Novelist Walter Mosley is the author of Devil in a Blue Dress, A Red Death, White Butterfly, Black Betty and A Little Yellow Dog in the Easy Rawlins mystery series; and RL's Dream, a blues novel. Mr. Mosley is the past president of the Mystery Writers of America, a member of the executive board of the PEN American Center as well as the National Book Foundation (sponsors of the National Book Awards). He also serves on PEN's Open Book Committee, a group working to increase the presence of African Americans and others in the publishing community. A native of Los Angeles, Walter Mosley now lives in New York City. 

Read the transcript of an On-line chat with Walter Mosley from BarnesandNoble.com dated Thursday, November 13, 1997.

Read about the books from Mosley's Easy Rawling's Series

The Tempest Tales
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Hardcover: 190 pages
Publisher: Black Classic Press (March 28, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1574780433

The Tempest Tales, Walter Mosley's newest book which we [Black Classic Press] are publishing. The wise folks at Essence [magazine] selected Tempest as the Book of the Month. It should be in bookstores the first part of May [2008]. This is the third book we've done with Walter, who continues to keep his values around supporting Black independent publishing front and center. We’ve got a big job to do on marketing Tempest and getting the word out. This is an exciting challenge. —Paul Coates, founder Black Classic Press

About the Book
Tempest Landry, an everyman African American, is “accidentally” killed by a cop. Denied access to heaven because of what he considers a few minor transgressions, Tempest refuses to go to hell. Stymied, Saint Peter sends him back to Harlem, where a guiding angel tries to convince him to accept Saint Peter's judgment, and even the Devil himself tries to win over Tempest’s soul. Through the street-smart Landry, Mosley poses the provocative question: Is sin for blacks the same as it is for whites? And who gets to decide?

Diablerie
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In this icy noir from a master of American fiction, the darkest secrets are the ones we keep
hidden from ourselves.

Ben Dibbuk has a good job, an accomplished wife, a bright college-age daughter, and a patient young mistress. Even as he goes through the motions of everyday life, however, inside he feels nothing. The explanation for this emotional void lies in the years he spent as a blacked-out drunk before pulling his life together—years in which he knows he committed acts he doesn’t remember.

Then a woman from his past turns up at a gala for his wife’s new gig at a magazine called Diablerie and makes it clear that she remembers something he doesn’t. Their encounter sets wheels in motion that will propel Dibbuk toward new knowledge, and perhaps the chance to feel again. With the same erotic force as Killing Johnny Fry, but grounded in a far darker vision of human nature, Diablerie is a transfixing new novel from one of our most powerful writers.

Fear of the Dark: A Novel
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Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; Reprint edition (September 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 044661789X

Fearless Jones and Paris Minton, stars of the bestsellers Fearless Jones and Fear Itself, return in a high-velocity, larger-than-life thriller about family, betrayal, and revenge.

"I'm in trouble, Paris."

Paris Minton has heard these words before. They mean only one thing: that his neck is on the line too. So when they are uttered by his lowlife cousin Ulysses S. Grant, Paris keeps the door firmly closed. With family like Ulysses-Useless to everyone except his mother-who needs enemies?

But trouble always finds an open window, and when Useless's mother, Three Hearts, shows up from Louisiana to look for her son, Paris has no choice but to track down his wayward cousin.

Finding a con artist like Useless is easier said than done. But with the aid of his ear-to-the-ground friend Fearless Jones, Paris gets a hint that Useless may have expanded his range of enterprise to include blackmail. Now he has disappeared, and Paris's mission is to discover whether he is hiding from his vengeful victims-or already dead.

Traversing the complicated landscape of 1950s Los Angeles, where a wrong look can get a black man killed, Paris and Fearless find desperate women, secret lives, and more than one dead body along the way. Fear of the Dark is filled with the sheer-nerve plotting and brilliant characterizations that prompted The Nation to credit Walter Mosley for "the finest detective oeuvre in American literature."

