Conversations with Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley

3 Walter Mosley Thulani Davis/1993 This interview was commissioned by and first published in BOMB Magazine, Issue #44, Summer 1993, pp. 52–57. © Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors. All rights reserved. The BOMB Archive can be viewed at www.bombsite.com. Reprinted by permission. Novelist Walter Mosley, forty-one, already a cult favorite among mystery readers, suddenly appeared on television and in the papers in January when newly inaugurated President Clinton named him as his favorite writer. Mosley is the author of three novels: Devil in a Blue Dress, the tale of troubles caused by an illusory woman who forces people to cross dangerous taboos; A Red Death, which brings the ’50s McCarthy witch hunts into the churches and Africanist meetings of black L.A.; and White Butterfly, the chase for a serial killer who does not interest police until a white woman turns up among his female victims in a black neighborhood. The books incidentally chart the lives of the unseen “blues people” in L.A. in the ’50s and early ’60s. Mosley has of late become a hot lunch ticket for movie stars happy to meet a guy who could fill a shopping bag with adventures of a free-wheeling black detective named Easy Rawlins, who lives in South Central Los Angeles , with memories roaming from Depression-era Texas to wartime Europe, and all the space between. Easy also has a seductively dangerous guardian angel, his childhood friend Raymond Alexander, better known and feared by most as “Mouse.” Mouse is a clean dresser who smiles when he kills. Mosley was born and raised in L.A., leaving at eighteen to go to Goddard College in Vermont. He dropped out and stayed in Vermont for five years, finishing his BA at Johnson State College. Mosley now lives in New York’s West Village with his wife, a choreographer. Thulani Davis: In your essay in Critical Fictions you say that you got into writing mysteries because editors didn’t respond to your other works. What other writing did you do? 4 CONVERSATIONS WITH WALTER MOSLEY Walter Mosley: Oh, everything. I was writing short stories, and I was studying poetry. I don’t think you can write fiction without knowing poetry, metaphor , simile, the music of the language. I wrote a novel called Gone Fishin’ about my two main characters, Easy and Mouse, when they were very young in the deep south of Texas. You could call it a psychological novel. Mouse was looking to steal from and kill his stepfather, and Easy was looking to remember his own father, who had abandoned him when he was eight. I sent it out to a lot of agents. They all liked it enough to send back intelligent letters. But none of them thought that a book of that sort would make it in the market. This was like ’88, ’89. TD: So, Easy and Mouse have been around a long time? WM: Mm-hum. TD: Why Texas? WM: Well, the books map a movement of black people from Southern Texas and Louisiana to Los Angeles. So, that’s why Texas. A lot of my family and a lot of people that I know come from there. TD: When you wrote Gone Fishin’, was your intention to write a series of books that mapped that movement? WM: Yeah. I just didn’t think they were going to be mysteries. Have you ever seen the movie, The Third Man? Great movie. I just loved Orson Welles’s character. I read the novel, and in the beginning Graham Greene says that he was hired to write the screenplay, and he wrote the novel first, to work out the kinks. I thought that was such a great idea I decided to do it myself. Of course, I got about three chapters into Devil in a Blue Dress and forgot anything about a movie. I was going to City College Graduate Program in writing, and the head of the program, Frederic Tuten, asked me if he could see the book. To abbreviate the story, I came back from a trip and he came to me and said, “Walt, my agent’s going to represent you.” TD: That was great! WM: Yep. Wonderful. TD: And now the novel Devil in a Blue Dress is being made into a film. What about writing the screenplay? WM: I didn’t do very well at it the first time. I mean, I want to try it...