Going for a Long Fall

 

Walter Mosley has had a "storied" career--his more than 20 books have been translated into 21 languages, his first published book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington, and he's received numerous awards, including a Grammy for liner notes for a Richard Pryor recording.

His three popular mid-to-late-20th century protagonists, hard-boiled black private detective Easy Rawlins, army veteran Fearless Jones, and ex-con/street philosopher Socrates Fortlow, have won him legions of fans and critical acclaim. But Mosley, not one to rest on his laurels, has added a third protagonist to the mix, contemporary New York P.I. Leonid McGill, in the just-released novel The Long Fall.

As Mosley says in this podcast:

"I created this new character because I'm talking about a completely different world. The world of Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones is a world of monolithic racism where it is exactly the same everywhere, where American saw itself as one nation and one negative nation, a white nation and a non-white nation. And Leonid McGill lives in a world where that's no longer true, where all kinds of people blend together, respond to each other, for various reasons, very different reasons, and it's not as easy to tell who's your friend and who isn't, and it's not as easy to tell what people are thinking about."

In McGill, Mosley has created another complex character, a man trapped in a loveless marriage,  whose father was an idealistic communist and his grandfather a slave master from Scotland, who also practices Buddhist meditation and tries to keep his son, Twill (who isn't even his biologically) out of trouble, all the while trying to reform himself into an ex-smoker and more of a by-the-book investigator, "from crooked to only slightly bent":

"But those days were pretty much over for me. I hadn't given up being a private detective, that was all I knew. I still took incriminating photographs and located people who didn't necessarily want to be found. I exposed frauds and cheats without much guilt.

In other words, I still plied my trade but now I worried about things.

In the years  before, I had no problem bringing people down, even framing them with false evidence if that's what the client paid for. I didn't mind sending innocent men, or women, to prison because I didn't believe in innocence--and virtue didn't pay the bills. That was before my past caught up with me and died, spitting blood and curses on the rug."

And so it is that when a private detective from Albany offers him way too much money to help locate four young men, he's hesitant, but since there's nothing obviously illegal about the PI's offer and McGill's rent is over due, he takes the job. It doesn't take long before he realizes he's made a serious error in judgment when the men he locates, as well as the PI who hired him in the first place, start turning up dead.

Mosley has said he intends to write up to ten more books in this series, and it will be interesting to see where he takes his not-quite-noir, morally relativistic creation in the future.

You can catch some video interviews online with Mosley about The Long Fall from Penguin and from the Barnes and Noble's Tagged series.

If you happen to be in Atlanta this Saturday, Mosley will be giving a reading from the book at the Jimmy Carter Library at 2pm, which is appropriate since it was a comment from former President Bill Clinton about how Mosley was one of his favorite writers which gave the author's career a boost.