Walter Mosley
American Novelist
1952-
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Mosley emerged during the 1990s as one of the foremost crime and detective fiction writers of his generation. His first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), achieved immediate popular success as well as critical acclaim. His private-eye hero Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins has appeared in seven novels that follow Easy's development from a teenager in south Texas during the 1930s to his uneasy success as a homeowner and family man in the African American community of post-World War II Los Angeles. Easy Rawlins has been favorably compared to the protagonists of the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and Mosley has been widely regarded as a rightful heir to African American crime writer Chester Himes. Mosley's literary reputation expanded in the early 1990s with the successful 1995 screen adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress and the acknowledgement by U.S. President Bill Clinton that Mosley was among his favorite authors.
Born in 1952 to a white Jewish mother and an African American father, Mosley was raised in South-Central Los Angeles, California. He graduated from high school in 1970 and enrolled in Goddard College in Vermont. He later earned a B.A. in political science from Johnson State College in 1977. Soon after graduating, Mosley moved to Boston, where he met and married Joy Kellman, a dancer and choreographer. Mosley moved to New York in 1982, where he worked as a computer programmer and began attending creative writing courses at the City College of New York. In 1989 he showed his manuscript of Devil in a Blue Dress to his writing teacher Frederic Tuten, who sent the novel to a literary agent. The agent soon arranged for the publication of Mosley's novel, and the commercial success of Devil in a Blue Dress allowed Mosley to support himself as a full-time writer. His three successive novels after Devil in a Blue Dress broadened Mosley's following and reputation, bringing him nominations for fiction awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the Private Eye Writers of America, and Britain's Crime Writers' Association. Developed for young urban residents, Mosley founded the City University of New York (CUNY) publishing degree program, the only such program in the country. Mosley has served on the board of directors of the National Book Awards, the Poetry Society of America, and TransAfrica as well as once serving as the president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Mosley is best known for his mystery series featuring private detective "Easy" Rawlins and his violent though loyal friend, Raymond Alexander, better known as "Mouse." The first novel in the series, Devil in a Blue Dress, is set in Los Angeles in 1948. Rawlins, a veteran of World War II, loses his job at a factory and is hired to track down a white woman known to frequent jazz clubs. Taking the job purely out of financial necessity, Easy is soon drawn into the complex and morally ambiguous underworld of L.A.'s African American community. As he struggles to locate the mystery woman, Easy repeatedly calls on his friend Mouse--a reputed ex-convict with a ruthless temper--to serve as a confidant, sidekick, and enforcer. Set in 1953 against the backdrop of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's communist witch-hunts, A Red Death (1991) finds Easy in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service for accepting $10,000 in untaxed payment for his detective services in Devil in a Blue Dress. Government agents coerce Easy into working for the FBI to spy on a union organizer suspected of being a communist. In White Butterfly (1992), set in the late 1950s, Easy has settled into a comfortable full-time job as a janitor at a public high school and is enjoying a quiet domestic life with his wife and a new baby. His relative newfound stability is disrupted when he is hired by the police to investigate the serial murders of several young women, one of whom is a white college coed who led a double life as an exotic dancer. Mouse is one of the key suspects in the police investigation, and Easy primarily becomes involved in an effort to aid his friend. The fourth novel, Black Betty (1994) takes place in the early 1960s and concerns Easy's search for a woman known as Black Betty, whom he knew during his youth back in Texas. Easy helps a woman to escape her abusive husband in A Little Yellow Dog (1996) and, as a result, ends up becoming the owner of a yellow dog named Pharaoh. The novel, set in 1963, concludes with two notable deaths--the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and the apparent death of Mouse, who lapses into a coma after being shot. In the conclusion, Mouse's wife, Etta Mae, carries his body out of the hospital, and it remains ambiguous if Mouse truly has died. Gone Fishin' (1997), a prequel to the Rawlins series, takes readers back to 1939, when a nineteen-year-old Easy and Mouse left their childhood home in south Texas and became embroiled in a murder. Marking Mosley's return to the Easy Rawlins series after a five-year hiatus, Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002), is set during the Civil Rights era, taking Easy on a tempestuous journey through the underworld of black political radicalism in his search for the missing son of a friend.
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Related Authors:
Frederick Busch (1941-2006)
John Alfred Williams (1925- )
Chester Himes (1909-1984)
Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995)
