Little Green

In 2007’s Blonde Faith, set in 1967, Easy Rawlins drove drunkenly off a cliff in what his creator indicated was likely his last appearance. Now, after two months of sliding in and out of consciousness, Easy begins the long journey back to the living, in Mosley’s superb 12th mystery featuring his iconic sleuth. Saved by Ray “Mouse” Alexander and the ministrations of Mama Jo, Easy is asked by Mouse to find Evander “Little Green” Noon, who went clubbing on the Sunset Strip and disappeared. Weakened but determined to keep moving, Easy is buoyed by Mama Jo’s potent brew she calls “Gator’s Blood” and the support of numerous friends, including Martin Martins and Jackson Blue. Things are changing in L.A., and Easy finds hope in the hippie culture. In the course of his search for Little Green, Easy earns an astonished accolade from Blue, who says he never thought he’d see the day “when Raymond Alexander had to tell Easy Rawlins to hold back.” If there were an Edgar for best comeback player, Easy Rawlins would be a shoo-in. 8-city author tour. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency. (May)

On Sale: May 14, 2013

(Source: Publishers Weekly)

Merge / Disciple: Two Short Novels from Crosstown to Oblivion

Merge

Raleigh Redman loved Nicci Charbon until she left him heartbroken. Then he hit the lotto for twenty-four million dollars, quit his minimum-wage job, and set his sights on one goal: reading the entire collection of lectures in the Popular Educator Library. As Raleigh is trudging through the eighth volume, he notices something in his apartment that at first seems ordinary but quickly reveals itself to be from a world very different from our own. This entity shows Raleigh joy beyond the comforts of twenty-four million dollars . . . and merges our world with those that live beyond.

Disciple

Hogarth “Trent” Tryman is a forty-two-year-old man working a dead-end data-entry job. Though he lives alone and has no real friends besides his mother, he’s grown quite content in his quiet life, burning away time with television, the Internet, and video games. That all changes the night he receives a bizarre instant message. At first he thinks it’s a joke, but in just a matter of days Hogarth Tryman goes from a data-entry clerk to the head of a corporation. His fate is now in very powerful hands as he realizes he has become a pawn in a much larger game with unimaginable stakes.

Published October 2, 2012

On the Head of a Pin

Joshua Winterland and Ana Fried are working at Jennings-Tremont Enterprises when they make the most important discovery in the history of this world—or possibly the next. JTE is developing advanced animatronics editing techniques to create high-end movies indistinguishable from live-action. Long dead stars can now share the screen with today’s A-list. But one night Joshua and Ana discover something lingering in the rendered footage…an entity that will lead them into a new age beyond the reality they have come to know.

Published May 8, 2012

The Gift of Fire

Published May 8, 2012

All I Did Was Shoot My Man

In the latest and most surprising novel in the bestselling Leonid McGill series, Leonid finds himself caught between his sins of the past and an all-too-vivid present.

Seven years ago, Zella Grisham came home to find her man, Harry Tangelo, in bed with her friend. The weekend before, $6.8 million had been stolen from Rutgers Assurance Corp., whose offices are across the street from where Zella worked. Zella didn’t remember shooting Harry, but she didn’t deny it either. The district attorney was inclined to call it temporary insanity-until the police found $80,000 from the Rutgers heist hidden in her storage space.

For reasons of his own, Leonid McGill is convinced of Zella’s innocence. But as he begins his investigation, his life begins to unravel. His wife is drinking more than she should. His oldest son has dropped out of college and moved in with an ex-prostitute. His youngest son is working for him and trying to stay within the law. And his father, whom he thought was long dead, has turned up under an alias.

A gripping story of murder, greed, and retribution, All I Did Was Shoot My Man is also the poignant tale of one man’s attempt to stay connected to his family.

Published January 24, 2012

(Source: WalterMosley.com)

Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

In his late teens and early twenties, Walter Mosley was addicted to alcohol and cigarettes. Drawing from this intimate knowledge of addiction and recovery, Mosley explores the deviances of contemporary America and describes a society in thrall to its own consumptions. Although Americans live in the richest country on earth, many citizens exist on the brink of poverty, and from that profound economic inequality stems self-destructive behavior.

In Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation, Mosley outlines his twelve-step guide to recovery from oppression. First we must identify the problems that surround us. Next we must actively work together to create a just, more holistic society. And finally, power must be returned to the embrace of the people.

