Transcending the Genre

Someone’s been tailing Walter Mosley.

The worst of it, he admits, palms flat against the table linen, in full confessional mode, is that who has--and maybe more precisely what has--been persistently shadowing him began first as a figment of his own imagination.

“It’s like this,” the author begins, leaning forward into the anecdote, his whisper skimming just above the whirring buzz of luncheon-rush cell phones at Beverly Hills’ Belvedere. “I was speaking at a library recently. And in the introduction the woman said, ‘Walter Mosley is a mystery writer. He’s written very many wonderful mysteries, and he’s just come out with a new book, ‘Walkin’ the Dog,’ starring Socrates Fortlow.’ I corrected her. I said I’ve written mysteries, but I’ve written more books that aren’t mysteries. My books don’t ‘star’ people. I have real characters, with real character development--hopefully. And y’know, if there were any genre that I was accused of being in,” says Mosley, “it should be the genre of black male heroes.”

Over the last decade, the wildly prolific Mosley, 47--with 10 books in as many years--has convened a powerful ensemble of such heroes, a hardy chorus of voices pushing off from the sidelines to solo. There is Socrates, the mediating force of the new collection of stories “Walkin’ the Dog” (Little, Brown), a sequel to 1997’s “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned” (W.W. Norton). There is Soupspoon Wise, the pain-permeated blues man, of “RL’s Dream” (Norton, 1995). And there is Chance, a biracial man looking for the meaning of his existence in the world, from 1998’s “Blue Light” (Norton). It is a foray into speculative fiction: “If we as black people can’t have a past,” suggests Mosley, a native Angeleno who now makes his home in New York, “we can at least have a future.”

But it’s Easy Rawlins, the reluctant man for hire, the neighborhood “fix-it man” of L.A.’s boom years of the ‘40s through ‘60s, who helps his friends and new acquaintances close the gaps and open the doors that better their lives. It is Easy who casts the most imposing, and thus eclipsing, shadow.

Fascination With Life’s Daily Challenges

Mosley, by all means, doesn’t minimize the entree that Easy Rawlins has afforded him in his writing career. (Even still, he continues to hear the “Bill Clinton’s favorite writer . . .” endorsement as some sort of seal of approval.) But there are other things to talk about. He doesn’t want to be pressed into the corner by his character’s growing presence and what it portends, either. To his mind, people sometimes miss the larger intent of his stories--that they are most certainly wrapped around a conceit, a convention, but it doesn’t mean that that is all they are.

“I want you to be able to read and get something out of it. If you have a post-doctorate degree or an eighth-grade education. I’m not writing for one and not the other, especially with what I’m writing about--that would be ridiculous. . . . It’s not exclusive. I think that my heroes could be anybody’s heroes. They’re all different kinds of people.”

Whether by coincidence or by design, most of Mosley’s novels concern themselves with this life quandary: How people live their lives in the space between--be they the narrow crawl spaces of one’s own consciousness or the margins that society forces them into. Socrates Fortlow, a 60ish ex-con, tries to piece together a life after prison. Daily, he must confront and mitigate his long-steeped anger. Not the hair-trigger anger at his fingertips, but the fury at its root.

Starting at subzero, Socrates wanders the urban landscape, collecting castoffs and throwaways--bottles, dogs, children--piecing together a life. And, much like transient/artist Simon Rodia, whose refuse-studded towers pointedly mark the landscape of Watts (Socrates’ home), the act of reclaiming objects and lives is Socrates’ own tribute to determination--a personal commitment to build something grand and new.

“When [Socrates] got to his place, he had the feeling of coming home,” writes Mosley in an early chapter of “Walkin’ the Dog.” “Home to his illegal gap. Home to a place that had no street address. . . . It was a hard place. . . . It had never been hearth or asylum, but now it was both of these things. For the first time he was thankful for what little he had. He was safe at least for one night more.”

Socrates tentatively approaches his post-prison life in easier-to-digest 24-hour portions. Sunrises and sunsets.

“When I wrote the book, I had a little sentence in the front that I didn’t publish. I kept it for myself,” Mosley says, settling into his plate of grilled shrimp. “Twelve stories straining to be a novel, in a life that can only be lived day to day.”

Mosley’s novels serve a multifold purpose. They fill in the blanks: Those lost chapters for and about African Americans--particularly black Angelenos--who have too seldom found their stories recorded formally on a page. But it isn’t simply the physical landscape--the sad long-boarded-up facades, the dusty beer-hall jukeboxes--that reverberates so. Rather, it’s reconnecting with that long-lost emotional landscape that can only be reignited with a nudge to the memory.

