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With the release of the latest Rawlins installment, A Little Yellow Dog Mosley recently spoke in an interview held in a stylish Italian restaurant near his apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village. He is very pleased with his new book which finds the black World War II-vet-turned-sleuth in a battle to solve two murders and other quirky matters at a Los Angeles school where he is the supervising custodian during the waning days of JFK's Camelot era.
Now a father of two growing children, sometimes private eye Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is mellowing and seeking a calmer way of life which continues to elude him. "The 1960s are going to be up and down for Easy," Mosley, 44, admits between bites of well-seasoned pasta. "It's a turbulent time. The kids are going to grow up and move away. Also, he doesn't have a wife, so he has to deal with that. The old ways of achieving stability are not working for Easy, so he has to find another way to survive."
Writing meant survival for Mosley, a Los Angeles native who explored a number of job options including that of a potter, caterer, and computer programmer before picking up the pen. To hone his skills, he studied writing in the graduate program of City College of New York. Since the 1990 publication of the first outing, Devil in a Blue Dress, made into a motion picture starring Denzel Washington last year, both Mosley and his alter ego, Rawlins, have gone through quite a few changes.
What sets Mosley's crime novels apart from others in the genre is their candid exploration of Rawlins's inner world against an ongoing American historical background from 1948 through the 1960s. The author examines the aftereffects of the Great Migration of southern blacks to the West and their battle to retain their cultural identity while trying to improve their economic status.
Mosley never beats the reader over the head on this point. This element of social struggle is skillfully mixed into the fictional sauce like seasonings into a well-stirred gumbo.
His appeal to a growing African American audience increased with the 1991 publication of A Red Death, and two subsequent books, White Butterfly and Black Betty. Writing from the influence of his father's Texas roots, Mosley has preserved the black southern sense of community in his work without lapsing into a fiction dependent on cheap sensationalism or pathology.
"For blacks who emigrated to the west and north, there was a deep concern for one another," Mosley explains. "There was a strong bond among blacks during the days of Jim Crow. They realized there was no chance of help coming from outside the community. They knew they were only a hairsbreadth from misfortune happening to any one of them if they didn't help each other. I'm very interested in this quality."
"With a lot of my readers, they understand this element in my work," he adds. "They know this is a hard life. They understand what Easy and his community are going through in their effort to survive. They understand that you have to get back up after youÕve been knocked down. They understand you have to take chances to move forward. Traveling around the country and talking to people who read my fiction, they say their lives are corroborated in my work. They don't often see this happening in TV, movies, and many books."
A trailblazer in a genre with little previous exposure to black cul ture, Mosley often finds his work compared to Chester Himes, the noted African American writer who penned several Harlem mysteries in the 1950s and 1960s. Although he operates in the noire world of corrupt cops, femme fatales, and crime bosses, Mosley is determined to put his own particular stamp on the field with a fictional style that is deceptively stripped down, precise, funny, and daring.
"It's bad enough when people compare you to other writers," he says. "People compare me to Himes because he was black and wrote mysteries. Then they want to compare me to Raymond Chandler because he wrote about LA in the old days and sold a lot of books. They never compare me to Hammett. In a sense, Hammett, Chandler, and the people of that generation wrote about the shape of the world at their time. They dealt with the decline of western civilization.
"The people who buy my books are less interested in that than in finding themselves on the page," he continues, motioning for the waiter. "They're trying to see themselves in the situations confronting Easy. What do I do when I lose my job? What do I do when I can't pay the rent? What do I do when my wife is messing around? How Easy solves these questions is a kind of release for a lot of my readers."
In A Little Yellow Dog, as with other Mosley mysteries, the caper starts with a very commonplace event mushrooming into a casually but cleverly paced series of sinister mishaps. Nothing is hyped up or overblown, yet the nervy tension is still there.
"Yes, everything begins in my new book with Idabell Turner and her bad little yellow dog," he chuckles. "If you get too mechanical in your plot, you get predictable. The reader will know exactly what will happen. The real mystery of life is that you do not know most things. A writer must get the sense of everydayness into his work without becoming boring. You must retain the element of surprise."
A recent surprise for Mosley was the massive critical acclaim and brisk sales for his first non-genre book, RL's Dream, the heartfelt tale of a dying bluesman. He credits his publisher, W.W. Norton, with supporting him in the publication of a non-Rawlins book. The blues motif has been of great interest to the author as he is currently rediscovering the rich fiction of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, two literary titans of the Harlem Renaissance.
"I'm very interested in their fiction because of its storytelling qualities," he says. "People are hung up on Langston's poetry, but I feel his mastery was in his fiction. The simple stories are so funny. The thing I love about their work is they loved black people, and that shows throughout their fiction."
This folksy quality will appear next year in Mosley's next work, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned: The Socrates Fortlow Stories. Described as a "novel of short stories," the tales will follow the life of Socrates, a 60-year-old ex-con who comes to Watts after serving 27 years in prison for a double murder. The author is also working on a book of experimental fiction revolving around the occurrences behind a college professor's series of lectures. He is enthusiastic about his work on a science fiction novel as well. A truly busy man.
"I plan to keep experimenting, moving around with my work," Mosley concludes. "Also, I plan to explore genre characters other than Easy. The problem is that there is not enough time. It would take a good part of the rest of my life to do everything I want to do. I'm glad so many doors are opening up."
Robert Fleming is a journalist whose most recent book is The Wisdom of the Elders (One World/Ballantine).
©1996, ProMotion, inc.