Conversations with Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley’s Secret Stories: A Ride with a Mystery Writer Who Evokes the Unclichéd

29 Walter Mosley’s Secret Stories: A Ride with a Mystery Writer Who Evokes the Unclichéd Lynell George/1994 From the Los Angeles Times Magazine, 22 May 1994: 14–17. © Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by permission. Midafternoon, and we are sailing. The wide span of Century Boulevard seems vast in its possibilities, a seductive expanse with room to roam or expand. At quick glimpse, it is sparkling, but a brief pause at a light reveals something quite different—a poorly patched facade, a wall of chain link encircling nothing, rubble from some long-lost decade left to rot or rust. “Look at these giant streets!” Walter Mosley rides jump seat, taking in L.A. the way many Angelenos do, at 45-miles-per, the window raised, studying the blur of color and shapes skidding outside the windshield. We make a left onto Central Avenue, slowing enough to see features on figures sitting in Will Rogers Park. Picnics. A ballgame. Families, black and brown, taking advantage of the sun, the air carrying a cool mist that, with imagination, could conjure the nearby ocean. “These houses are nice—they’re little, tiny,” he says. “A lot of people come here and say: ‘When are we gonna get to the bad community?’” The answer comes in a voice colored the softest shade of irony: “You’re in it, brother.” At the tip of 76th Place and Central slumps the shell of a broken and singed mini-mall threatening complete collapse. The All-American Liquor Junior Market’s marquee still advertises “Hot dogs 2.50,” as if the building is only momentarily darkened, the owner under the weather or off on a brief vacation. And there are survivors—fish markets, a shoeshine parlorcum -barbershop, a senior citizen center, the Universal Missionary Baptist Church, all grouped around empty lots strewn with trash and weeds. Mosley grew up here, and he’s been mining these broad streets, and their 30 CONVERSATIONS WITH WALTER MOSLEY smaller side arteries, for stories for nearly half a dozen years. But at first, he doesn’t seem to register the damaged terrain. Or doesn’t speak about it. He’s busier reconstructing the past, letting the vacant lots spark a fragment of a memory, reading the symbols in piles of wood and iron. “When I was a kid along [this stretch of Central], there was a White Front, a hardware store, a liquor store, little markets and bars, a shoe store, television repair shops, a whole economic community,” he recalls, his voice moving with a bit of a rhythmic lilt. In moments, he erects filling stations in empty lots, replaces the nuclear-age post office with the old Goodyear plant and a parking lot full of gleaming tail fins. Mosley’s measure of fame comes from the detective stories he’s astutely woven from that vanished place. His mysteries are period works, spanning 1948–1961 on these streets—Denker and Slauson and hot-lit Central Avenue—where dreams and hard work intersect. And Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins , his reluctant private eye, navigates the hurdles of this world—the Police Department, the subtleties of discrimination, unabashed racism—with both feet planted firmly on the sidewalks banking these wide boulevards. A protagonist acutely sensitive to the mercurial nature of his world, Easy’s not quite a social commentator, nor an island of a private eye like Philip Marlowe. Instead, he’s at the center, struggling, hoping to make it through one day into the next. Easy Rawlins is about to appear on film, played by Denzel Washington, as Carl Franklin (One False Move) directs Devil in a Blue Dress. Devil (1990) and Mosley’s third book, White Butterfly (1992), were nominated for Edgar awards; Butterfly and his second, A Red Death (1991), were nominated for Golden Dagger awards (Butterfly won). President Bill Clinton has proclaimed Mosley his favorite mystery writer, and his works—which sell well but have not hit the bestseller charts—pop up on college reading lists with increasing frequency, surrounded by the works of Chester Himes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, his most frequently cited literary forebears. The latest Rawlins installment, Black Betty, set at the dawn of the ’60s, four years before Watts blew, is due next month. L.A. itself, you could say, comes to Mosley in a dream. He lives in Greenwich Village in New York, estranged from this city for more than a decade— L.A. was a claustrophobic web of...