Laurie R. King in conversation with Walter Mosley, June 3, 2017. Sponsored by Mystery Writers of America, NorCal chapter, and by the Bay Area Book Fest.

LIGHT THE DARK, a new collection of 46 acclaimed authors writing about their creative process and what inspires them, is now available from Penguin Books. The collection includes Walter Mosley’s essay titled “How I Awoke” on how discovering Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye at the age of fourteen changed his life. “For the first time I understood the power of language to reach beyond the real and into the metaphysical and metaphor…It was a step beyond the limitations of the physical world and into a realm where a thing and its opposite could meet and magically become something else.”

The government is declaring war on the press and the press is fighting to uphold the journalistic freedom necessary for democracy to function. Genuine news media outlets are discredited at every turn while fake news — the real fake news — gains influence. It’s no wonder that public trust in the media is at an unprecedented low. Read the rest of this entry »

SOUTH BEND — At the end of the novel “Blonde Faith,” Walter Mosley decided that Easy Rawlins, his most famous character, had to die.

So after 11 Easy Rawlins novels since “Devil in a Blue Dress” debuted in 1990, Mosley decided to allow Rawlins to have a fatal accident at the end of “Blonde Faith” in 2007.

Mosley told an audience at the St. Joseph County Public Library that he didn’t know where to take Rawlins, the black World War II veteran private eye whom the world first met in “Devil in a Blue Dress.”

“‘Blonde Faith’ was a very romantic novel in a way and I really liked that,” he said. “I enjoyed it, but I felt that I was repeating myself.” Read the rest of this entry »

Best-selling novelist Walter Mosley will publish a new novel with Mulholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, EW can announce exclusively.

Titled Down the River Unto the Sea, the novel centers on a former New York City police detective, now working as a Brooklyn PI, who is investigating the case of a Black civil rights activist convicted of murdering two city policemen. At the same time, he’s still trying to piece together the conspiracy that caused his own downfall at the hands of the police.

This novel will mark Mosley’s return to Little, Brown, where he’ll be edited and published by Mulholland Books’ Josh Kendall. Down the River Unto the Sea is slated for a Feb. 20, 2018 publication.

(via EW)

Holding court near the bar, Walter Mosley was practically joyous. He wouldn’t give Trump the satisfaction of having gained power (much less the popular vote). “People in power are the people who are gonna respond to what happened in the election — that’s the power,” he said. “I’m not sure if that’s the people in this room, but I’m sure we’re in that mode. If you have somebody who represents you,” — e.g., Obama — “you’re less likely to stand up for what’s right. But now, you have no choice. So, hey, that’s great. America’s gonna have some fun.” Read the rest of this entry »

Whatever you think of Marvel’s Luke Cage, you can’t say it’s not literate. A bevy of books are either seen or name-checked throughout the latest Netflix superhero series, and one that gets a particularly bright place in the spotlight is Little Green, a novel by one of the most prolific and acclaimed living crime-fiction writers, Walter Mosley. In the second episode, two of the leads debate the comparative merits of Mosley and fellow African-American crime novelist Donald Goines — and the one going to bat for Mosley is none other than the title character. As it turns out, the feeling of respect is mutual: Mosley is a longtime superhero-comics geek and grew up reading Luke’s initial comic-book adventures in the early 1970s. We caught up with the author to talk respectability politics, the thorny issue of colorism, and why he thinks Spider-Man was the first black superhero.

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Six-time NBA champ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar may be best known as the leading scorer in professional basketball of all time. Yet Abdul-Jabbar is also a major editorialist and an author books such as Mycroft and Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White. Recently, he joined the prolific novelist Walter Mosley at LIVE from the NYPL. For this week’s episode of the New York Public Library, we’re proud to present Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Walter Mosley discussing depictions of the British Empire, a lifelong love of English, and how Beethoven inspired concentration.

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In 1990, Walter Mosley first told the story of black postwar LA through Easy Rawlins, an Army vet turned private eye. It became Mosley’s best-known series. He discusses Easy’s creation and journey.
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As his latest detective novel drops, the writer muses on Obama, the Clintons, and how his own father is like his celebrated protagonist, Easy Rawlins

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton flashed a copy of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress and proclaimed the writer his favorite novelist, shooting Mosley to mainstream fame. Now Mosley’s legendary Los Angeles detective Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins, played by Denzel Washington in a 1995 film adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress, is celebrating his 25th anniversary in Mosley’s new novel, Charcoal Joe.

“Bill was a really smart guy. He knew my books better than I did,” Mosley says in his soothing baritone, talking to me from St Louis on Charcoal Joe’s release tour. “He read them very closely. We were sitting at dinner one day and he was talking about how the books were about migration. Clinton was talking about how these characters had moved, and in that new place had created a place of power.” Mosley says that he strongly disagrees with some of Clinton’s policies, though he remains a supporter.

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