This Year You Write Your Novel
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ISBN: 0316065412
Pub. Date: April 2007
Format: Hardcover, 113pp
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

"With Mosley as instructor, how can your novel go wrong?" –Library Journal

No more excuses. "Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls," bestselling novelist Walter Mosley advises. Anyone can write a novel now, and in this essential book of tips, practical advice, and wisdom, Walter Mosley promises that the writer-in-waiting can finish it in one year. Intended as both inspiration and instruction, the book provides the tools to turn out a first draft painlessly and then revise it into something finer. Mosley tells how to: - Create a daily writing regimen to fit any writer's needs-- and how to stick to it. - Determine the narrative voice that's right for every writer's style. - Get past those first challenging sentences and into the heart of a story.

Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel
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ISBN: 159691226X
Pub. Date: December 2006
Format: Hardcover, 288pp
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

This bold new novel from Walter Mosley startles in both its rawness and its honest portrayal of a man on a quest for sexual redemption in midlife. When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act that he witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. In that instant, the calm existence of this middle-aged New York City man becomes something unrecognizable: he wants revenge, but also something more. Killing Johnny Fry is the story of Cordell's dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. His guide is a mysterious woman named Sisypha, who leads him deep into the erotic heart of the city.

Killing Johnny Fry marks new territory for Walter Mosley, bestselling author of Devil in a Blue Dress and many other books in different genres: sci-fi, politics, literary fiction. It will surprise, provoke, inspire, and make you blush. Above all, it is about a man questioning the rules we take for granted--and the powerful and sometimes disturbing connections that occur between people when these rules are removed.

Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: University of Michigan Press (December 27, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0472031988

A passionate examination of the social and economic injustices that continue to shackle the American people

". . . bracing and provocative. . . ."
---Publishers Weekly

". . . clear-sighted . . . Mosley offers chain-breaking ideas. . . ."
---Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[A] thoroughly potent dismantling of Yanqui capitalism, the media, and the entertainment business, and at the same time a celebration of rebellion, truth as a tool for emancipation, and much else besides. . . ."
---Toronto Globe and Mail

"Workin' on the Chain Gang excels at expressing feelings of ennui that transcend race. . . . beautiful language and penetrating insights into the necessity of confronting the past."
---Washington Post

"Mosley eloquently examines what liberation from consumer capitalism might look like. . . . readers receptive to a progressive critique of the religion of the market will value Mosley's creative contribution."
---Booklist

Fortunate Son
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ISBN: 0316114715
Format: Hardcover, 320pp
Pub. Date: April 2006
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley's novel about two boys, one ensconced in a life of privilege and the other in a life of hardship, explores the true meaning of fortune.

In spite of remarkable differences, Eric and Tommy are as close as brothers. Eric, a Nordic Adonis, is graced by a seemingly endless supply of good fortune. Tommy is a lame black boy, cursed with health problems, yet he remains optimistic and strong.

After tragedy rips their makeshift family apart, the lives of these boys diverge astonishingly: Eric, the golden youth, is given everything but trusts nothing; Tommy, motherless and impoverished, has nothing, but feels lucky every day of his life. In a riveting story of modern-day resilience and redemption, the two confront separate challenges, and when circumstances reunite them years later, they draw on their extraordinary natures to confront a common enemy and, ultimately, save their lives.

Life out of Context
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ISBN: 1560258462
Format: Paperback, 103pp
Pub. Date: January 2006
Publisher: Avalon Publishing Group

"Life Out of Context begins as a brooding examination of Mosley's own sense of cultural dislocation as an African-American writer. But die to a series of serendipitous events - the screening of a documentary about Africa, an inspiring encounter with Harry Belafonte and Hugh Masekela - Mosley has a set of epiphanies that turns the focus away from him. What can we do to fight injustice, poverty, exploitation, and racism? What is globalization doing to us?" Through these late-night meditations, Mosley attempts to transcend his earlier feelings of living a "life out of context" and seeks instead to find a political context. He ends with a call to arms, proposing that African-Americans have to break their historic ties with the Democratic Party and form a party of their own. Mosley writes, "Economic globalism has pressed many lives out of context. It's about time we push back."

