Of the St. Louis American
With more than 30 books in many genres, it’s hard to select a starting point when picking the brain of Walter Mosley.
Luckily, he was in St. Louis promoting a new fictional character and wanted an opportunity to offer a public farewell to another.
“Easy Rawlins was me paying homage to my father,” Mosley said of the character – a janitor/detective in post-World War II Los Angeles – that made him a household name through 10 books and a film (starring Denzel Washington).
“That was a period of monolithic racism, sexism, classism, where everybody knew where they belonged and where they couldn’t go – very few people didn’t know and those were the ones that changed the world,” Mosley said.
“If you read those books today, they are valid, but the world has changed.”
For this new world, he penned The Long Fall. The book is the debut in a series of novels that will chronicle the life and work of Leonid McGill, a hard-nosed boxer turned detective living in present day New York City.
McGill’s rugged and formerly shady existence is anything but easy. However, when readers meet him in The Long Fall, he is desperately chasing redemption – a journey that Mosley says is a metaphor for the present day United States.
“For the last 30 or 40 years, America has been doing things wrong– deregulating the banks, insurance companies and the hospitals, waging wars against people who haven’t done anything to us, allowing the rich to get richer while everybody else becomes poor,” Mosley said.
“And now all of a sudden America has this turn around and has decided to do right.”
In his candid way, Mosley made it plain that there’s no looking back to the work that put him on the literary map. He’s already completed the second Lenoid McGill book.
“I’m glad I stopped writing Easy. There was nothing else to say,” Mosley said.
“A lot of people wanted me to write more, but the books just wouldn’t have been as good. I had written 3,000 first-person narrative pages for Easy Rollins – that’s more than enough for any person.”
Mosley hopes to have created a tool for people to connect and relate with themselves and each other – from the racism that exists beyond black and white to the economic crises that have affected communities on a global scale.
“I finished talking about my father’s world. Now it’s time to talk about this world,” Mosley said.
“You still have racism, but at the same time if you go up to someone and say, ‘Yeah, you know I’m a black man in America and I’ve got it tough,’ he may turn to you and say, ‘I’m an Arab man from Iraq and I’d change places with you any day of the week.’”
Black male heroes
In the crowded auditorium of Central Branch Library Tuesday night, fans of Mosley’s work fired questions at him like automatic weapons.
It was encouraging to see people from different ages, races, genders and socieo-economic scales so well versed in the body of work of a man who intentionally renders undeniably black male experiences.
He was challenged by a black woman with regard to plans on creating leading black women in his books.
In a playful but serious tone, he told the woman not to hold her breath.
“Very few people in the history of American literature have written about black male heroes, and even in that group, not a lot of them are black,”
Mosley said.
“Not protagonists, a lot of people write about protagonists – Richard Wright wrote about protagonists – but they are not heroes. They are people that might scare the [expletive] out of you, but they are not heroes.”
Even among the group of mostly white faces, Mosley frankly described what he considers to be a dirty secret of the book business.
“The publishing world figured out that people – especially white feminists – would buy books written by black women if black men were portrayed in negative roles,” he said.
According to Mosley, their work supported a long-running trend in the fiction industry of demeaning stereotypes for black male characters.
“Needless to say, black men didn’t find this compelling so they stopped reading fiction,” Mosley said.
“Why would I read something that’s going to lie about me, beat me up and make me to be some kind of fool? I don’t want to be this absolutely imperfect man. I want to be the man that I am.”