Thursday, October 21, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Easy street

Novelist Walter Mosley on writing, the Fantastic Four and why he's not 'half white'

By Lynnette Curtis

When Walter Mosley published his first book in 1990, he was 38 years old and working as a computer programmer. A few years later, then-President Bill Clinton counted Mosley among his favorite writers, and that first book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into a movie starring the buff, wife-beater T-shirt-wearing Denzel Washington as Ezekial "Easy" Rawlins, a charismatic janitor-slash-private eye hired to search for a mysterious missing woman among the sultry jazz joints of late 1940s Los Angeles. Mosley happily gave up the programming biz and became a full-time writer.

Of the 18 books he has written since, nine are Easy Rawlins mysteries and several were best-sellers, including Black Betty and A Little Yellow Dog. In Mosley's latest book, Little Scarlet, we catch up with Rawlins just after the 1965 Watts riots, when he's asked by cops to help solve a local murder. As usual, Rawlins is recruited for his ability to work in tough black neighborhoods where white cops aren't exactly welcome.

Fresh from a 35-city book tour in support of Little Scarlet--and set to speak Friday in Las Vegas as part of the Vegas Valley Book Festival--Mosley talked to the Mercury from his home office in Greenwich Village, N.Y.

Mercury: Little Scarlet takes place just after the Watts riots. You were 13 at the time and living in L.A. What about the experience made you want to set the story at that time?

Mosley: The experience that colored the book wasn't the riots. It was my father's response to them. One night during the riots, my father was very unhappy and near tears. He told me he understood so well why people were rioting, why they wanted to, and how much he wanted to join them, to burn things and shoot at people. But he said he knew it was wrong to hurt people who might not deserve it, so he wouldn't do it. That had the biggest impact on me. It was kind of an indirect heartbreak my father experienced over that. I wanted to understand more about it.

M: Readers love it when a new Easy Rawlins book comes out. But how do you keep from getting tired of writing about him?

Mosley: Because I write all kinds of other books in between.

M: Also because you follow him chronologically?

Mosley: Yes. Thank you. He gets older. I'm not writing about the same character because he keeps changing.

M: Easy's a character who often works as a middleman between the white world and the African-American world--negotiating that distance between them. You are of mixed race. Do you think of yourself as straddling that canyon as well, because of your heritage?

Mosley: I don't think so. People say, "You're half white." No, I'm half Jewish. You don't know your history if you say I'm half white. Just look at Europe. Look at the Middle East, and you tell me. "White" means white Christians in Europe and America. The whole notion of race is ridiculous. There are no races; there are groups of people who get lumped together for a variety of reasons. All black people in America are multi-racial. It's very rare that you see somebody that's "black." Race is how one thinks of oneself and how one is thought of. I'm a black man in America. There's no question about that, and I don't have any choice about it. Do I have any kind of different cultures through language, genetics or family? Sure. But when I look in the mirror I'm Walter. I never go, "Look at that black man in the mirror." One would have to be crazy to do that.

M: There's a sort of standard complaint that the white world doesn't understand or feel comfortable in the African-American world and vice versa. Your books certainly explore this. Do you think that's something that's changing?

Mosley: They [the books] do. The complaint would have to be looked at really closely. To say that black people feel uncomfortable in the white world would be to say that black people feel uncomfortable in America. You don't have to be among white people to be in a world dominated by Anglo-Saxon Christian culture.

I think racial relations are changing. It has been excruciatingly slow changes since 1865. Internationally, economics have taken center stage about who is and isn't important. If a dowager billionaire left her fortune to a dog, that dog would have more rights than most people in Afghanistan. You say it has less to do with race than location, but race is still a defining factor in the world. If the amount of people slaughtered in Sudan were being killed in Ireland, we wouldn't hesitate to send an army there. But because it's a country filled with black people, nobody cares. I don't think America as a whole is moving in the right direction. Personally, culturally, people are being treated better, but America isn't treating the world in a better way.

