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• Mr. Mosley's official site
• Mr. Mosley's articles in The Nation
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• About Blonde Faith

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Novelist discusses the importance of including Black, male heroes in his writing. (3:21)
 

Tavis: Good news for Walter Mosley fans. His favorite detective, Easy Rawlins, is back. However, the bad news is it may be for the last time. The new book from the award-winning author is called "Blonde Faith" and is the tenth in the Easy Rawlins mystery series. Walter Mosley dedicates this latest novel to the late, great August Wilson.

Back in the spring, he was on this program with a work of nonfiction called "This Year, You Write Your Novel." Apparently, he took his own advice, because Easy is back and as is Walter Mosley. Walter, good to see you.

Walter Mosley: Great to see you, Tavis.

Tavis: You all right, my friend? You doing okay?

Mosley: I'm fine, great.

Tavis: I saw this wonderful piece recently in "The New York Times," it was very clever, "In Memoriam, Easy Rawlins, Distinguished Investigator, Loving Father, Beloved Friend and Colleague." It appears that this may be it for Easy, and I don't want to give the book's ending away. You read this, you think it's the end. But it may not be the end.

Mosley: It may not be, but in my head, it is. In my head, I think this is it for Easy Rawlins. It's been 10 books. I kind of, like, took an inventory recently in my mind and I realize that I have more books in my head than I have time in my life to write. And Easy Rawlins has been covered. I've really - he's been covered. I've done a lot of work on him. It's possible that I'll return to it, but I'm not thinking about doing it. Now I have all this other work to do.

Tavis: How do you make a decision, though, to either kill off or put on hold a character that represents the bread and butter? You're a fine writer, but people not often so easily walk away from the bread and butter stuff.

Mosley: I'm a writer. So many people in America are writers - everybody in America, affected by capitalism. You put the left front tire on the Pinto, that's what you do for your whole life, you get your insurance, you get your retirement, all that stuff. But the truth is that I'm a writer, an artist, I want to do all kinds of different books, all kinds of different things.

I want to write about other detectives, I want to write about different eras, I want to talk about different aspects of Black male heroes. And as much as I could write more about Easy, it would be the same about Easy.

Tavis: You think so? There's so much -

Mosley: A lot. Him and (unintelligible) and Jackson Blue, and they've gotten to such a perfect place in their lives. Easy's at the peak of his powers, Mouse and Jackson are really - they're something else. Jesus is married, he has a child. Life is -

Tavis: Life is good.

Mosley: It's understandable.

Tavis: Tell me more about the storyline for those who obviously are just rushing out now to pick up a copy of "Blonde Faith." It takes place a couple years after the Watts riots here in L.A., of course.

Mosley: Yeah, it's a couple of years after the Watts riots, a guy that Easy has met only recently, Christmas Black, is in trouble. Mouse is being sought out by the police, the police were planning to kill him for a murder that he may or may not have committed. But really what's really going on with Easy is that in the last book he broke up with Bonnie and he realizes he was wrong. He's trying to figure out how to get back together with her, but he can't find it in his mind.

Couple of chapters in, she calls him and says, "I'm engaged. I'm getting married to this African prince." And so Easy's trying to deal with his inner demons while after these two guys, the two deadliest men in Los Angeles, in Southern California. And so that's the book, and in it you begin to understand how complex racism became after the riots.

After a real movement toward integration, racism became so complex and understanding it became so complex that as Easy moves through his day you begin to see, boy, this is more difficult than anybody can imagine. Easy says to a guy, he says, "Listen, only three out of every 10 people I meet are racist, but that's an awful lot, you run into 100 people a day."

Tavis: Yeah. (Laughs) How do you decide, or how do you know, when you have gone close enough to the line without stopping over it with regard, Walter, to entertaining people and not preaching to people? Because you always attach to the storyline, you always wrestle with larger themes like racism; in this book, the Vietnam War.

You never shy away from that, but how do you know when you are at the point of crossing that line between entertaining people and Walter Mosley's politics seeping in?

Mosley: Well, my politics don't seep in. Actually, honestly, I'm just telling the truth about Easy's life. Easy, in one part of this book, is going to go to a very nice restaurant. He's taking out this young woman he's met; he's trying to forget about Bonnie, he's trying to take her to this restaurant. Well, the guard when he goes into the restaurant tries to stop him.

