Photograph by Marcia Wilson
“Words could be either glue or acid, an old man named Tyner once told me…. Words are the finest invention that human beings have ever made. They build bridges and burn ’em down.” —Walter Mosley in Little Green
In 1990, Walter Mosley came out with his first Easy Rawlins mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress. Bill Clinton loved Easy Rawlins, and Denzel Washington brought him alive on screen. All manner of books followed—more Rawlins books, crime fiction with other heroes, nonfiction, novels, plays. Now Little Green brings Easy back—quite literally, after he crashes his car and tumbles over a cliff, and the cops stamp their Easy Rawlins file “Dead.” “Most novels I write are novels of redemption,” Mosley says. “People who have had to live tough lives. But this novel went beyond that. It’s a novel of resurrection.”
Are you religious?
Not in any kind of classical way. I’m Cartesian: I think, therefore I am. My consciousness seems to be an awareness that goes beyond the physical—so it’s almost impossible not to believe in a soul. But I don’t think I understand anything about it. I don’t have any rituals around it.
One of your famous characters, Socrates Fortlow, is as reflective as you are.
When you think about the philosophers, starting with Socrates really—although the sophists came before him—philosophy is, like, real and physical. You start your university on a street corner, and people come up and they talk to you, and you talk to them, and you have to prove yourself as a thinker. Socrates was a war hero, a very powerful man, kind of ugly. I saw my Socrates as kind of a reflection of the real Socrates, not the later philosophy that becomes so abstract and “purified.” In The Right Mistake, one of the characters says that the white man takes what’s good and makes it purer—like white sugar. “Which makes it better?” Socrates asks. “No, sir. Pure’ll kill you.”
How do you make Easy Rawlins—and so many of your other characters—so likeable? Is it a conscious effort?
I don’t think it is conscious, honestly. I was at the Mystery Writers award ceremony last night, and I was thinking, almost as if I wasn’t a writer, how do you do that? How do you make people likeable? I don’t know. I just like writing about characters. I like writing about Easy and Mouse and Mama Jo.
You like them, and readers pick up on that. I just loved Mama Jo [the voodoo practitioner who gives Easy a potion called Gator’s Blood to help him recover after his accident]. Where’d she come from?
Mama Jo was a big character in the first book I ever wrote, Gone Fishin’. When I was a kid, my cousin Alberta told me a story about how down in Galveston, rats would come up on the pylons to sun themselves, and boys would grab them by the tail and swing them around. Alberta grabbed a rat by the tail to be like the boys, but froze when she did it, and the rat bit her. Her arm turned black and swole up twice its size, but she had a witch woman in the family, and the woman put a poultice on and said, “Just let her sleep through the fever.” When they took off the bandage, there was a toad that had been killed and sliced open, pressed against the bite. Alberta said, “That toad just sucked the poisons out.” I completely believed that story when I was a kid. So I imagined the woman who did that, and that woman was Mama Jo.
By the way, what’s in Gator’s Blood?
I think it’s probably illegal. But she probably makes it from scratch, so it’s not so illegal.
Easy’s done some things he’s not proud of, and Socrates Fortlow has done terrible things, yet we forgive them instantly. How do you manage to make your heroes just bad enough?
I think I talk about the way we really are. There are ideals about who we want to be, and we make the people in our histories those perfect ideals. And then one day your mother comes in and says, “Well, he wasn’t really your father. Your father is really your uncle.”
I write about who the character is really. The difference between your friends and the people who might be your enemies is that you like your friends and you don’t like your enemies. Other than that, they are exactly the same. [In other words, Mosley’s a lot like Easy, who’s told by another character, “You look at the world and see what’s there. You know there ain’t one person outta three hundred could lay a claim to half’a that.”]
How do you define noir?
I was on a panel with Otto Penzler—who politically I don’t agree with about anything—but he was very good about noir. He said noir has at its base tragedy: Terrible things happen to people. But in film, it’s a mood. It’s the way people dress, the way people come up to you. The mood is dark, the mood is sleek, the mood is dangerous. But it’s not necessarily tragic or evil.
Well, your publisher says you write contemporary noir, so how would you define your version?
People say it, and I let them say it, because y’know, what am I going to do? But the truth is, I don’t know. I’m writing novels. Many of my novels—a little bit less than half—are crime fiction. Most of them have black male heroes. The genre I kind of leave up to other people.
You write incredibly well, did from the start. What have you learned over the years?
I appreciate you saying that, ’cause I just write. If I’m good, that’s great. It’s not something I can call upon easily. I know I love to write. Does that make me a better writer? Maybe. I think that all art is unconscious in its beginning, in its genesis. And because of that, it’s kind of by definition very difficult to know.
Don’t you think about technique at all?
I think about what I write. So I’ll read a sentence and say, “Ooh, that doesn’t work well,” or “that feels bad.” But technique in a more sophisticated sense, I don’t think about. Technique and art are not the same thing. There’s a lot of painters who can do anything, whatever you want them to put on a piece of paper, they can do. The question really is “What do you have to say?”
You used to smoke three packs a day and drink…a lot. What did addiction teach you?
For me, when I like something, it’s really hard to stop doing it. And it’s hard to limit it. People would have one cigarette after dinner; I’d smoke a pack. They’d have one drink; I’d drink a fifth. My father was a big self-medicator, and I think it’s kind of coming after him. Forgiving oneself is a really important thing. It’s as important as understanding oneself. Once you know something is true, it becomes more likely that you will do something about it.
Your characters’ names are strong and memorable and meaningful without being cute. How do you come up with them?
I like names. You know how they say Genghis Khan had 10,000 children? It’s like that, ’cause I get to give them all names.
Of all your books, all your awards and insights and achievements, what are you proudest?
I don’t know. But I can tell you who my favorite character is. It’s Twill, Leonid McGill’s wife’s son. He’s kind of an ideal sociopath. Sociopaths don’t have to be bad. He’s really lovable. He’s a character who defines right and wrong in his own terms, and because of that he’ll break all the laws and rules but never think he’s doing anything wrong.
Have you ever known somebody like that?
Oh, yeah, I’ve known lots of people like that, but not many who can pull it off.
Little Green hits bookstores tomorrow, May 14. Mosley will read and sign copies at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 23, at the St. Louis Public Library, 1415 Olive. Call 314-206-6779 or go to slpl.org for details.