The Wave
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ISBN: 0446533637
Format: Hardcover, 224pp
Pub. Date: January 2006
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated

The New York Times bestselling author returns to science fiction with an eerie, transcendent novel of the near future.

Errol's father has been dead for several years. Yet lately Errol has been awakened in the middle of the night by a caller claiming to be his father. Is it a prank, or a message from the grave? When he hears the unmistakable sound of a handset being put down on a table, he decides to investigate.

Curious and not a little unnerved, Errol sneaks into the graveyard where his father is buried. What he finds there changes his life forever. Caught up in a war between a secret government security agency and an alien presence infecting our world, touched by the Wave, he knows that nothing will ever be the same again.

47
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ISBN: 0316110353
Format: Hardcover, 240pp
Pub. Date: May 2005
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Age Range: 12

Number 47, a fourteen-year-old slave boy growing up under the watchful eye of a brutal master in 1832, meets the mysterious Tall John, who introduces him to a magical science and also teaches him the meaning of freedom.

The story you are about to read concerns certain events that occurred in the early days of my life. It all happened over a hundred and seventy years ago. For many of you it might sound like a tall tale because I am no older today than I was back in the year 1832. But this is no whopper I'm telling; it is a story about my boyhood as a slave and my fated encounter with the amazing Tall John from beyond Africa, who could read dreams, fly between galaxies, and make friends with any animal no matter how wild.

In his first book for young adults, bestselling author Walter Mosley weaves historical and speculative fiction into a powerful narrative about the nature of freedom. 47 is a young slave boy living under the watchful eye of a brutal slave master. His life seems doomed until he meets a mysterious runaway slave, Tall John. 47 soon finds himself swept up in an otherworldly battle and a personal struggle for his own liberation.

Deeply compelling, 47 is reminiscent of the literary masterworks of Nancy Farmer, Philip Pullman, and Octavia Butler.

Cinnamon Kiss
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ISBN: 0786278552
Format: Hardcover, 444pp
Pub. Date: September 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Edition Description: Large Print Edition

New York Times bestseller Walter Mosley's sizzling new novel pits Easy Rawlins against his greatest challenge ever--a terrifying murder during the Summer of Love.

It is the Summer of Love as CINNAMON KISS opens, and Easy Rawlins is contemplating robbing an armored car. It's farther outside the law than Easy has ever traveled--but his daughter, Feather, needs a medical treatment that costs far more than Easy can earn or borrow in time. And his friend Mouse tells him it's a cinch.

Then another friend, Saul Lynx, offers a job that might solve Easy's problem without jail time. He has to track the disappearance of an eccentric prominent attorney. His assistant of sorts, the beautiful "Cinnamon" Cargill, is gone as well. Easy can tell there is much more than he is being told--Robert Lee, his new employer, is as suspect as the man who disappeared. But his need overcomes all concerns, and he plunges into unfamiliar territory, from the newfound hippie enclaves to a vicious plot that stretches back to the battlefields of Europe.

Little Scarlet: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
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ISBN: 0316073032
Format: Hardcover, 320pp
Pub. Date: July 2004
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Easy Rawlins returns to solve a mystery set amid the flames of the hottest summer L.A. has ever seen.

Just after devastating riots tear through Los Angeles in 1965 - when anger is high and fear still smolders everywhere - the police turn up at Easy Rawlins's doorstep. He expects the worst, as usual. But they've come to ask for his help.

A man was wrenched from his car by a mob at the riots' peak and escaped into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a redheaded woman known as Little Scarlet was found dead in that building - and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. But the man has vanished.

The police fear that their presence in certain neighborhoods could spark a new inferno, so they ask Easy Rawlins to see what he can discover. The vanished man is the key, but he is only the beginning. Easy enlists the help of his longtime friend Mouse to break through the shroud. And what Easy finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned in the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around deep-set passions - feelings echoed within Easy himself.

Mosley's lean and musical vernacular captures the heat and the rhythm of Los Angeles' heart, where danger is the common currency of everyday life. Little Scarlet is further proof that Mosley is "a master of mystery"
—New York Times Book Review.