Challenging and original, Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation confronts both our understanding of ourselves, and how we define ourselves in relation to others. 

Published 2011

(Source: Publisher)

When the Thrill is Gone

Leonid McGill is back, in the third-and most enthralling and ambitious-installment in Walter Mosley's latest New York Times bestselling series.

The economy has hit the private-investigator business hard, even for the detective designated as "a more than worthy successor to Philip Marlowe" (The Boston Globe) and "the perfect heir to Easy Rawlins" (Toronto Globe and Mail). Lately, Leonid McGill is getting job offers only from the criminals he's worked so hard to leave behind. Meanwhile, his life grows ever more complicated: his favorite stepson, Twill, drops out of school for mysteriously lucrative pursuits; his best friend, Gordo, is diagnosed with cancer and is living on Leonid's couch; his wife takes a new lover, infuriating the old one and endangering the McGill family; and Leonid's girlfriend, Aura, is back but intent on some serious conversations...

So how can he say no to the beautiful young woman who walks into his office with a stack of cash? She's an artist, she tells him, who's escaped from poverty via marriage to a rich collector who keeps her on a stipend. But she says she fears for her life, and needs Leonid's help. Though Leonid knows better than to believe every word, this isn't a job he can afford to turn away, even as he senses that-if his family's misadventures don't kill him first-sorting out the woman's crooked tale will bring him straight to death's door.

Published 2011

(Source: Publisher)

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Ptolemy Grey is ninety-one years old and has been all but forgotten-by his family, his friends, even himself-as he sinks into a lonely dementia. His grand-nephew, Ptolemy's only connection to the outside world, was recently killed in a drive-by shooting, and Ptolemy is too suspicious of anyone else to allow them into his life, until he meets Robyn, his niece's seventeen-year-old lodger and the only one willing to take care of an old man at his grandnephew's funeral.

But Robyn will not tolerate Ptolemy's hermitlike existence. She challenges him to interact more with the world around him, and he grasps more firmly onto his disappearing consciousness. However, this new activity pushes Ptolemy into the fold of a doctor touting an experimental drug that guarantees Ptolemy won't live to see age ninety- two but that he'll spend his last days in feverish vigor and clarity. With his mind clear, what Ptolemy finds-in his own past, in his own apartment, and in the circumstances surrounding his grand-nephew's death-is shocking enough to spur an old man to action, and to ensure a legacy that no one will forget.

In The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, Mosley captures the compromised state of his protagonist's mind with profound sensitivity and insight, and creates an unforgettable pair of characters at the center of a novel that is sure to become a true contemporary classic.

Published 2010

(Source: Publisher)

Known to Evil (A Leonid McGill Mystery)

Leonid McGill-the protagonist introduced in The Long Fall, the book that returned Walter Mosley to bestseller lists nationwide -is still fighting to stick to his reformed ways while the world around him pulls him in every other direction. He has split up with his girlfriend, Aura, because his new self won't let him leave his wife-but then Aura's new boyfriend starts angling to get Leonid kicked out of his prime, top-of-the­skyscraper office space. Meanwhile, one of his sons seems to have found true love-but the girl has a shady past that's all of sudden threatening the whole McGill family-and his other son, the charming rogue Twilliam, is doing nothing but enabling the crisis.

Most ominously of all, Alfonse Rinaldo, the mysterious power-behind- the-throne at City Hall, the fixer who seems to control every little thing that happens in New York City, has a problem that even he can't fix- and he's come to Leonid for help. It seems a young woman has disappeared, leaving murder in her wake, and it means everything to Rinaldo to track her down. But he won't tell McGill his motives, which doesn't quite square with the new company policy- but turning down Rinaldo is almost impossible to even contemplate.

Known to Evil delivers on all the promise of the characters and story lines introduced in The Long Fall, and then some. It careens fast and deep into gritty, glittery contemporary Manhattan, making the city pulse in a whole new way, and it firmly establishes Leonid McGill as one of the mystery world's most iconic, charismatic leading men.

Published 2011

(Source: Publisher)

The Long Fall

His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: Leonid McGill, Private Investigator. It’s a name that takes a little explaining, but he’s used to it. “Daddy was a communist and great-great- Granddaddy was a slave master from Scotland. You know, the black man’s family tree is mostly root. Whatever you see aboveground is only a hint at the real story.”

Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGill’s an old-school P.I. working a city that’s gotten fancy all around him. Fancy or not, he has always managed to get by—keep a roof over the head of his wife and kids, and still manage a little fun on the side—mostly because he’s never been above taking a shady job for a quick buck. But like the city itself, McGill is turning over a new leaf, “decided to go from crooked to slightly bent.”

New York City in the twenty-first century is a city full of secrets—and still a place that reacts when you know where to poke and which string to pull. That’s exactly the kind of thing Leonid McGill knows how to do. As soon as The Long Fall begins, with McGill calling in old markers and greasing NYPD palms to unearth some seemingly harmless information for a high-paying client, he learns that even in this cleaned-up city, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be constantly tested.

And we learn that with this protagonist, this city, this time, Mosley has tapped a rich new vein that’s inspiring his best work since the classic Devil in a Blue Dress.

Published 2009

(Source: Amazon)

Best African American Essays: 2009

This exciting collection introduces the first-ever annual anthology of writing solely by African Americans. Here are remarkable essays on a variety of subjects informed by—but not necessarily about—the experience of blackness as seen through the eyes of some of our finest writers.

From art, entertainment, and science to technology, sexuality, and current events—including the battle for the Democratic nomination for the presidency—the essays in this inaugural anthology offer the compelling perspectives of a number of well-known, distinguished writers, including Malcolm Gladwell, Jamaica Kincaid, James McBride, and Walter Mosley, and a number of other writers who are just beginning to be heard. 

Published 2009

The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow

Living in South Central L.A., Socrates Fortlow is a sixty-year-old ex-convict, still strong enough to kill men with his bare hands. Now freed after serving twenty-seven years in prison, he is filled with profound guilt about his own crimes and disheartened by the chaos of the streets. Along with his gambler friend Billy Psalms, Socrates calls together local people of all races from their different social stations—lawyers, gangsters, preachers, Buddhists, businessmen—to conduct meetings of a Thinkers’ Club, where all can discuss the unanswerable questions in life.

The street philosopher enjoins his friends to explore—even in the knowledge that there’s nothing that they personally can do to change the ways of the world—what might be done anyway, what it would take to change themselves. Infiltrated by undercover cops, and threatened by strain from within, tensions rise as hot-blooded gangsters and respectable deacons fight over issues of personal and social responsibility. But simply by asking questions about racial authenticity, street justice, infidelity, poverty, and the possibility of mutual understanding, Socrates and his unlikely crew actually begin to make a difference.

In turns outraged and affectionate, The Right Mistake offers a profoundly literary and ultimately redemptive exploration of the possibility of moral action in a violent and fallen world. 

Published 2008

(Source: Amazon)

The Tempest Tales

Tempest Landry, an everyman African American, is “accidentally” killed by a cop. Denied access to heaven because of what he considers a few minor transgressions, Tempest refuses to go to hell. Stymied, Saint Peter sends him back to Harlem, where a guiding angel tries to convince him to accept Saint Peter's judgment, and even the Devil himself tries to win over Tempest’s soul. Through the street-smart Landry, Mosley poses the provocative question: Is sin for blacks the same as it is for whites? And who gets to decide? 

Published 2008

This Year You Write Your Novel

Master storyteller Walter Mosley shares the secrets of the craft and gives you the tools to write a novel in just one year. No more excuses. "Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls," Mosley advises. Anyone can write a novel now, and in this essential book of tips, practical advice and wisdom, Mosley promises that the writer-in-waiting can finish it in one year. Intended as both inspiration and instruction, the book provides the tools to turn out a first draft painlessly and then revise it into something finer. Mosley tells how to: Create a daily writing regimen to fit any writer's needs, and how to stick to it; Determine the narrative voice that's right for every writer's style; Get past those first challenging sentences and into the heart of a story.

Published 2007

Blonde Faith

Set in post-Watts 1967, this 10th installment of Mosley's groundbreaking Easy Rawlins series finds Easy, now 47, groping for stability in an increasingly unstable world. He's just lost his soul mate and has now been hired to track down two friends: Christmas Black, a former Green Beret who left his adopted Vietnamese child at Easy's house before disappearing, and everyone's favorite sociopath, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, whom the police are out to kill. In their review, Library Journal observed: "More than one man's journey, Mosley's Easy Rawlins series is a chronicle of the shifting landscape of race relations from the 1940s to the 1960s and is destined to become part of the American-and not just African American-conscience. Highly recommended."

