Blowing up: Walter Mosley is having a very prolific year, even for him, with an almost indescribable novel, a new mystery, a television venture and an editing project - fiction - Interview

Black Issues Book Review, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Pearl Stewart

Walter Mosley has never experienced writer's block. Ever. But he expects to. "I'm just hoping that when it happens I'll have enough things written so that I won't have to worry about it," he says, in a telephone interview from his New York apartment.

Mosley has been dizzyingly busy on con current projects, crossing genres, challenging readers' psyches and stretching his characters to new emotional depths and heights.

Mosley's latest novel, The Man in My Basement is due out January 2004. Fear Itself, the latest Fearless Jones mystery, debuted in July 2003. And The Best American Short Stories 2003, edited by Mosley with Katrina Kenison, was scheduled for release in October 2003. He has also been working on an Easy Rawlins television series for the USA Network, a "science fiction novel about slavery" for young adults and a movie project with director Wayne Wang. Has Mosley been cloned?

"It's really not that much. It's no more than you do every day," he says, laughing at the understatement. "I have all day every day to write, and I try not to do anything but write."

Paladoxically, he then mentions a few recent public appearances from Harlem to Idaho, and his intense interest in impoverished African nations, which he addresses as an outspoken hoard member of TransAfrica Forum. "But even when I travel I try to write every morning. Writing is what I do."

Being prolific on many fronts seems to he Mosley's modus operandi. "In a funny kind of negative way, I'm representative of a new breed of crime writers and fiction writers," Mosley said in a 2001 interview for the on-line edition of BookPage, "because I write so many different kinds of books."

The Man in My Basement is, indeed, a different kind of book. Even its promoters find the book indescribable. In her letter to BIBR, Laura Quinn, a Little, Brown executive wrote:

"Mosley has written mysteries, science fiction, and short stories. The Man in My Basement fits none of these genres. I have difficulty comparing it to anything. This is one strange work of fiction...."

For starters, it has an unlikable protagonist, a man who lies, steals, womanizes, drinks, daydreams and generally epitomizes uselessness. Unemployed and disgraced in his community, Charles Blakey lives in a house in the Hamptons, left to by his proud ancestors. Unlike the good-hearted Easy Rawlins and the troubled hut dignified Socrates Fortlow of Mosley's novels, Blakey appears to have no redeeming qualities. "Oh, he's not really that bad," Mosley insists good-naturedly. "The point is he gets his life together after he meets Aniston."

Aniston Bennet is a guilt-ridden mercenary who has profited from Third World atrocities far worse than any Blakey could even imagine. One day, Bennet appears at Blakey's door offering him a way out of his deepening financial woes. In exchange for a considerable amount of money, Bennet wants to become a prisoner in Blakey's storm-proof basement to atone for his treachery.

"Your whole life could be called a failure," Bennet declares once he is ensconced in the cellar. "Every second up until this moment has been wasted. But you are truly innocent while I, who have changed the course of nations, am not worthy to call you friend."

Blakey begins a transformation in an evocative tale of an emotionally undeveloped man's coming-of-age.

Mosley describes The Man in My Basement as essentially an existentialist work, and he acknowledges that parallels will be made to The Stranger, the 1946 novel by Albert Camus about a young man's alienation and spiritual uncertainty. "That's OK," he reasons. "I love Albert Camus."

For a successful mystery writer to shatter the boundaries his faithful readers and publishers have imposed might be considered risky, but Mosley rejects that idea. "When his longtime publisher Norton rejected his science fiction work, Blue Light, in 2000, he found another publisher, Little, Brown. Mosley theorizes that the success of many genre authors wanes after about 10 years. "By diversifying, I make it much more possible to survive. I do cross boundaries. I do innovative things that other people don't do, but I don't consider it risk taking; I think I am galvanizing my career."

Whatever the genre, Mosley's heroes--even Blakey--find ways to become self-sufficient, despite the odds, a point that Mosley says is critical. Independence and economic survival are important themes throughout his work.

In his other new novel, Fear Itself, the more familiar Mosley guides the reader through another taut mystery involving Paris Minton, a reticent bookstore owner forced into hiding while trying to help his trouble-plagued comrade Fern less Jones in 1950s Los Angeles. It is ultimately as much a story of loyalty and friendship as it is a suspenseful page-turner.

Mosley's third new project, The Best American Short Stories 2003, is a collection chosen by Mosley from publications ranging from mainstream Harper's and Esquire to the African American literary journal Callaloo and the edgy quarterly Tin House. The writers include well-known novelists Edwidge Danticat, E.L. Doctorow, Louise Erdrich and newer talents, including ZZ Packer.