Conversations with Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley: A Seat at the Table

112 Walter Mosley: A Seat at the Table Charles N. Brown/2001 From Locus magazine, December 2001: 6–7, 75–76. Reprinted by permission. Walter [Ellis] Mosley was born January 12, 1952, in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in South Central L.A. In 1972, he moved to the East Coast and attended college in Vermont and Massachusetts before graduating in 1977 from Johnson State College, Vermont, with a BA in political science. In 1982 he moved to New York City with Joy Kellman, whom he married in 1987. Mosley held a variety of jobs, including potter and caterer, and didn’t get interested in writing until he was in his early thirties, while working as a computer programmer for Mobil Oil in New York City. (He took a poetry workshop in college and “wrote poems that were really awful!” though it did teach him how to be economical with his prose.) When the writing bug bit, it took hold with a vengeance, and he wrote every spare minute after work and on weekends, then quit his job to attend a writing program at City College of New York from 1985 to 1989. In 1989 he showed his manuscript for Devil in a Blue Dress to his instructor , who passed it on to an agent, who quickly sold it to W. W. Norton . Published in 1990, it was the first in the “Easy Rawlins” mystery series, which numbers six books to date, was nominated for an Edgar, won a Shamus Award for Best First Novel and the UK John Creasey Memorial Award for first-time crime novels, and was made into a movie in 1995. Also in the series—set in Los Angeles between the 1940s and 1960s—are: A Red Death (1991), White Butterfly (1992), Black Betty (1994), A Little Yellow Dog (1996), and series prequel Gone Fishin’ (1997), which was actually the first book Mosley wrote. In 1997 Mosley began a new modern-day detective series starring Socrates Fortlow in a collection of fourteen linked vignettes titled Always Outnumbered , Always Outgunned. The book’s stories were reprinted separately in various magazines; one, “The Thief,” won the 1996 O. Henry Award and was featured in Prize Stories 1996: The O. Henry Awards. The entire collec- CHARLES N. BROWN / 2001 113 tion was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (for works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America) and was made into an HBO film in 1998. A second Socrates Fortlow collection, Walkin’ The Dog, appeared in 1999. Fearless Jones, which begins a new mystery series set in the 1950s, appeared in 2001; a second novel is due in 2002. Often compared to Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes and labeled a mystery writer, Mosley considers himself a novelist whose work includes mysteries. He has published novels outside the genre, such as “Blues” novel RL’s Dream (1995), based on blues guitarsman Robert (Leroy) Johnson, which won the 1996 Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Literary Award and was a finalist for the NAACP Award in Fiction. His first science fiction work, Blue Light, appeared in 1998. Futureland, a near-future collection of nine linked stories, was published in 2001. (Two stories from the collection were available earlier in the year as e-books.) He also has published nonfiction; he edited the essay collection Black Genius: African American Solutions to African American Problems (1999) and published a critique of capitalism in Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking off the Dead Hand of History (2000). He was awarded the TransAfrica International Literary Prize in 1998. In 1996, Mosley was named the first Artist-in-Residence at the Africana Studies Institute, New York University, a post he continues to hold. He also serves on the board of directors of the National Book Awards and The Poetry Society of America, and is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America. He is currently divorced and lives in New York City’s West Village . “Sometimes I get upset with science fiction because of its elitist nature, which is funny because only within the genre itself can it be seen as elitist. I like Star Trek, but with the Borg, this has gone beyond being a comment on our culture, because it’s too far ahead. I want to see how we become them. In my story ‘Angel Island,’ we have the technology to control children at school, insane people, prisoners, and soldiers, so we have...