M: You've written mysteries, science fiction, nonfiction, short stories. How is it that you are so comfortable working in so many different genres?

Mosley: There's not a lot of difference between genres, in my opinion. You have to tell a good story, use interesting and accessible language and you have to have something you want to say. Other issues become less important. Mysteries have much more plot than a literary novel. Science fiction is not much more imaginative, but is more imaginative in a concrete way. Those are small things in the large arc of a novel.

M: So writing is writing.

Mosley: Writing is writing.

M: For the most part, critics seem to really like you. J.D. Salinger said, "A real artist...will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)" Do you think even good reviews can harm you as a writer? Do you listen to the critics?

Mosley: They certainly can be harmful. They can also be benign--it depends. It's less about the review and more about what you think about the review. If somebody writes a review and says, "Walter Mosley did this thing," and I think about it and think, "Wow! I did and didn't realize it!"--that's good because I learn something. If somebody writes a review and says I did something wrong and I wasn't aware of it and I agree, then I've learned something. If they say, "Walter Mosley shouldn't write this kind of book," or "Mosley's the greatest writer that ever lived,"--those can be harmful. As a matter of fact, I got "He shouldn't write this book" about Fear Itself (the sequel to Fearless Jones). Then I had this wonderful sequel.

M: How can being called the "greatest writer that ever lived" be harmful?

Mosley: It's an impossible notion. It makes you have to live up to something which you can't, because as an artist you have to be able to make a mistake. If someone has declared you perfect, you might be afraid to make mistakes. You can't go on a limb. You could be the greatest boxer who ever lived. You can be bigger, faster and stronger. But writing is not boxing.

M: I was glad to read in an interview that you find [James Joyce's] Finnegans Wake painful and hard to read, because I always feel like a dumbass trying to wade through it.

Mosley: That's because it's Finnegans Wake!

M: That's why I find your writing refreshing--it's straightforward and very sensual. Do you write that way consciously?

Mosley: That's a good question, and I'm not sure it's easy to answer. Many writers believe they are teachers, which I don't think is true. Writers believe that in order to write a good novel, it has to be challenging to the reader. I believe it has to be challenging to the writer. I think that a lot of writing in the English language comes out of Shakespeare. He wrote very complex notions in very available stories. We're asked to do that. We open dialogues; we're not teachers.

M: Is it true you're now working on a book for young adults [called 47]? What inspired you to go in that direction?

Mosley: It's finished and coming out in April. I didn't really [go in that direction]. I was about halfway into it and thought, "Hey, it looks like a young adult novel." And it was. I've also finished a new Easy Rawlins book called Cinnamon Kiss. Now I'm working on a novel about luck.

M: What about luck?

Mosley: It's a hard thing to answer. Some of us are lucky, some of us are not. What does that mean? But I'm pretty far along [on the book]. I'll be finished by the end of this month.

M: Some writers find it hard to talk about works-in-progress, because they lose interest in actually writing the stories.

Mosley: I don't really. It's one thing to talk about writing and another to write. It's like if you wrote Finnegans Wake and [the critic] Harold Bloom writes about it. Talking about kissing someone is one thing, actually kissing them is another.

M: You left L.A. a long time ago. Do you miss the West?

Mosley: I left in 1973. I go to L.A. all the time. I spend four weeks a year there. But I love New York, and Greenwich Village is one of the best places in New York.

M: What do you love about it?

Mosley: It's one of the three or four places in the country where you don't need a car--where having a car is actually a detriment. Anything I want is in walking distance. Even the mortuary.

M: You plan to walk to the mortuary?

Mosley: I expect to walk to there when it's time.

M: Just climb into your coffin...

Mosley: ...and say "I'm ready."

M: What do you think of Las Vegas?

Mosley: Being in Vegas is always a wonder to me. It's a funny thing. It's such an extraordinarily American city that it's different from the rest of America. The notion of instantaneous wealth is the notion of America around the world. That's no place so concrete as in Vegas. My favorite place in the world is the desert. There's a certain kind of beauty there. And you never see so many stars as in the desert.

