Easy writer

It’s one of those classic picture postcard days -- a broad blue sky, a light dusting of clouds, the lacy script of the Watts Towers rising in the backspace -- that is if one could find many pretty postcards of Watts.

On this short stretch of 107th Street, small bungalows painted the cheerful pastels of Easter eggs sit behind flowerbeds bearing succulents; grandmothers chat across the fence in dancing Spanish; kids zip by on bikes. But just an echo away, a police cruiser has pulled up alongside a purring and primered sedan; a teenage boy missing one leg rolls by in a wheelchair; a weathered O.G. wheels by a block away, missing both.

It’s this complex, multilayered Watts that writer Walter Mosley has attempted to pull into focus in a series of mysteries that feature his neighborhood “fix-it” man turned reluctant detective, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins.

So it’s more than fitting that Mosley should be standing before a small gathering of press, city officials -- including Mayor James K. Hahn -- a smattering of neighborhood folk and even his mother, Ella, to celebrate the selection of his latest Rawlins book, “Little Scarlet,” as L.A.’s choice for the One Book One City reading program on this quiet block in Watts. A block, it so happens, just around the corner from where he grew up.

“I lived at 116th and Central. Then at 176th and Central until I was 12,” he tells the crowd, a sharp wind tugging at his crowning black fedora. “So all of this is really like coming home. It’s an important story that L.A. has to tell. My father said: ‘Los Angeles already had a structure. As people came here, they brought another structure. As they came together, it made a city that was impossible to know.’ Most of those stories haven’t been told.”

This morning’s formal portion of the program is brief enough to allow Mosley, outfitted head to toe in black, time to pose for pictures and to talk to some of the fans who’ve stopped by for a look: There’s an African American woman who wants to get him involved in a scholarship program; another would like him to visit with her book group; a black man plays one of Mosley’s audio books loudly on his boombox. Amid it all, there’s the documentary crew that has been filming the author for the last few months.

A young Latino makes his way through the fuss with a hardcover first edition of “Devil in a Blue Dress” for the author to sign. “I want to tell you how much your books mean to me,” he says, shaking Mosley’s hand. “They make me proud of my neighborhood. Of living here.”

For the entire month of April, Angelenos will be encouraged to read the “Little Scarlet” book, stepping into Easy Rawlins’ shoes, which will take them back to 1965 Los Angeles to sort through the debris of the Watts riots.

All manner of city-sponsored events are scheduled -- from library discussions and drop-in signings to a town meeting session and a bus tour of Easy Rawlins’ L.A. The roster is so extensive (even Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton wants to meet with him) that Mosley, who now makes his home in New York, will be moving into an apartment in town for a sizable portion of the month so he can participate.

All of this is fine and good. But like his protagonist Rawlins, Mosley is wary of labels. He doesn’t want to feel hemmed in. Though his mysteries have brought him a certain level of notoriety, Mosley has made it very clear through sheer herculean production (19 books in 15 years and five more on the way within the next 18 months) that labeling him a “mystery writer” would not only be imprecise, it would be dead wrong.

For nearly a decade, Mosley has heeded no borders; his writings move freely around genres. “I write every day for three hours a day, because I really love writing,” says Mosley after the crowd has thinned. There is no career checklist or grand plan. “There are just books I want to write.” And life puzzles he wants to tinker with -- if not solve.

Mysteries for Mosley allow him to delve into issues that bedevil his community and the wisdom and shrewdness it takes to navigate an uncertain world full of changeable folk.

Indeed, his imagination has introduced readers to a few new protagonists, including Fearless Jones and Socrates Fortlow. There have been forays into science fiction and political thought and Hollywood adaptations. What connects all the seemingly disparate pieces is Mosley’s focused quest to write about black male heroes.

But it isn’t just his writing life that is all over the map. In the last 10 years or so, Mosley has evolved into a public intellectual, attaching himself to various political and social issues and causes, arts organizations and executive boards.

In the late 1990s, he conceived the “Black Genius” project. Sponsored by the New York University Africana Studies Program and the Institute of African American Affairs, the project was a series of public conversations (later published as a book) among black visionaries -- filmmakers, academics, activists and culture critics -- who discussed black America’s realities, goals and solutions.

He followed that in 2001 with “What’s Next?,” a political monograph in response to Sept. 11 in which he encouraged everyday people -- particularly black Americans -- to think about ways in which they might affect global change and peace. And though 2003’s “The Man in My Basement,” Mosley’s “novel of ideas,” was met with mixed reviews, it put a fine point on what he was after: a literary oeuvre that was ambitious and full of risks that have broadened his purview.

In what’s left of his spare time, he serves on the board of the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham, N.C., the Poetry Society of America and TransAfrica -- a nonprofit organization that’s dedicated to educating the public about the economic, political and moral ramifications of U.S. foreign policy.

What might seem like an overabundant plate is actually not really a stretch. For anyone who has been reading closely from the beginning -- when Easy scraped to keep his house, his dignity, his rage in check -- Mosley’s extracurricular activities simply amplify themes present in his books: the quality of black life, the importance of community, the quest to be not just heard but also understood.

