Walter Mosley

Though he has written in many genres including science fiction, political essays, and literary fiction like the recent The Man in My Basement, Walter Mosley’s widest acclaim comes from crime novels, especially his Easy Rawlins series, which earned him praise as Bill Clinton’s favorite novelist. The first Easy book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into a film with Denzel Washington in 1995. The latest, Little Scarlet, finds Rawlins tracking down a killer during the tumultuous Watts Riots of 1965.

How did Little Scarlet come about?

I was writing my nonfiction book What Next, which is partially a memoir of my father. I was writing about my father’s response to the riots, and it caused me to start thinking about them, not exactly in the way I remember my father reacting to them. And I thought, wow, I should write from this point of view. And the other thing is that [in the series] I’m working on a timeline, working through the contemporary history of Los Angeles from a black point of view, and Watts was the next thing up after the [Kennedy] assassination.

Race and class issues are at the heart of your writing, more than for most mystery writers. Were you drawn to mysteries as a vehicle for discussing these issues?

I made this discovery that if you write a crime novel about an important political issue, you’re going to have a much broader audience. People read it because of the genre, and not necessarily what they might learn from it. But you can attract anybody from a housewife in Texas to the president of the United States.

In Scarlet, Easy claims that the Watts riots gave rise to a completely new relationship between black and white culture, that after the riots everything had changed. “If it’s not broke, you don’t fix it” is a general notion in human life and maybe all animal life. People don’t go around trying to change things if they work. Black people were kind of invisible. They were held back by a certain set of rules and norms of society that most people didn’t have to pay attention to. And they seemed to be all right. You could go to black neighborhoods, they could be around but you didn’t have to know their name or know anything about them. They couldn’t insinuate themselves into your life. And it was OK. And all of a sudden there was this incredible riot, and all these people you never knew and never had to think about, you have to know and think about, even though you still don’t know anything about them. It really is like a second movement in the Civil Rights movement.

In What Next, you draw a parallel between the rage that fueled the Watts riots and the rage in the Middle East against America today, and suggest that black America is in a unique position to help bring about peace in the world.

My apartment looked out on the World Trade Center, and I watched the airplanes crash into it. I was deeply moved by it, but at some point I realized that everybody I knew who was black wasn’t surprised. They were outraged, angered, afraid—but not surprised. Many people said, “You knew this had to happen, bad as we’ve been treating them.” And I began to understand this knowledge in the African-American community about how America is seen around the world that many other Americans don’t have, because they aren’t that close to a history of oppression from the United States. Whereas black Americans are. So what you have is a people who are in a very good position to start to talk about how we might pursue an international peace. Most Americans have no notion why so many people in other parts of the world hate America. And that’s something we really need to talk about.

Little Scarlet will be released July 5; Mosley appears at Once Upon a Crime bookstore in Minneapolis July 29.