M: Although not downtown.

Mosley: No. But it takes, what, five minutes to get out of town? I feel bad about you guys growing so fast, though. People are so mobile in America. You say, "Housing is cheap. Education is good. There are a lot of jobs." So everybody moves there, and pretty soon there are no jobs.

M: Housing isn't so cheap, and education isn't so great here right now, though.

Mosley: And now it takes nine minutes to get out of the city.

M: My editor wants me to ask if you ever plan to set anything in Vegas.

Mosley: [Laughs.] I haven't ever thought of that. It's not beyond hope, though, and I'm in the middle of writing my novel about luck, and Vegas is all about luck. So Vegas may make an appearance.

M: Let's talk about other writers for a minute. We've all heard the story about how President Clinton praised your work in the early '90s, which helped you sell a lot of books. I guess the question now is: Have you read his book?

Mosley: It didn't help me sell as many books as you might think, but, yeah, I guess it did. I haven't read [his book] yet, but I do have it. We traded books at one point along the road. Now that I'm settling down, I may read it. It's a long book, so you have to make a commitment. It's more a book about wanting to know what he thinks about what happened.

M: What are you reading now?

Mosley: I'm actually reading two books right now. One is Karen Armstrong's Buddha. The other is Letter Perfect by David Sacks. It's about the history of the alphabet. It's really a crazy thing--it's so interrelated around the world and throughout history.

M: Who are your favorite writers?

Mosley: That's a very complex question. Most writers will lie to you, because, say you're a young black woman writer, of course you're going to say Zora Neale Hurston, even though maybe Nancy Drew really launched you into the world. I could say Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Albert Camus. But for me it was really comic books--the Fantastic Four. Everything you read as a kid has an incredible impact on you. So I'm afraid to answer that question, because I'd have to leave out Jack Kirby, the artist who drew Fantastic Four.

M: Did you read Nancy Drew?

Mosley:[Laughs.] No.

M: The Hardy Boys?

Mosley: For me it was Tom Swift.

M: In 1997, you gave your book Gone Fishing to Black Classic Press, a small African-American publishing house, to publish. Then you launched a publishing certificate program at The City College for young urban residents. What motivated you to do this?

Mosley: People were saying, "We have to get more black writers published." Well, there was a plethora of black writers. There were no black publishers or editors. I was saying, "Writers are all good and well, but they are not the people who make decisions in the publishing industry." You have no people of color working in the industry. You have everybody's editor being what America calls "white," and no black, yellow or brown people. It's no longer a political act for a black simply to write a book. Black people can be published and seen as literary and important. What one has to do is deal with the economics--go to a black press. You're bringing a great deal of profits back to your community. Any member of a community should be doing that.

M: Okay, Mr. Mosley--

Mosley: You haven't asked me about politics.

M: Okay. Who do you plan to vote for?

Mosley: That's personal. [Laughs.] It's funny--you can ask people about their upbringing, their families, their sex lives. But ask who they're voting for and it's personal.

M: You'd rather talk about your sex life?

Mosley: [Laughs.] No. I'm certainly voting Democratic, but I'm the only person I know who expects [John] Kerry to win. If you bring out a great amount of voters, the Democrats tend to have the lion's share of the votes. They're registering voters like never before. The polls lie. They don't call people with cell phones. What person under 25 do you know who still uses a land line? They're not Republicans, these people.

M: I hope you're not being overly optimistic.

Mosley: The thing I don't get is this: There's a guy who has a wife and two kids living in Baghdad, and one day bombs start falling. Every sixth or seventh week a bomb kills a member of the family. Then someone tells him, "Oh, no. There were no weapons of mass destruction." Not only have you killed his whole family because of a guy he didn't even vote for, but the excuse [Bush] gave for killing his family was false. I am an American, and whatever America does, it's my responsibility. I as an American am not right to have killed that man's family. America needs to understand that we are committing a crime by murdering a man's family.