How crime genre pioneer Walter Mosley defied expectations

It would have been easy for Mosley, an aspiring novelist who had been working as a computer programmer in the 1980s, to be discouraged and move on to something else. Born and raised in Los Angeles, the son of a Jewish mother and African-American father who couldn’t get a marriage licence in the 1950s, Mosley had few if any examples of writers who looked like him.

But he kept writing. Every day, for more than 30 years. “I just had to remember to stay true to what I thought I was doing as a writer, and not what somebody else wanted me to do,” Mosley tells the Listener over a video call from his home in New York. “I didn’t realise it at first, but I was writing about black male heroes. If you don’t exist in literature, you don’t exist in the culture. That’s still true today, even though we have all these popular movies. So, one of the things I wanted to do is write like Émile Zola, who says, ‘I’m going to write about the history of France’ in the Rougon-Macquart series, and writes dozens of novels. I’m writing books to talk about a part of American culture that doesn’t make it into literature.”

Mosley uses the term literature regularly. A prolific storyteller, he has published nearly 60 books since 1990, ranging across crime fiction, erotica, science fiction, graphic novels, literary fiction, political non-fiction, memoir and how-to-write books, to go along with stage plays, short stories, personal essays and screenwriting. He decries any snobbery about “popular fiction” versus “literature”. “Great literature always speaks to a large range of people,” says Mosley, noting that whether you’re talking about Shakespeare or many novelists who are considered classic literature, from Dickens to Austen to Zola, those “great writers were almost all popular writers; all people whom people love to read”.

Mosley, who’s most often seen as a crime writer despite his wide repertoire, has received numerous accolades, including the O Henry Award, the Anisfield Wolf Award (for works increasing the appreciation and understanding of race in America), a Grammy Award, an honorary doctorate, and multiple National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work. In 2016, he became the first non-white author to be made a grand master by the Mystery Writers of America, and in 2020, he became the first black man ever to receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

But when he began writing in the late 1980s, taking a class at City College in Harlem after being inspired by Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, few could foresee how popular and influential Mosley would become. His tutor, the great Irish writer Edna O’Brien, believed in Mosley. She saw the value in his background and voice: black, Jewish, a poor upbringing. To O’Brien, that was an asset.

But no one Mosley sent his first manuscript to felt the same. Gone Fishin’ was a lyrical coming-of-age story about two young black men, Ezekiel Rawlins and Raymond Alexander, in interwar Texas.

“I sent it out, and nobody wanted to publish it basically, because the thought was, in America at any rate, that white people don’t read about black people, black women don’t like black men, and black men don’t read. So, who’s gonna read your book?”

Fortunately for readers and countless storytellers who’ve since been inspired by Mosley, he didn’t let those early setbacks dim his fire.

He tried again, this time with “Easy” Rawlins and “Mouse” Alexander as young men returned from World War II. Rawlins is struggling to find work in Los Angeles when he’s approached to find a young white woman who has been hanging out in African-American bars.