<img class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-612" src="https://www.waltermosley.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Debbie-Doesnt-Do-It-220×332.jpg" alt="Debbie Doesnt Do It Anymore" width="220" height="332" srcset="https://www.waltermosley.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Debbie-Doesnt-Do-It-220×332.jpg 220w, https://www.waltermosley.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Debbie-Doesnt-Do-It check this.jpg 444w” sizes=”(max-width: 220px) 100vw, 220px” />In this scorching, mournful, often explicit, and never less than moving literary novel by the famed creator of the Easy Rawlins series, Debbie Dare, a black porn queen, has to come to terms with her sordid life in the adult entertainment industry after her tomcatting husband dies in a hot tub. Electrocuted. With another woman in there with him. Debbie decides she just isn’t going to “do it anymore.” But executing her exit strategy from the porn world is a wrenching and far from simple process.
Millions of men (and no doubt many women) have watched famed black porn queen Debbie Dare—she of the blond wig and blue contacts-“do it” on television and computer screens every which way with every combination of partners the mind of man can imagine. But one day an unexpected and thunderous on-set orgasm catches Debbie unawares, and when she returns to the mansion she shares with her husband, insatiable former porn star and “film producer” Theon Pinkney, she discovers that he’s died in a case of hot tub electrocution, “auditioning” an aspiring “starlet.” Burdened with massive debts that her husband incurred, and which various L.A. heavies want to collect on, Debbie must reckon with a life spent in the peculiar subculture of the pornography industry and her estrangement from her family and the child she had to give up. She’s done with porn, but her options for what might come next include the possibility of suicide. Debbie . . . is a portrait of a ransacked but resilient soul in search of salvation and a cure for grief.
Following the success of OxTales and OxTravels, this collection of crime writing is the latest Oxfam fundraiser, introduced by Britain’s greatest crime writer, Ian Rankin, and featuring a compelling cast of suspects.
For 2014, Oxfam and Profile have turned to crime in order to raise a further £200,000 for Oxfam’s work.
OxCrimes is introduced by Ian Rankin and has been curated by Peter Florence, director of Hay Festival, where it will be launched in May. The stellar cast of contributors will include Walter Mosley, Mark Billingham, Alexander McCall Smith, Anthony Horowitz, Val McDermid, Peter James, Adrian McKinty, Denise Mina, Louise Welsh and a host of other compelling suspects.
Pre-Order OxCrimes:
by Michael Sommers, The New York Times
With best-selling mysteries like “Devil in a Blue Dress” among his more than three dozen books, Walter Mosley is a master of crime fiction who knows how to put his characters into tight, scary situations. In “Lift,” his new drama of suspense that begins performances on April 10 atCrossroads Theater Company in New Brunswick, the writer traps two strangers within an urban nightmare: Inside a damaged elevator that is stuck high up in a burning skyscraper.
Disturbing undertones of Sept. 11 aside, Mr. Mosley said his dramatic fiction was mostly about revealing the inner lives of the characters who are grappling with such terrors. “They are those average-looking people you see beside you every day who have interesting back stories that you wouldn’t ever suspect,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Brooklyn. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Marcia E. Wilson/WideVision Photography
Two strangers trapped in an elevator have a fateful encounter in Lift, a suspenseful new drama by award-winning writerWalter Mosley, premiering at Crossroads Theatre Company, 7 Livingston Ave., April 10-24.
Performances are 8 p.m., Thursdays through Saturdays; 3 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays; with additional performances at 10 a.m., Wednesday, April 16, and 7 p.m., Tuesday, April 22. Tickets are $10 to $65. Opening night is Saturday, April 12. Read the rest of this entry »
Fifteen years after Laurence Fishburne starred as Walter Mosley‘s Socrates Fortlow in the HBO movie Always Outnumbered written by Mosley and directed by Michael Apted, the actor-producer is revisiting the character for HBO, this time on the series side. The pay cable network is developing The Right Mistake, a drama series from Fishburne’s Cinema Gypsy Prods and Fox Television Studios. It is based on the series of novels by Mosley featuring Fortlow: an ex-convict who seeks redemption — while battling inner demons and external forces — after serving 27 years in prison. The books include Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, Walkin’ The Dog and The Right Mistake. Mosley and Patrick Charles are co-writing the series adaptation, with Fishburne attached to star. He is executive producing with Cinema Gypsy’s Helen Sugland and Tom Russo as well as Mosley and his partner, Diane Houslin. Charles is co-executive producing. The Right Mistake stems from the Cinema Gypsy’s first-look cable deal with FtvS. On the broadcast side, Cinema Gypsy has Black-ish, a single-camera comedy starring Anthony Anderson and written by Kenya Barris in development at ABC. The Matrix and CSI alum Fishburne, repped by Paradigm, Landmark Artist Management and Del, Shaw, also has a major recurring role on NBC’s Hannibal.
(via deadline.com)
For today only – July 19 – Amazon Kindle Daily Deal is
Futureland
by Walter Mosley
When he was a teenage author, Walter Mosley learned that African-American men like himself faced different laws and rights than his peers. In the wake of the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, he says nothing has changed—and asks what we’re going to do about it.
I remember when I was 17 years old, in 1969; three of my friends dropped by in one of their cars and asked me if I wanted to go out with them to the beach or the woods, I forget which. I told my father that I was going and he came out to see my friends. He knew them all and liked them. I went to high school with two of them.
“I’ll see you later,” I said to my dad.
“OK, Walter, but let me tell you something first. If the police stop you guys, your friends will be going home and you will go to jail.”
These particular friends were young, long-haired white kids.
My father was telling me, teaching me that my rights and those of my friends were not the same in mid-century America. People were watching me, suspecting me, fearing and hating me. Not all people. Not all white people. But there was an active shooting range on the streets of every big city in the country, and there was an indelible target on every black man’s chest and head.
Living in the land of the free doesn’t make you free—that’s what my father taught me.
Read the rest of the article on The Daily Beast
On Friday, May 31 at 4:00pm EDT, The New York Times Bestselling author Walter Mosley talks about his book LITTLE GREEN, with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor, The Atlantic. Watch the conversation live, here.
Author Walter Mosley. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
The Writer’s Life, By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic
When last we saw Walter Mosley’s detective Easy Rawlins, he had just lost control of a car he was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Malibu. This was in the closing pages of the 11th (and apparently final) Rawlins book, “Blonde Faith,” published in 2007. “The back of my car hit something hard,” Easy tells us, “a boulder no doubt. Something clenched down on my left foot and pain lanced up my leg. I ignored this, though, realizing that in a few seconds, I’d be dead.”
And yet, six years later, Easy is back, narrating a new novel, “Little Green” (Doubleday: 292 pp., $25.95), that picks up where “Blonde Faith” left off. He is, if not entirely alive, then at least present, navigating a 1967 Los Angeles he barely recognizes in the wake of both the Watts riots and the Summer of Love.
“It was great,” Mosley enthuses, “because for all intents and purposes, Easy was dead. And when he came back to consciousness, he felt dead. … Most of my novels are about redemption. But ‘Little Green’ is about resurrection. And so, I naturally followed it, from having him wake up dead to, at the end of the book, actually being alive.” Read the rest of this entry »