The hostess at the front desk tries to stop him. The policemen on the street wonder what he's doing in the neighborhood. I'm not making this up. This is real. This is a real thing for Easy. And so if I went beyond it and started to philosophize about it or have him actually try to make something different, then I'd be going too far. But I'm just talking about - it's like if I were to write about a woman in 1901 in America, and I forgot to say, “Well, she doesn't have rights over her body, rights over her children, rights over her income, and she can't vote.”

If I left all those things out of her life, it would be a fantasy I'm writing. You have to say these things. But then you get right back to your story. Well, what's the story about? Why is he going to the restaurant? What's going to happen with the woman? What's going on? The story continues to go.

Tavis: What's your sense, as the writer, as the creator of Easy, for what the through-line has been where his character is concerned, that attaches us to him? You keep referring to him, and indeed he is, as a flawed character; he's not human and divine like the rest of us, only human; has his good points and his bad points. What is it about this particular character, Easy Rawlins, that's kept us attached to him that causes us to be endeared to him over 10 books?

Mosley: Well, I think that in one way, it's an identification. You have, like, for instance, a lot of Black men and some Black women who read Easy and say, "This is a real character in my life that I've known." And other people say, "This is a real character in my life that I've known." And on the other hand, you get things like I remember I got a review on Amazon for "Cinnamon Kiss" when Easy at the end of that book broke up with Bonnie.

Because she saved his daughter's life, but in doing so she rekindled this relationship with (unintelligible) and so he breaks up with her. And a woman wrote, she said it was always like a letter to me rather than a review on Amazon. She said, "That's it, I will never buy another one of your books because you had him do something which I just cannot accept."

And I thought, wow, that's great. (Laughter) She loves Easy, and she loves him so much that she's never going to read him again. I thought, God, that's a wonderful thing. But that identity, that his choice means something to her, and I think the real truth about that, it's about the writing itself. It's not about the characters, or race or masculinity or anything. It's about writing a character that you identify closely enough with that you get angry at.

Tavis: Over 10 books, over 10 appearances by Easy Rawlins. How much have you heard over the years from Easy fans, from fans of yours about what they like, didn't like, or they thought the storyline ought to go? How much interaction?

Mosley: People don't usually tell me what they think I should be writing, which is good. Every once in a while, I'll write some science fiction stuff and they say, "You should never write that again," and that's okay. (Laughter) I say, “That's all right, that's all right; you think like that, that's okay.” But no, no, no, people usually, they just want to talk about decisions Easy makes or Mouse makes or Jackson Blue makes, somebody like that, and where they're going with those ideas and thoughts.

I think that Easy has entered the consciousness - there are not very many people ever in American history who write about Black male heroes that you can put a name on. Not many at all. And it's because of the nature of the country. Black men have been vilified partially because people are afraid of them, and the other part because people feel so guilty about what's been done to Black masculinity.

And so it's hard, even among Black people, to create heroes that exist in other cultures, races, etc. And so in order to have a hero like Easy Rawlins, or Fearless Jones or Socrates (unintelligible), people are very happy just to have that hero. So they don't want to really change it and say, "Man, good, you got it there? That's good."

Tavis: Leave it the way it is, yeah.

Mosley: Just leave it there, don't run away with it.

Tavis: I think I know what you meant by this, but just to make sure that I'm clear, to say nothing of the audience being clear, when you say Black male heroes that you can put a name on, what did you mean by the latter part?

Mosley: Well, Easy Rawlins. I like that Mouse, and people start quoting things Mouse says, and they start quoting things that Easy says, and the notion that there's a name. There's a name on a character, it's like Zorro or some other character who people say they're - “That's my hero. Batman, that's my hero.”

Tavis: I raise that only because I think a lot of people perhaps don't think that Black heroes even exist, much less can have a name put on them.

Mosley: Yeah, no, I understand that, and of course they do exist. And certainly in my life, certainly in yours, there are all these, like, Black men who are wonderful. It's not that there aren't other people who are wonderful. It's just that the Black men who are wonderful kind of fade into some kind of background and it's like they become caricatures that we could put - well, either it's the pimp or the preacher or the sidekick, not a man out there in the world, making a difference in the world.

