Conversations with Walter Mosley

Interview with Walter Mosley January 1999

75 Interview with Walter Mosley January 1999 Samuel Coale/1999 From The Mystery of Mysteries: Cultural Differences and Designs. Madison, WI: The Popular Press, pp. 200–210. © 2000 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press. Sam Coale: You have said that you wrote a single sentence one day which spoke to you and that that got you started as a writer. Could you explain this in more detail? Walter Mosley: I was working as a consulting programmer at Mobil Oil, not as an employee but working on my own. I was there on a weekend, so nobody else was there. And I was writing programs. I got tired of doing that, so I started writing this sentence: “On hot sticky days in southern Louisiana, the fire ants swarmed.” And I thought, “That sounds like the first sentence in a novel.” I’d read lots of novels, and that sounded good to me. So I decided to keep on writing. I was about thirty-four at the time. SC: Had you always wanted to write? WM: No, I hadn’t. At various times in my life I’d taken a poetry workshop or something, but I’d never ever considered prose, before that day actually. It was a voice that I understood and that I could write in. I’m always a little leery of “it” speaking to me. When you say “it,” it’s like the id. If you want to go in that direction, okay. I wrote the sentence, started writing, and took a workshop again, but after several workshops, it wasn’t working. So I went to City College and studied poetry with a man named Bill Matthews for about two or three years. I was working. I had left Mobil but came back, then I sold my first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, and then I quit. SC: Why did you pick the mystery form to write in? WM: The first book I wrote was Gone Fishin’, but nobody wanted to publish it, not because they were against the writing, but they couldn’t figure out who would buy the book. Who would read this book? It’s kind of an 76 CONVERSATIONS WITH WALTER MOSLEY interesting notion. The publishing industry is incredibly Eurocentric and also white-thinking. The idea was that the people who bought books and read books were the people the publishers knew. Seeing that everybody in publishing is white, the idea that black people would buy books that were already being published was beyond them. SC: So it is similar to Toni Morrison who worked at Random House and helped cultivate a black audience while she was writing the books that they would eventually buy. WM: Yes. SC: Did the publishers suggest to you the mystery form? WM: No. Nobody suggested it to me. Everybody said that there was good writing in Gone Fishin’, but it wasn’t commercial, and come back when I had something else. SC: But why the mystery form, which is essentially Eurocentric and white? WM: I’m not sure it is. Let’s get rid of your caveat. What happened was that I read a lot of mysteries, and the mysteries that influenced me were of three different kinds. Political, which I find Dashiell Hammett to be; funny, which Rex Stout is; and then that kind of exotic world, which, I think, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays, bringing people to the exotic realms of the British Empire in his work. I’ve always loved those three different kinds of mysteries, where you’re going into this new, exotic world or laughing at the voice that’s telling you the story or becoming aware of the political nature of a narrative . I started writing definitely not knowing that I was beginning to write a mystery. It was only when I was about halfway through it, I said, “Well, it is kind of in that genre.” And when I was finished with it, I realized, “Yeah, it is.” So that was it. Now of course there’s also an economic issue involved. To begin with, when I wrote my first contract with Norton, it was for two books. The reason I wrote the next one is that they had already paid me for it. SC: You had held on to Gone Fishin’ until later, until you were established. WM: Yes, after Black Betty...