The Man in My Basement: A Novel
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ISBN: 0316570826
Format: Hardcover, 256pp
Pub. Date: January 2004
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

The man at Charles Blakey's door has a proposition almost too strange for words. He wants to spend the summer in Charles's basement, and Charles cannot even begin to guess why.

The beautiful house has been in the Blakey family for generations, but Charles has just lost his job and is behind on his mortgage payments. The money would be welcome.

But Charles Blakey is black and Anniston Bennet is white, and it is clear that the stranger wants more than a basement view. There is something deeper and darker about his request, and Charles does not need any more trouble. But financial necessity leaves him no choice.

Once Anniston Bennet is installed in his basement, Charles is cast into a role he never dreamed of. Anniston has some very particular requests for his landlord, and try as he might, Charles cannot avoid being lured into Bennet's strange world. At first he resists, but soon he is tempted - tempted by the opportunity to understand the secret ways of white folks. Tempted to understand a set of codes that has always eluded him. Charles's summer with a man in his basement turns into an exploration of inconceivable worlds of power and manipulation, and unimagined realms of humanity.

In this successful and intriguing departure from his usual work, Mr. Mosley creates a substantial subplot about heritage and history. … In the end this audacious novel is about facing up to such brutal realities. But it is also about seeking refuge. —Janet Maslin The New York Times

What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace
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Format: Paperback, 124pp.
ISBN: 1574780204
Publisher: Black Classic Press
Pub. Date: February 2003

A message from the publisher about What Next

Read an AALBC.com Review

In What Next, Walter Mosley -- New York Times bestselling author -- has crafted a deeply personal and political proposal, offering a commonsense approach to the challenge of finding world peace in a post-9/11 world. Mosley recalls his father’s story about not feeling like an American until German soldiers shot at him during World War II. Now the younger Mosley explores what the terrorist attacks meant to him, and challenges African Americans to use their unique position to help create a new kind of peace between the U.S. and the rest of the world. What Next examines this and other questions in a powerful polemic and call to action for African Americans and freedom-loving people everywhere.

Six Easy Pieces
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Format: Hardcover, 208pp.
ISBN: 0743442520
Publisher: Atria Books
Pub. Date: January  2003

For years, readers have been enthralled by the adventures of Easy Rawlins, the unforgettable hero created by bestselling and award-winning writer Walter Mosley.  In Six Easy Pieces Mosley presents a collection of six NEW Easy Rawlins short stories. . .sure to please fans that have long awaited his return.

Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World
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Format: Hardcover, 356pp.
ISBN: 0446529540
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Pub. Date: November  2001

"Life in America a generation from now isn't much different from today: The drugs are better, the daily grind is worse. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a chasm. You can store the world's legal knowledge on a chip in your little finger, while the Supreme Court has decreed that constitutional rights don't apply to any individual who challenges the system. Justice is swiftly delivered by automated courts, so the prison industry is booming. And while the media declare racism is dead, word on the street is that even in a colorless society, it's a crime to be black." "But the world still turns and folks still have to get by with the hands they're dealt, folks such as:" "Ptolomy "Popo" Bent: This gentle backwoods child has a genius I.Q. - and a soul so pure that officials want him locked up forever." "Folio Johnson: A hardboiled, cyber-augmented private eye who can see beneath the dark poetry of the metropolis, he will need an even greater edge than that to find out who's systematically murdering rich, young Nazis." Fera Jones: She's the boxing Queen of the Ring who must still fight all comers to save her dad, preserve her identity, and protect the fans who believe in her. 

