Walter Mosley looks east

He's got an elusive black mistress and a bored Swedish wife who doesn't love him. He's raising three kids, only one of whom is his. A low-level mobster wants him to kill someone, and the men he's tracking for a shadowy detective are being murdered one by one. ¶ Leonid McGill, the protagonist of Walter Mosley's new mystery, "The Long Fall," is a harried, middle-aged African American. He's nothing like Easy Rawlins, the Los Angeles private eye who made Mosley one of America's most respected writers. ¶ But it's not just a stage of life that separates the two characters: It's the stage itself. In "The Long Fall," the author has shifted the action from post-World War II Southern California to New York, where he lives. ¶ It's an intriguing change for Mosley, who was born in L.A. and has long been identified with the city's diffuse landscape. ¶ As he sipped a glass of iced tea at Soho House, a private club in New York's meatpacking district, he said the idea for the new novel, the first in a projected series, had more to do with his own restlessness than any sense that the Rawlins saga had run its course.

By Josh Getlin reporting from new york > > >

March 24, 2009