Published 2007

Source: Library Journal

Fear of the Dark

Fearless Jones and Paris Minton, stars of the bestsellers Fearless Jones and Fear Itself, return in a high-velocity, larger-than-life thriller about family, betrayal, and revenge. Filled with the sheer-nerve plotting and brilliant characterizations that prompted The Nation to credit Walter Mosley for "the finest detective oeuvre in American literature."

Published 2006

(Source: Waltermosley.com)

Killing Johnny Fry

The first sexistential novel by one of America's greatest men of letters startles in both its rawness and its honest portrayal of a man on a quest for sexual redemption in midlife. When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act that he witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. In that instant, the calm existence of this middle-aged New York City man becomes something unrecognizable: he wants revenge, but also something more. Killing Johnny Fry is the story of Cordell's dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. Above all, it is about a man questioning the rules we take for granted, and the powerful and sometimes disturbing connections that occur between people when these rules are removed.

Published 2006

(Source: Bloomsbury USA)

Fortunate Son

Mosley's latest novel about two boys -- one white and ensconced in a life of privilege and the other black and living a life of hardship -- explores the true meaning of fortune. O Magazine calls it "a sharp parable that confronts hard questions head-on... you'll be on the edge of your seat." Publishers Weekly said, "With the lightest, slyest of touches, Mosley shows how a certain kind of inarticulate, carnal, involuntary affection transcends just about anyhting. It's not love, it's fate, and it's breathtaking." Library Journal raved, "Fortunate Son deserves to be on the shelves of every library."

Published 2007

(Source: Little Brown)

Life Out of Context

 Life Out of Context begins as a powerful, brooding and humorously honest examination of Mosley's own sense of cultural dislocation as an African American writer. But due to a series of serendipitous events (the screening of a documentary about Africa, an encounter with Harry Belafonte and Hugh Masakela), Mosley, rather like the protagonist in one of his mystery novels, has a series of epiphanies on the role of a black intellectual in America. He asks: What can we do to fight injustice, poverty, exploitation, and racism? What is globalization doing to us? Through these late night meditations, Mosley attempts to transcend his earlier feelings of living a "life out of context" and seeks instead to find a political context. He ends with a call to arms, proposing that African Americans have to break their historic ties with the Democrat Party, and form a party of their own. 

Published 2006

(Source: Avalon Publishing Group)

The Wave

 The New York Times bestselling author returns to science fiction with an eerie, transcendent novel of the near future. Errol's father has been dead for several years. Yet lately Errol has been awakened in the middle of the night by a caller claiming to be his father. Is it a prank, or a message from the grave? When he hears the unmistakable sound of a handset being put down on a table, he decides to investigate. Curious and not a little unnerved, Errol sneaks into the graveyard where his father is buried. What he finds there changes his life forever. Caught up in a war between a secret government security agency and an alien presence infecting our world, touched by the Wave, he knows that nothing will ever be the same again.

Published 2006

(Source: Warner Books)

Cinnamon Kiss

Mosley's sizzling new novel pits Easy Rawlins against his greatest challenge ever -- a terrifying murder during the Summer of Love. In an advanced review, Publishers Weekly said, "As ever, Mosley is able to capture the era -- hippies, Watts, communes -- in brief strokes that provide a brilliant background to Easy's search for solutions."

Published 2005

47

In his first book for young adults, Mosley deftly weaves historical and speculative fiction into a powerful narrative about the nature of freedom. Nominated by the American Library Association as one of the Best Books for Young Adults in 2006.

Published 2006

(Source: Time Warner)

Maximum Fantastic Four

Walter Mosley is a self-described comic book geek. From the time he discovered The Fantastic Four, the groundbreaking 1961 superhero comic book created for Marvel Comics by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, he has been fascinated by Kirby and Lee's art and storytellling. "I learned," says Mosley of the comic, "that entertainment, education, and art could all coexist in one form." Now, more than four decades later, Mosley has teamed with Marvel Comics to produce this oversized hardcover recreation of the first issue of The Fantastic Four with a new twist " every one of Kirby's panels is enlarged, transforming a 32-page pulp comic into a 224-page hardcover book. "The result," says Publishers Weekly "offers something like Roy Lichtenstein's early comic panel paintings.... an impressive tribute to Kirby and Lee and a labor of love by Mosley."

