Easy writer book3/7/2023 ![]() ![]() Mosley saw it all with his own eager, teenage eyes: It was a time when disaffected youth - activists, runaways and dropouts - turned Sunset Boulevard into a roiling scene each night. It was 1967 the setting was the legendary Sunset Strip. Little Green, a story about a black teen who disappears into a hippie commune after a bad acid trip. And if Easy was going to go on, I was going to have to put down these other people's interpretations of the world and use my own." "My father and his family story had kind of come to an end at that point for me. I didn't think he was dead, but I did think I was going to stop writing him."Īnd he did. "And so I decided I was going to stop writing him. The novel ended with Easy driving off a Malibu cliff.įans were devastated, but Mosley didn't see a way around it. But afterīlonde Faith, the 11th book, Mosley was stuck. Little Scarlet, the ninth book, Easy has become a private eye, and the Watts riots have reduced his old neighborhood to ash. The novels move from the pre-civil rights era to the late '60s, when Easy has a steady day job but still occupies much of his time seeking answers for people who can't or won't go to the police. "Many, many things change from '48 to '68 in Los Angeles, particularly in terms of race relations, racial culture, racial divisions, etc., which are at the essence of what the Rawlins books are tracing." Ulin says the books span a critical period in the city's evolution. Those stories helped shape the Easy novels and enabled Mosley to paint a vivid portrait of LA's evolving black community. As a boy, Mosley listened to his father and his father's friends talk over backyard beers about politics, music and finessing the city's notoriously racist police. Nobody was telling their stories."įortunately, there were stories aplenty. And the black people in California, they just weren't remembered. And that doesn't include the history books. It was part passion, part mission: "One of the things that I understood was that you don't exist unless you're in the literature. Mosley says he had a very specific objective: He wanted to write about the lives he saw around him growing up in Los Angeles. ![]() In the Easy novels, the city is important, the people even more so. "I think he's operating in the tradition of Balzac or Dickens, who wrote sort of broad social novels with large casts of characters, moving across a variety of classes and social spheres, and also in which the city - Paris or London, in Walter's case, Los Angeles - becomes a character in its own right," Ulin says. Los Angeles Times, says the Rawlins novels are fine mysteries, but that Mosley goes beyond the genre. The lifetime achievement award puts him in the company of past Grand Masters like John le Carré, Ross Macdonald and Agatha Christie.ĭavid L. ![]() The Easy Rawlins series has also brought Mosley honors: He was chosen as the 2016 Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, its highest honor. Former President Bill Clinton famously became one of his biggest fans. Mosley's tale of love, political corruption and racial intrigue became a best-seller. Those experiences were vividly portrayed in that novel, which later became a movie starring Denzel Washington. That story is set in 1948, when Los Angeles was adjusting to its new population of black migrants from the South, who came to work in war-related industries. The first book in the Rawlins series,ĭevil in a Blue Dress, was written in 1990. if you want to get rich, you go into real estate."īut it's his Easy Rawlins series that made Walter Mosley famous.Ĭharcoal Joe, was released this summer. "And I say, 'Well that's OK, we'll just publish it, don't give me any advance and we'll see where it goes.' You know, because the idea of writing. "I have all these things, I'm continually writing them, and people say, 'Well I can't sell that,' " Mosley says. He has even penned a slim book that instructs would-be fiction writers on how to get started. He has written mysteries, science fiction, erotica, young adult fiction, plays, opinion pieces and essays. While most writers specialize in one or two types of books, Mosley refuses to be constrained. Ask Walter Mosley what he does, and he'll say, simply, "I'm a writer." And he's written a lot: 52 books, about 30 short stories and another 30 or 40 articles, he says. ![]()
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