There’s No Easy Way Out for This Private Eye : Books: Walter Mosley has won critical praise for a series of novels set in a Los Angeles long ignored by mystery writers. His hero is an African-American sleuth, Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins.

Phillip Marlowe is the most famous private eye in detective fiction, the character Raymond Chandler used to chronicle the gritty, film noir side of post-World War II life in Hollywood, the Wilshire District and Santa Monica.

Now another detective is working a different set of streets during that same era in Los Angeles.

The name’s Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins, an African-American sleuth, and the Rawlins mysteries created by Walter Mosley unfold in the southern and eastern sectors of Los Angeles, areas that had been blanks on the city’s detective fiction landscape.

There’s no office with “Easy Rawlins, Private Investigator” stenciled on the glass because Rawlins is more of an accidental detective. He takes on his first case to make his mortgage payments after being fired from a defense plant.

“With a lot of people who write mysteries,” says author Walter Mosley over a plate of pasta in his favorite Greenwich Village cafe, “the idea of crime fiction comes first, and it doesn’t really for me. I’m most interested in character and tragedy, and I’m interested in Easy’s world.

“Easy’s not really a detective and he doesn’t see himself as a detective. He does favors for people and he’s restless. It’s not easy in Easy’s position. It’s not easy being a black man in America if you don’t want to be settled.”

Creating discomfort for Rawlins has enabled Mosley, 40, to settle comfortably into a writing career marked by critical praise and the respect of his peers.

“Devil in a Blue Dress” introduced Mosley’s ongoing cast of characters two years ago and earned an Edgar nomination for best new mystery from the Mystery Writers of America.

“The Red Death,” which he wrote in 1991, mixed political, intellectual and institutional strands of Los Angles life during the McCarthy era. With “The White Butterfly,” the third Rawlins mystery scheduled for publication by W.W. Norton on July 1, Mosley moves into the mid-’50s and a psycho-sexual realm of serial killers and male-female relations.

“He is such a gifted writer that everybody is fascinated by seeing this reverse side of the L. A. that mystery readers have known so well through Chandler,” says Sheldon McArthur of the Mysterious Bookshop in Los Angeles. The Rawlins books and Chandler’s Marlowe stories “merge beautifully as two sides of a coin in the mystery/private eye world of the ‘40s and mid-’50s in L. A.”

Hustling for economic survival and enduring racist slights are parts of everyday life in Easy Rawlins’ world, and Mosley constructs his plots so that Rawlins’ detective work is never separated from the community in which he lives. Easy calls on friends and acquaintances for help, and his actions often hurt himself or his friends as much as the ostensible villains.

Of his reluctant detective, Mosley says: “The story in ‘The Red Death’--and, I guess, ‘The White Butterfly’--is you want to be doing this, but you’re doing that.

“That’s a lot of what Easy’s life is like. It seems to me that’s much more the way life is for everyone--it’s just much more obvious with someone like Easy because he lives much closer to the edge.”

The affable, gregarious Mosley speaks at a rapid clip, using questions as launching pads for reflections on art, writing and society. The notebook computer on the restaurant table stands as a reminder of the years when working as a computer programmer paid the rent but extracted a psychic toll.

“I was so terribly unhappy so many hours of the day,” Mosley says. “I’m not trying to say I’m a bastion of happiness now--there’s a lot of stuff to work out--but I’m writing and I can think about things and express my thoughts. Before, people said, ‘Nobody cares about your thoughts--we need your programs.’ ”

Mosley grew up in Watts and the Pico-Fairfax district as an only child. His mother came from a Bronx Jewish family and his father from black Texas/Louisiana roots. Mosley uses his father’s background for most of the characters in the Easy Rawlins series.

Mosley credits much of his love of storytelling to listening to his parents and their friends spin tales.

“They would always be telling these great stories and then they would laugh,” he recalls. “When you’re a little kid and you know you’re going to go out and laugh really hard, it gets exciting. I think my view of life was formed by these people.”

Looking to spread his wings beyond L.A., Mosley went to Goddard College in Vermont, but dropped out and eventually earned a degree in political theory from Johnson State College in Vermont. He made unsuccessful stabs at being a painter, sculptor, caterer and musician before moving to New York City a decade ago. Encouraged by his wife, dancer/choreographer Joy Kellman, he abandoned computer programming to enroll in a writing program at New York City College in 1985.

“When I was 20 to 25, I read a ton of mysteries--Chandler, Hammett and Ross MacDonald being the central ones,” Mosley says. “All of them talk about mood and try to talk about something else--Chandler about the history of L. A.; Hammett, I guess, about good and evil, and MacDonald, in his first books, about psychology, how every time there’s a crime committed, there was another crime committed 30 years ago.”

“I think mystery is the genre--it’s really what writing a novel is about. The form of the novel is the form of uncovering something, of finding something within. You’re introduced to a world and then within that world, you find something else.”

Easy and his friend Raymond (Mouse) Alexander first appeared as the youthful protagonists of “Gone Fishing,” a short novel set in Texas that Mosley submitted to publishers several years ago.

“Nobody was interested--they read it, they liked it, they said, ‘Who’s going to read it?’ ” Mosley says. “There’s that kind of nascent racism when (the book) is about black people--poor black people--and there are no white people.”

Most of the fiction by black writers before the ‘80s is social commentary, about being black in a white society, Mosley says. “ ‘Gone Fishing ‘ was a psychological novel, basically, because Mouse was going to kill his stepfather and Easy was trying to remember the father who had abandoned him. Then I had these characters, so I wrote ‘Devil.’ ”

Mosley envisions a nine-book series that will follow Rawlins’ life up to the early 1980s.

“There’s certainly a book with Jimi Hendrix in it with Easy, or somebody like Hendrix,” he said. “I’d like to have one around the assassinations (of the ‘60s) with Easy being somehow involved, and certainly Mouse will have to die some day.

Mosley isn’t confining his efforts to Easy Rawlins or the mystery genre. He is working on a novel that includes the late, legendary Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson as a central presence. He is nearly finished with a screenplay based on “Devil in a Blue Dress” for Universal. And a script for director Bob Rafaelson is in the “ideas” stage.

Despite his success, Mosley says he is still learning his craft.

“I’m at this moment in my career where I don’t really want to say no to anything,” he says. “At some point, I’m going to have to have to calm down a little to really think and contemplate.

“One of the problems for young writers in America is a pressure to produce and be a star. There’s a lot of young writers, younger than me and my age, who should really take time to move forward as writers.”