Published 2005

(Source: Publishers Weekly)

Little Scarlet: An Easy Rawlins Mystery

Mosley returns to top form in this ninth installment of his celebrated Easy Rawlins series. It's the last days of the Watts riots in 1966, and a black woman, nicknamed Little Scarlet, has been found murdered in her apartment, the same building that an unidentified white man appeared to enter after escaping a mob of rioters. Did the white man commit the murder? The LAPD wants answers quickly, which is why Rawlins is asked to investigate... Mosley remains a master at showing his readers slices of history from the inside, from a perspective that is all those things history usually isn't: intimate, individual, and passionate.

Published 2004

(Source: Booklist's starred review)

The Man In My Basement

Charles Blakey is a young black man whose life is slowly crumbling. His parents are dead, he can't find a job, he drinks too much, and his friends have begun to desert him. Worst of all, he's fallen behind on the mortgage payments for the beautiful home that's belonged to his family for generations. When a stranger offers him $50,000 in cash to rent out his basement for the summer, Charles needs the money too badly to say no. He sees an opportunity to understand secrets of the white world, and his summer with a man in his basement turns into a journey into inconceivable worlds of power and manipulation, and unimagined realms of humanity.

Published 2005

(Source: backcover of the book)

Fear Itself: A Fearless Jones Novel

In this eagerly anticipated follow-up to Fearless Jones (2001), Watts bookstore owner Paris Minton and the dangerous but principled Fearless Jones are reunited in this mystery filled with deception, kidnapping, temptation and murder. Mosley weaves a gripping tale thanks to a fast-paced and largely character-driven narrative set in the black Los Angeles of the 1950's.

Published 2003

What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace

What Next is a deeply personal and political essay, offering a simply written, common sense approach to the current challenge of world peace. Mosley threads stories and remembrances of his father, through a provocative assessment of the unique perspective African Americans have developed as insiders and outsiders in America. He challenges African Americans to use this unique position to demand and help create a new kind of peace between the United States and the rest of the world. This new role for African Americans may well be the only route to a lasting peace.

Published 2003

Fearless Jones

Paris Minton is a black bookstore owner in 1950's Los Angeles, happy to mind his own business - but when the beautiful Elana Love walks into his store, his lust for her gets him into trouble. Soon he's been robbed and his store burned to the ground. He needs the help of his friend Fearless Jones, a World War II veteran who earned his name fighting Nazi soldiers. Together they set out to find the elusive Elana Love and discover a trail that leads to a cache of looted riches from the War. But the more they uncover, the more danger they're in - as black men in 1950s L.A., they have no rights, few friends, and little recourse under attack.

Published 2002

Devil in a Blue Dress: A Novel

In Devil in a Blue Dress, Detective Easy Rawlins is hired by a financier and a gangster to locate Daphne Monet, a search that leads him from elegant board meetings to the raucous jazz joints of the late forties in Los Angeles.

Published 1990

Walkin' the Dog

Nine years after being released from prison, ex-convict Socrates Forlow is struggling to rebuild his life - with a girlfriend, a steady job, and a pet - but his efforts to maintain his principles and do the right thing is complicated when the police make him their prime suspect for every neighborhood crime.

Published 2000

Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Hand of History

Walter Mosley spins a different yarn in Workin' on the Chain Gang, imploring citizens to solve the social, economic, racial, and political crimes of late 20th-century civilization. Mosley takes aim at the average American's feelings of disempowerment and - while he is quick to point out the role race plays - he also states: "The problem facing Americans today does not originate from racial conflict. The problem is the enslavement of a whole nation to the rather small and insignificant goals of the few who own (or control) almost everything."

Published 2006

Blue Light

Blue Light is a speculative novel about good and evil, the nature of humanity, and the ultimate purpose and fate of the human race.

Published 1998

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

 This is the debut of Socrates Fortlow, a tough ex-convict who's determined to challenge and understand the violence and anarchy in his world -- and in himself. In each of the stories that comprise this novel, Socrates, like his namesake, explores philosophical questions of morality in a world beset with crime, poverty and racism.

Published 1998

Black Betty

 In Black Betty, Easy Rawlins is tracking down Elizabeth Eady, a.k.a. "Black Betty"--a stunning beauty with mayhem in her wake. Easy's search takes readers deep into America's racial dilemmas and the mysteries of human character.

Published 2002