Author Mosley to present ‘contrarian’ lecture at UNLV

You certainly know Walter Mosley from his series of mystery novels featuring hardboiled Los Angeles PI Easy Rawlins.

But that megaselling series — one book of which was adapted into a film starring Denzel Washington — is just the tip of the literary iceberg for Mosley, who works in genres ranging from mysteries to sci-fi to erotica to plays to political op-ed pieces, all of it offered in his own polished and, often, opinionated prose.

Mosley will visit Las Vegas May 7 to speak at a program sponsored by the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. The program begins at 7 p.m. in the ballroom of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Student Center. Tickets are free at the door.

In addition to working in a diverse array of literary genres, Mosley isn’t averse to mixing things up a bit, weaving history into his mysteries, social commentary into his sci-fi and keen sociopolitical insights into, well, just about everything he does. During a recent phone interview, Mosley said crossing and intermingling genres is merely part of being a writer and looking at the world through a writer’s eyes.

“Writers write. And if I’m going to think about politics, I’m going to think about it as a writer. If I’m going to think about sex, I’m going to think about it as a writer. In every genre you can imagine, I’m going to think about it as a writer,” he said.

Take, for instance, a recent short story Mosley wrote about New York that was basically a western. “It allowed me to see New York in a completely different way.”

And, in that case, the story worked well, while, in contrast, arbitrarily making that particular story a mystery “just complicates the issue.”

It’s nothing new, Mosley added. “If you read a lot of Twain or Dickens, they had stories that were love stories, mysteries, history. Everyone wrote just about everything.”

In the end, he said, the value of any story, in whatever genre, lies in whether “that’s good writing I want to read (and if) that’s a voice I want to hear.”

Nonetheless, Mosley has earned his most popular success in the mystery genre through his Easy Rawlins mysteries. Does it seem that mysteries are, in many ways, a popular but critically disrespected genre of literature?

Maybe, he answered, “but the worst is sci-fi. Nobody respects sci-fi, and I’m not really sure why”

Well-written, serious works exist in every genre, Mosley said, and there are “some very well-written, wonderful mysteries, from Hammett and Chandler down to so many writers who are really wonderful writers. And, then, you have the hack writers, just like you have hack writers in every other genre — the coming of age novel, memoirs, so-called literary novels.”

In fact, Mosley added, “the most marginalized form of writing is literary writing, because people buy more mysteries, romances and sci-fi than they do literary novels.”

Why are mysteries — as well as mysteries’ sort-of cousin genre, true crime — so popular? Mosley suspects it has something to do with “kind of an unconscious thing to try to protect ourselves” from bad things and bad people, and that mysteries and PI novels can meet a desire to “want to understand what does happen, how do I protect myself and how other people protect themselves.”

Crime novels and mysteries also can hold up a mirror to society and ourselves and force us to consider larger questions than “Who done it?” through the eyes of an interesting protagonist.

“When you’re writing in the crime genre, you’re actually writing about the foibles of humanity, how people are weak, how people are addictive, how people are attracted to things that are bad for them. How does this all work out? How do people handle it? The detective is often somebody who represents a certain kind of morality, and you may or may not agree with that morality, but you’re willing to follow the detective.

“And one of the great things about the genre, starting at least all the way back to Conan Doyle, is, you can look into different worlds. Your detective is trying to solve a crime and goes to different worlds, and you can see into them. The reader can see a much broader spectrum (of society) than they’re used to seeing.”

The stories of Easy Rawlins not only conveyed facets of African-American culture to white America but to some segments of black America, too, he said, and in a genre where, except for a few standouts such as the Chester Himes Gravedigger Jones/Coffin Ed Johnson stories set in ’50s and ’60s Harlem, that didn’t often happen.

Mosley’s already-popular Rawlins series got a significant kick onto the mass-market radar in 1992 when candidate Bill Clinton named Mosley as a favorite author.

That was “a wonderful thing,” Mosley said, but, at the same time, the first few books he’d written already were doing well.

“So it was wonderful that Bill Clinton read it,” Mosley said, but “it’s the old lady sitting on the corner who turned to me and said, ‘I read your book’ that was really exciting.”

Surprisingly, the Rawlins novels weren’t even intended to be detective stories. Rather, Mosley said he’s always been intrigued by Emile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart series, a collection of 20 novels that follows two fictional families over the course of almost 20 years in mid-1800s France.

While Mosley’s Rawlins novels track the course of their lead character, they also explore the evolution of Los Angeles and America from the ’40s into the ’60s. At first, Mosley said, “I wasn’t even thinking about writing mysteries. I wanted to talk about the black migration from Texas and Louisiana to the western states, and it turned out that the second time I tried it, it turned into a mystery and that was the first book I published.”

Mosley’s Las Vegas presentation will be the first entry in the Black Mountain Institute’s Jim Rogers Contrarian Lecture series, and he’ll talk about higher education. Mosley said that, while he’s not fond of labels, he considers himself a left-leaning “pragmatist” politically, and believes that both the Republican and Democratic parties have let African-Americans down. He’s deeply wary of capitalism. And, he rejects the notion that, with President Barack Obama’s election, America has become a so-called postracial society.

Mosley said he has had publishers decline to publish some of his work and who “say, ‘It’s too political. Can’t you just say something nice?’ Well, yeah, I mean people are dying all over the world, and it’s hard to say something nice about that.”

“It’s important to be political,” Mosley said. “I think the whole notion of democracy is, you should be involved with it every day.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280 or follow on Twitter at @JJPrzybys.