovered a city-wide ring of criminals more heinous and foul than any McGill has encountered previously.

The woman and the ring of criminals have more in common than one might anticipate, since they both require a lot of thinking over cognac and afford McGill very little sleep. It is, after all, a Walter Mosley novel.

Drew Gallagher is a freelance reviewer in Spotsylvania County.

(via fredricksburg.com)

NY Times Sunday Book Review: ‘And Sometimes I Wonder About You’

Walter Mosley breaks every rule in the private-detective-story stylebook in his new mystery featuring Leonid McGill, AND SOMETIMES I WONDER ABOUT YOU (Doubleday, $26.95). His New York sleuth’s disorderly domestic affairs keep threatening to overwhelm the crime elements, and a vital piece of the plot isn’t introduced until midway through the book. And when Mosley does wrap things up, he makes no effort to connect any of the multiple subplots.

So why the devotion? To begin with, McGill is one of the most humane (and likable) P.I.s in the business. He’s a short man, and every time a male character is introduced McGill automatically estimates his height. (“Just a centimeter or two north of six feet”; “Standing face to face, we were the same height”; “Medium-­sized. . . . but with bad posture.”) Although he hesitates to call himself a family man, he’s dedicated to his clinically depressed wife and the brood of grown children he considers his own. And despite being a hard man with a rough past, he does his best by his clients, even taking on the posthumous case of a despondent man he regrets turning away: “I could afford to do a good deed for some poor schlub down on his luck.”

Like his messy personal life, McGill’s casebook is totally disorganized. The job that most interests him (once he begins an affair with his client) concerns a femme fatale being pursued by the rich fiancé she ditched after selling his engagement ring. The most bizarre plot thread involves a Fagin-like villain who runs a criminal network of child thieves from an underground lair by the Hudson River. But Mosley’s strengths have less to do with plot than with the colorful characters he puts in his protagonist’s path, like the retired hit man McGill advises to take up meditation (as a way of resisting the itch to kill), or the gunman he personally hires over a game of chess.

With Mosley, there’s always the surprise factor — a cutting image or a bracing line of dialogue. McGill is about to bid farewell to a woman he loves when: “It struck me that we’d not discussed literature.” He’s also gratified to trace a clue to a 13th-century edition of Herodotus’ “Histories.” As a final treat, the story ends with a wedding in a boxing gym.

(via The New York Times Sunday Book Review)