When Walter Mosley walks on stage on July 6 to accept the Diamond Dagger honour from the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) at an awards dinner near the Tower of London, the 71-year-old storyteller will have travelled a lot further than the 5500km plane journey across the Atlantic. Thirty-five years ago, Mosley was told no one wanted to read the kinds of books he wrote, nuanced stories about black men in America.
It would have been easy for Mosley, an aspiring novelist who had been working as a computer programmer in the 1980s, to be discouraged and move on to something else. Born and raised in Los Angeles, the son of a Jewish mother and African-American father who couldn’t get a marriage licence in the 1950s, Mosley had few if any examples of writers who looked like him.
But he kept writing. Every day, for more than 30 years. “I just had to remember to stay true to what I thought I was doing as a writer, and not what somebody else wanted me to do,” Mosley tells the Listener over a video call from his home in New York. “I didn’t realise it at first, but I was writing about black male heroes. If you don’t exist in literature, you don’t exist in the culture. That’s still true today, even though we have all these popular movies. So, one of the things I wanted to do is write like Émile Zola, who says, ‘I’m going to write about the history of France’ in the Rougon-Macquart series, and writes dozens of novels. I’m writing books to talk about a part of American culture that doesn’t make it into literature.”
Mosley uses the term literature regularly. A prolific storyteller, he has published nearly 60 books since 1990, ranging across crime fiction, erotica, science fiction, graphic novels, literary fiction, political non-fiction, memoir and how-to-write books, to go along with stage plays, short stories, personal essays and screenwriting. He decries any snobbery about “popular fiction” versus “literature”. “Great literature always speaks to a large range of people,” says Mosley, noting that whether you’re talking about Shakespeare or many novelists who are considered classic literature, from Dickens to Austen to Zola, those “great writers were almost all popular writers; all people whom people love to read”.
Mosley, who’s most often seen as a crime writer despite his wide repertoire, has received numerous accolades, including the O Henry Award, the Anisfield Wolf Award (for works increasing the appreciation and understanding of race in America), a Grammy Award, an honorary doctorate, and multiple National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work. In 2016, he became the first non-white author to be made a grand master by the Mystery Writers of America, and in 2020, he became the first black man ever to receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
But when he began writing in the late 1980s, taking a class at City College in Harlem after being inspired by Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, few could foresee how popular and influential Mosley would become. His tutor, the great Irish writer Edna O’Brien, believed in Mosley. She saw the value in his background and voice: black, Jewish, a poor upbringing. To O’Brien, that was an asset.
But no one Mosley sent his first manuscript to felt the same. Gone Fishin’ was a lyrical coming-of-age story about two young black men, Ezekiel Rawlins and Raymond Alexander, in interwar Texas.
“I sent it out, and nobody wanted to publish it basically, because the thought was, in America at any rate, that white people don’t read about black people, black women don’t like black men, and black men don’t read. So, who’s gonna read your book?”
Fortunately for readers and countless storytellers who’ve since been inspired by Mosley, he didn’t let those early setbacks dim his fire.
He tried again, this time with “Easy” Rawlins and “Mouse” Alexander as young men returned from World War II. Rawlins is struggling to find work in Los Angeles when he’s approached to find a young white woman who has been hanging out in African-American bars.
“I was just writing the story and halfway through I went, ‘Wow, this really reminds me of all those noir fictions I’ve read and loved’,” recalls Mosley of the manuscript that would become his career-launching debut, Devil in a Blue Dress. “I’m writing about the beginning of a detective’s journey. WW Norton understood that and said they wanted it, and the next one. So I did that.”
Even from those early days, Mosley’s unique voice and masterful storytelling was clear. On the campaign trail in 1992, future President Bill Clinton named Mosley his thriller writer of choice. Easy Rawlins mysteries began appearing in bookshop windows and on feature tables. Denzel Washington played the private eye in a 1995 neo-noir film based on Mosley’s debut, with Don Cheadle winning awards for his scene-stealing performance as trigger-happy sidekick Mouse.
“Walter Mosley took the hardboiled crime genre and bent it to his whim like Superman bending an iron bar around his neck,” says new CWA chair Vaseem Khan. “In his Easy Rawlins novels, Mosley centred a black protagonist at a time when that was all but unthinkable, and in doing so inspired legions of crime writers of colour, including myself.” The Diamond Dagger recognises “authors whose crime-writing careers have been marked by sustained excellence, and who have made a significant contribution to the genre”.
“What I particularly love about Walter’s work is he uses crime fiction as a means to talk about society and its many inequities, a lesson I’ve taken to heart in my own Malabar House novels set in 1950s Bombay,” says Khan.
A long-time proponent of increasing diversity in publishing, Mosley established the Publishing Certificate Programme at City College of New York in 1998. He co-founded the Crime Writers of Color organisation with Kellye Garrett and Gigi Pandian in 2018. Their ranks now number more than 350.
“Walter is an inspiration to every black crime writer who’s come after him – and should be an inspiration to every crime writer period,” says Garrett, the award-winning author of Like a Sister, an urban psychological thriller with a black heroine.
“He was the reason publishers finally had to admit that people want to read crime fiction books with black protagonists.”
For Virginia author SA Cosby, a recent breakout crime-writing megastar, Mosley is the standard by which all modern mystery writers judge themselves. “He’s a mentor and friend to so many up-and-coming black writers. He’s generous with his time, his advice and his sparkling wit. He is the best of us.”
The facets that have made Mosley’s crime writing so influential and iconic are on clear display in his latest novel, Every Man a King, which sees the return of ex-NYPD cop Joe King Oliver from Mosley’s award-winning 2018 novel Down the River Unto the Sea.
Reluctantly roped into helping a nonagenarian billionaire investigate whether an alt-right poster boy is being wrongly imprisoned, Oliver steps into a minefield including white nationalists, private prisons, fuel fraud, the Russian Mob, and a spiderweb of relationships and betrayals. Mosley deftly sets the hook and reels us through the pages, exploring themes of incarceration, inequality and monetised hatred alongside some wonderfully vivid and unusual characters.
“I really wanted to talk about how we make enemies of people, and it’s that kind of world where everybody is hating each other and sharing hatred for other people where you really want to say: ‘What’s wrong with you?’
“So, in this book, Joe, a left-leaning guy, represents an unbelievably rich white guy – you know, the root of all evil – in order to try to prove whether or not an alt-right guy has done something wrong. To me, that’s an interesting juggling act: an anvil, a ping-pong ball and a squash. And you’re trying to make that work.”
For Mosley, crime and thriller tales – and genre fiction in general – are an ideal vehicle for exploring broader questions about culture, society and race.
“Let’s say you’re talking about Mexicans coming to work in California. You can write a novel about that and certain people will read it. But if one of the strawberry plantation owners gets murdered, they’ve arrested a guy from Tijuana who’s come to pick strawberries, and you have a Chicano detective from Los Angeles come to figure out who did the murder, then the whole country is interested.
“Because people love the detective genre and want to figure out why the crime happens, in every possible way.”
Every Man a King, by Walter Mosley (Orion, $37.99).