“When I first started writing, I thought I was going to write a series of histories--not history histories,” he clarifies, “but mapping the migration of black people from southern Texas to Louisiana to L.A. Starting with ‘Gone Fishin,’ which nobody would publish. Then I wrote ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ [W.W. Norton, 1990]--then it was: ‘Yeah, right, we’ll buy two books and they have to be about the same guy and they have to be blah, blah blah’ . . . and I went ‘Ah . . . Oh . . . OK, I like money,’ ” he cracks wise. “You gonna pay me for that, right?”

And then some.

A Hero Who Makes Lasting Friends

Easy Rawlins took off. Critically as well as popularly. Four other titles followed. The works translated into 21 languages. And the Clinton plug didn’t hurt either. Then there was the ’97 screen adaptation of “Devil in a Blue Dress,” starring Denzel Washington. (There is a TV series in the works as well.) Before Mosley knew it, his success with Easy plugged him into the mystery genre--for better or for . . .

“Remember? . . .” Mosley cuts off the line of conversation, his eyes flashing fierce but a smile winking at the corners of his mouth. “Remember? We’re not talking about Easy.”

“You brought him up,” he’s reminded.

“Yes, that was my fault,” he concedes with a shrug.

Easy, you see, is tailing Mosley, ever gaining on him.

And even at Mosley’s recent Southland reading at Vroman’s in Pasadena, you’d think Easy himself was going to stride in and take his place behind the lectern; the room was abuzz with “I miss Easy” and “I want him to come back.”

Truth be told, it’s not so much the specter of Easy that is problematic for the writer but what he represents: the self-isolated world of the noir gumshoe--and all the romance and expectations that come with it.

Even Raymond Chandler, the noted hard-boiled L.A. prose laureate, struggled with being hemmed in by the form, says Robert F. Moss, who maintains a Raymond Chandler Web site. “By the early 1950s, many British critics were praising Chandler as an important American novelist, while in the United States he was still suffering from the stigma of being a common ‘genre writer’ and, therefore, not worthy of serious critical attention.”

And like Chandler, says Cal State Long Beach professor David Fine, author of the upcoming “Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction,” Mosley is less interested in crime than in rendering the urban environment in a symbolic way. “Mosley’s books are what you call cultural novels. They are complex--with plot and character development. He is a cultural mediator between white and black worlds--Watts and greater L.A. He’s not really a genre writer but, rather, an L.A writer.”

An L.A. writer seeking to create works as expansive and complex as the region he most often chronicles.

For a man who believes in movement, action, Mosley is feeling the press: Can something that is popular also be seen as “literary” and thus judged as important?

“Whenever anything is popular or popularized, whether it’s good or not, it’s up for questioning,” he says. “People will talk about my writing. People read my books. They buy them. And that,” he says with a shrug, “is a strike against me. It takes awhile for popular fiction to enter into the literary area. But the greatest writers in English are popular writers. William Shakespeare, the most revered writer in English, was a complete popular writer . . . who wrote for the masses.”

Addressing Themes That Are Universal

Being squeezed into this ever-narrowing intellectual space as a genre writer doesn’t do justice to what Mosley has already accomplished with his work in a larger realm. Much like his character Socrates, who assembles a casual round table made up of his friends and neighbors to discuss issues affecting their present and future--from race to sex to the very property of hate and rage--Mosley has been endeavoring to discuss similar themes in his novels.

But for Mosley, uncovering solutions to society’s problems, or at the very least talking about them, stretches beyond the realm of fiction. Already he has tried one nonfiction exploration: “Black Genius” (Norton, 1999) assembled 13 black thinkers, from writer-activist Angela Davis and writer Stanley Crouch to activist Randall Robinson and film director Melvin van Peebles, to offer varying perspectives on what it might take to create a more self-sufficient, self-determined future for black Americans.

As well, he has been deeply involved with activist Robinson’s Washington D.C.-based lobbying group, TransAfrica, most recently traveling to Cuba on a fact-finding mission to examine the U.S. trade embargo’s effects on Afro-Cubans. And due in January is his contribution to Ballantine’s Library of Contemporary Thought series, “Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History,” a plain-spoken though deeply thoughtful examination of the problems and shackles of capitalism.

This, Mosley maintains, shouldn’t be seen as a stretch, if you’ve been reading him closely all the while. It’s all there: the mutability of racism, the destructiveness of hate, the shades of exclusion, the many chambers of identity.

“It’s what I’m doing with my mysteries, the novels,” he explains. “I’m not telling people what to do anymore in ‘Workin’ on the Chain Gang’ than I did in ‘Walkin’ the Dog.’ I do believe in the Socratic method. I believe that we do need to sit down and talk about it. I tell people that they should write down what they think is important. I don’t tell them what’s important.

“But I also believe that we must do something. Problem is not the politicians. The problem is us. We’ve been so drained of our vital life juices that we don’t know what it’s like to be political anymore. Voting doesn’t matter. What matters is after the day you vote, you say: ‘OK, now I’m gonna watch yo’ ass . . .’ ”

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Lynell George can be reached by e-mail at lynell.george@latimes.com.