Fearless Jones
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Format: Hardcover, 320pp.
ISBN: 0316592382
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Pub. Date: June 2001
Edition: 1 ED

Read an AALBC.com Review

From the Book Jacket
"Paris Minton is minding his own business - a small used-book store of which he is the proud proprietor - when a beautiful woman named Elana Love walks in and asks a few questions. Within the next twenty-four hours, Paris has been beaten up, made love to, shot at, and robbed, and his bookstore has been burned to the ground. He's in so much trouble he has no choice but to get his friend Fearless Jones out of jail to help." "Fearless Jones is an army veteran, a man who is proud of his accomplishments during World War II and refuses to step into the background now that the war is over. Violence dogs Fearless's every step, and Paris has tried to keep his distance. But there's no friend like the one you need." "The two set out to find the elusive Elana Love, and every step leads them deeper into a bewildering vortex of money and betrayal. Their questions bring out a ruthless and racist cop, a gang of vicious excons, and an elderly Jewish woman who is as determined to help the two friends as others are to harm them. These two black men in 1950s Los Angeles have few rights, little money, and no recourse under attack. But they have their friends, their wits, and their knowledge of the way the world really works to help them prevail."

WALKIN' THE DOG
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Format: Pop Up Book, 1st ed., 272pp.
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Pub. Date: October  1999
Edition Desc: 1 ED Format: Pop Up Book, 1st ed., 272pp.

"Socrates Fortlow, an ex-convict forced to define his own morality in a lawless world, confronts wrongs that most people would rather ignore and comes face-to-face with the most dangerous emotion: hope. It has been nine years since his release from prison, and he still makes his home in a two-room shack in a Watts alley. But he has a girlfriend now, a steady job, and he is even caring for a pet, the two-legged dog he calls Killer. These responsibilities make finding the right path even harder - especially when the police make Socrates their first suspect in every crime within six blocks."

"In each chapter of Walkin' the Dog, Socrates challenges a different conundrum of modern life. In "Blue Lightning," he is offered a better-paying job but has to consider whether the extra pay is worth the freedom he would have to give up. In "Promise," he keeps a vow made long ago to a dying friend, and learns that a promise to one person can mean damage to another. In "Mookie Kid," he gets a telephone and learns that the price of being able to reach others is that others can contact him - whether he wants to be reached or not."-- Book jacket.

"The stories are delightful, nothing overly powerful just pleasant little journeys. At first glance one could think that a book of this nature could be easily written but I think not. There is an art to what Mosley does with a story, without being preachy he delivers subtle little messages through the thoughts of Socrates and his friends. It's an easy fast read, I enjoyed it."  --  Carey, comments originally posted on AALBC discussion board (11/18/99)

Gone Fishin'
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Hardcover: 244 pages
Publisher: Black Classic Pr; 1st ed edition (February 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1574780255

Read Chapter One from Gone Fishin'

The setting: Houston, 1939. Easy and Mouse are young men just setting out in life. Easy has yet to develop his skill for unraveling the secrets of others, and Mouse has yet to kill his first man. All will soon change. Easy and Mouse come of age in Gone Fishin' as they are compelled to examine their friendship and other relationships that have shaped their lives. Both young men take a closer look at their love and memories of their mothers and are forced to deal with the fathers in their lives - Easy yearning for the one he hardly knew, Mouse vengeful over the one he was left. Out of these memories and interactions, each must somehow forge his own sense of manhood.

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned: The Socrates Fortlow Stories
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Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton and Company; 1st ed edition (November 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393045390

Read a sample chapter from this book.

Three decades ago, the young Socrates had, in a burst of drunken rage, murdered a man and a woman with his huge "rock-breaking hands." Twenty-seven years of hard time in an Indiana prison followed. Now Socrates lives in a cramped two-room apartment in an abandoned building in Watts, scavenging bottles and delivering groceries for a supermarket. In each of the linked stories that comprise this richly brooding work, Socrates, like his namesake, explores philosophical questions of morality in a world beset with crime, poverty, and racism. He is an unforgettable presence and his perceptions cast a glow of somber lyricism upon an often harsh world.

Related Links

Video - Howard Zinn & Walter Mosley - Excerpt from Conversation, July 21st 2007 at the Harlem Book Fair (11:22 mins)
http://authors.aalbc.com/howard_zinn.htm

Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins Novels
On-line chat Transcript with Walter Mosley
What Next

Walter Mosley Website
www.waltermosley.com/

 

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