Tavis: I can think of, and I don't want to start listing names, because we'd be here for the rest of the week doing this, but I could list a bunch of names of people, heroes, shall we say, who've had a movie, a sequel, another sequel, another sequel - we're up to, like, four or five of these things now, they all stink except for the first one, that's my own personal opinion. We got one good Easy pick, "Devil in a Blue Dress;" 10 books, though - why not more motion pictures?

Mosley: I don't know. I made this movie with Tri-Star and that was good. The movie kind of broke even. Unluckily, it came out the same weekend that O.J. Simpson was found not guilty, so there were no Black male heroes in America (laughter) that weekend.

Tavis: That weekend, yeah.

Mosley: And we were still the number two movie.

Tavis: Yeah, it was a great movie, though.

Mosley: And the movie broke even. And then afterwards with DVDs and VHS, they've made many, many, many millions -

Tavis: So why not another one, then?

Mosley: It's beyond me. Like they never wanted to make another movie. I've written a script for HBO that Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright have said they want to star in, and I'm working with them. Hopefully, we're going to do something.

Tavis: It's an Easy treatment, or something different?

Mosley: Oh, it's easy. It's "Little Scarlet," which is one of the best. I actually think this "Blonde Faith" the best of all the Easys, but "Little Scarlet" was a very good book, took, and about the Watts riots, etc. They want to do it; they want to do it for a price. We're trying to work that out, so we'll see what happens.

Tavis: What makes Walter Mosley the writer say that he thinks this one, "Blonde Faith," is the best of the Easys?

Mosley: I think that it gets the deepest into Easy's heart. Easy has a very - he's a good person, but he has a very dark heart. And inside of it, lots of things have gone wrong. All the things that have gone wrong for so many people, including Black people around the world, reside in Easy. Easy was at Dachau, Easy was in World War II, Easy lived in the Deep South when Jim Crow was the master.

Easy has changed his life, even though everything was set against him. And this book, I think, underscores all of that, and in a way that's clear and fluid, and his ideas about his friends have changed. Jackson Blue friends.

Tavis: This is a dangerous question to close on with a guy like you, but since you mentioned earlier you want to do other stuff, should this be the last Easy Rawlins book, what else is in your head that you want to tackle?

Mosley: Well I can tell you that the next - at least three books coming out - in December, I have a book coming out called "Diablerie" (sp), which is a very noir novel, kind of a Black anti-hero. Then I have the "Tempest Tales," stories that I had written for Savoy and (unintelligible) coming out from Black Classic Press in April, and then Basic Books is coming out with the new Socrates (unintelligible) collection called "The Right Mistake." So right there I got -

Tavis: At least the next three.

Mosley: Yeah, yeah.

Tavis: All right. And finally, somebody sent me an email the other day, and I've known you for years and I said I think I know this story, but I've never asked Walter this question on television. So Easy has his own idiosyncrasies. You love wearing that fedora, and people know it's part of your trademark. When and where did the fedora begin?

Mosley: It was about 20 years ago. I was in New York and I'd always worn a beret my whole life and then all of a sudden a beret just wasn't working anymore. And -

Tavis: So you went from Che Guevara to this?

Mosley: Yeah, right, well, (laughter) Che Guevara, that's kind of like going backwards. From Che Guevara to a gangster. And then I started writing and publishing, and the hat kind of followed me along with it.

Tavis: It works.

Mosley: But what did they email you? What did they say -

Tavis: No, they just wanted to know.

Mosley: Oh, they just wanted to know why -

Tavis: Could you please ask Walter Mosley why the fedora?

Mosley: Hey.

Tavis: There you have it.

Mosley: All right.

Tavis: We try to serve our customers around here.

Mosley: That's right, that's good.

Tavis: The new book, maybe the last so you better run out and get it, Walter Mosley, "Blonde Faith." The tenth and again perhaps final Easy Rawlins mystery. We pray not, but if it is, it's 10 good years - 10 good books, I should say. Good to see you, Walter.

Mosley: Thanks a lot.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight.