Clout benefits his activism

Running into each other at a convention for mystery lovers and writers, the two friends took an improvised seat on a conference hall floor. During their 90 minutes of catching up and batting around ideas, Walter Mosley, star author, displayed a deference that Paula Woods still remembers.

“People would come by and say, ‘Oh, you’re Walter Mosley!’ and ‘Oh, your work is fabulous!’ and ‘Oh!’ and ‘Oh!’ And every time someone stopped like that, he said, ‘Thank you. And this is Paula Woods. Do you know her work?’ ” said Woods, author of three mysteries and editor of a mystery anthology. “When his French publisher stopped by, Walter said, ‘Why aren’t you publishing Paula?’ Just like that.”

That intervention on someone else’s behalf was a subtle variation on a more expansive Mosley theme. Since a campaigning Bill Clinton mentioned Mosley as a personal favorite, pulling him from the shadows into the limelight, the writer’s celebrity has also been his bully pulpit.

Things being as they are in a mainly white publishing world, Mosley said, he can’t spend all his time merely telling stories. There is so much agitating to be done.

Agitating against that entrenched publishing world, of course, said the 51-year-old writer, whose 19th book, “The Man in My Basement: A Novel,” just hit bookstores. And, through his activism as well as his writing, against dirty politics, corporate chicanery and the unrestrained apathy of an outsized share of black people.

Mosley has delivered an average of almost 1 1/2 books every 12 months since “Devil in a Blue Dress,” adapted as a box-office hit starring Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle, debuted in 1990.

His titles are available in 20 languages and, apart from the mysteries for which he is noted, include science fiction and nonfiction on weighty, real-life affairs. And his next book will be a novel for young adults set in 1832 Georgia.

His fiction has been made into HBO movies, and he is fine-tuning the script for a USA Network series slated to launch next summer about Easy Rawlins, the snap homeboy detective of Mosley’s first wave of popular mysteries.

Mosley is the first black person to sit on the National Book Foundation’s influential board of directors. In November, he also became the first person of color to host the annual National Book Awards and, amid recycled controversy over what constitutes literature, presented its lifetime achievement award to Stephen King.

“In a kind of oblique way, it is important for a black American to stand in front of that audience and say, ‘This is our world too,’ ” Mosley said.

Mosley’s beginnings were in Los Angeles. He grew up in a besieged Watts until, at 12, he and his parents moved to an integrated middle- to upper-middle-class section of West L.A. Mosley’s black father, a school custodian who died in 1993, was his strongest, most valiant and persistent role model, said Mosley, an only child. “I feel, to some degree, I am his mission in this world.”

His mother, in her 80s and still driving to her school clerk’s job in L.A., is Jewish. Mosley does not consider her or any other Jew as being white and understands that to be a radical idea. By his reasoning, Jews, in the eyes of Europe’s Aryan supremacists, were an extinguishable race. He is Jewish in a cultural sense but a black man in a racial sense, he said, because his father was a black man. Because the world sees him as a black man.

His father and an uncle, his mother’s brother, were gifted raconteurs, Mosley said. They sowed the seeds of his storytelling yearnings, which led him east in 1981. A burned-out computer programmer by the time he was in his late 30s, Mosley, enrolled in a writing program at City College in Manhattan. (When his new career took off, he funded a publishing institute on the college’s Harlem campus to build ties with publishers and groom minority students for publishing jobs.

And in a rare strike against the stranglehold of established publishing houses, Mosley allowed the relatively tiny, Baltimore-based Black Classic Press, which specializes in publishing obscure and out-of-print black books, to roll out two of his works, “What Next” last year and “Gone Fishin” in 1998. With “What Next,” Mosley handed over subsidiary rights as well, which means the company reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from the paperback version alone.

Prison activism is one of Mosley’s mandates. All black people should vote, irrespective of political parties, he said, and demand that elected officials return voting rights to ex-felons and those still in prison.

For his part, Mosley is convinced that the villains and victors in his books are the characters many readers -- especially black men -- want to read about. Masterful renderings of, say, Ralph Ellison or Richard Wright or Toni Morrison notwithstanding, fully formed, complex black men have been absent from much of contemporary literature, he said.

His fiction draws, in part, on history, with his characters affected by rioting, presidential assassinations, the Great Depression. They include detective Rawlins, his pistol-packing sidekick Mouse, Fearless Jones and Socrates Fortlow, a reformed ex-con, moralist and philosopher. Character flaws make them human, and the honesty of that is what heroism is to Mosley.

“It’s hard for me to understand how somebody could not be political in their writings,” he adds. “There’s no way you can talk about life and not talk about where that person is politically and economically. All of my books, including, but not especially, this new one, have politics as part of the fabric.”