Across town, after running errands with his mother, Mosley pops into his interim digs -- a furnished apartment on the Westside -- to make a couple of phone calls. It’s simply appointed, more semi-glorified hotel room. He gives it the once over with a shrug.

He’s barely had time to get settled. His suitcases sit still zipped tight in the dining room. His briefcase and computer case also sit unopened. He offers lunch. “I could make a steak ... or should we venture out?” There’s only a couple of hours before he’ll have to get ready for a dinner hosted by Hahn, so getting out into the sun after an uncomfortable flight the night before sounds restorative.

Living in L.A. again after 20 years won’t take much adjustment. He’s back to town at least half a dozen times a year to visit his mother and tend to business. The L.A., however, that exists in his head is antique now, and he doesn’t really need to be here to access it, he explains. That L.A., Easy’s L.A., comes through memory, through people’s stories, he says, as the car motors west to the Pacific. “People tell me stories all the time.”

All this attention will bring new readers -- and perhaps new stories -- to Mosley, but he hopes it will inspire substantive discussion.

“One of the things about being black,” he says, “is that people think you’re paranoid or you’re anti-American because you’re suspicious.” All this came to him again, full force, just a few months ago when he stumbled upon a news article about a string of murders in South L.A. that had finally been solved after a decade. Coincidentally, Mosley had already embroidered Easy’s search for a killer of black women -- the central tension of “Little Scarlet.”

“It’s not like I knew that story when I was writing the book. But I knew that it could happen. Imagine if this happened in any other community? Here was further evidence that these things happen all the time.”

The next morning, still dressed top-down in black, Mosley cuts a peculiar silhouette strolling Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice. First he buys some ink and a notebook. “Sketching and watercolors calm me,” he says. Moving among the beach-bound legions, he turns a few heads, but it’s difficult to tell if it is because they’ve been able to peg him as “that writer” or if it is because his ensemble makes for odd beach togs, even by Venice standards.

“I’m getting used to my little place,” he offers optimistically while poking around the first editions at Equator Books. But shortly he will be away again. Back to New York for a few days, then to Durham for the film fest.

There’s more. Due next month, his young adult novel “47” -- part magic realism, part science fiction, part folk tale -- is the story of a young slave boy’s struggle toward freedom.

“Descendants of the victims of slavery find it hard to look straight into that image because it is so painful,” Mosley says. “I wanted to write something ... to help people understand the nature of freedom.... The only way to be free is to free yourself.”

After the next installment in the Easy Rawlins series, “Cinnamon Kiss,” arrives this fall, Mosley has a couple more thematic departures in store: “The Wave,” due in early 2006, is a traditional science fiction novella, then “Fortunate Son,” a novel he describes as a parable.

He isn’t abandoning Easy or his venal friend Mouse. We will see Easy into his 80s, he promises. But there will be others along the way -- a detective who is a criminal, another who is an anarchist. “The genre needs to be growing. It needs to grow in a political sense. And in a moral sense. You have so many people who live outside. And it’s kind of nice when you have the old guys from Chandler and Hammett and Ross Macdonald -- you know, the moral white Christian, sometimes Jewish, guy. Even when they break the rules they break the rules in the way we want to break them. But there are a lot of people who live out there -- way on the edge they’re not all that good and wonderful.”

At a recent Mosley appearance here, as the Q&A; portion turned from plot line to public policy, someone asked the author point-blank if he might have political aspirations. He slithered out of the question gracefully with a roll of the eyes.

But asked again, he considers the question: “I don’t, really. But I think it is important that everyday people -- even if they think they have a spotty education and a kind of lopsided knowledge of the world -- should say what they think is right. We should all be outspoken.”

It puts Mosley in mind of yet another project. “I finished it last night! It’s another political monograph,” he says. This one elicits a hovering, wide-Cheshire grin: “It’s called ‘Life Out of Context.’ ” In it, he says, “I explain why people often can’t move forward as a group because we don’t have a context. It’s important to see our connectedness to the rest of the world.”

The idea, he says, is to stop griping about lack of access, of not being invited to the table. “Get your own table. And talk at the table. And then figure out what other tables you can get to. We get together at our table and we discuss our context, and then we go out to the other tables. The Police Review Board. The University of California Board.

“If you’re not invited, that’s one thing. But if you don’t come to the table anyway? Well, that’s your fault.”

*

Walter Mosley

The author kicks off the One Book One City L.A. program tonight and will participate in various events over the next three weeks. Check the Los Angeles Public Library website (www.lapl.org/onebook) for a full listing. Here are some highlights:

What: Kitty Felde, host of KPCC-FM’s “Talk of the City” (89.3), interviews Mosley before an audience.

Where: Exposition Park Intergenerational Community Center, 3980 S. Menlo Ave., L.A.

When: 7:30 tonight.

Also

What: Two-hour tour of Easy Rawlins’ L.A. Riders will receive a “Little Scarlet” book bag and paperback. Mosley will not be attending.

Where: Departing from the Central Library, 630 W. 5th St., L.A.

When: 10 a.m.-noon Saturday.

Contact: Call for reservations at (213) 228-7314.