“Mosley is a master of craft and narrative, and through his incredibly vibrant and diverse body of work, our literary heritage has truly been enriched...” —National Book Foundation
“Easy's finely calibrated understanding of and commentary on the social and racial climate around him gives the novel its defining texture and power...” —Booklist
“Mosley does a fine job highlighting a world of Black survivors who know how difficult their struggle remains, every day of every decade. This marvelous series is as relevant as ever.” —Publishers Weekly
When Walter Mosley burst onto the literary scene in 1990 with his first Easy Rawlins mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress—a combustible mixture of Raymond Chandler and Richard Wright—he captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of readers (including future president Bill Clinton). Eleven books later, Easy Rawlins is one of the few private eyes in contemporary crime fiction who can be called iconic and immortal. In the incendiary and fast-paced Little Green, he returns from the brink of death to investigate the dark side of L.A.’s 1960s hippie haven, the Sunset Strip.
We last saw Easy in 2007’s Blonde Faith, fighting for his life after his car plunges over a cliff. True to form, the tough WWII veteran survives, and soon his murderous sidekick Mouse has him back cruising the mean streets of L.A., in all their psychedelic 1967 glory, to look for a young black man, Evander “Little Green” Noon, who disappeared during an acid trip. Fueled by an elixir called Gator’s Blood, brewed by the conjure woman Mama Jo, Easy experiences a physical, spiritual, and emotional resurrection, but peace and love soon give way to murder and mayhem. Written with Mosley’s signature grit and panache, this engrossing and atmospheric mystery is not only a trip back in time, it is also a tough-minded exploration of good and evil, and of the power of guilt and redemption. Once again, Easy asserts his reign over the City of (Fallen) Angels.
“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…. If there were an Edgar for best comeback player, Easy Rawlins would be a shoo-in.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Mosley fans were pining for the resurrection of Rawlins. Their dreams have come true…. Mosley returns here to doing what he does best: setting the pain and pleasure of individual lives, lived mostly in L.A.’s black community, within an instantly recognizable historical moment and allowing the two to feed off one another…. [A] major event for crime-fiction fans.”
Written by Walter Mosley Directed by Daniel Bryant Featuring Anthony Irons
Feb 25, 2013 – Mar 24, 2013
For tickets:
Congo Square Theatre Company
2936 North Southport Avenue
Chicago, IL 60657
773.296.1108
In the blink of an eye, Tempest is struck by the bullet of a police gun and finds himself at the pearly gates facing St. Peter and his judgment. Refusing to accept his eternal condition, he’s stripped of his identity and given a new body and a chance to change his fate. Alive, Tempest was no angel, but he was far from evil. The Accounting Angel, Joshua, is out to prove the scales tip toward the latter. Adapted from his book, Tempest Tales, and inspired by Langston Hughes’ colorful character, Jesse B. Semple, Walter Mosley takes us on a hip trip—an ethereal excursion into the metaphysical conundrum between right and wrong, good and evil. Which will you choose?
Enjoy a sneak peek from a staged reading of The Fall of Heaven:
Camera Q&A: Walter Mosley on adapting his novels for the screen, by Christian Niedan
Walter Mosley is a New York City-based author, whose 37+ book literary career goes back to 1990′s Devil in a Blue Dress. That novel kicked off a series revolving around detective Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins — a Black resident of the Watts section of Los Angeles, whose continuing story begins in 1948, and (with the May 2013 release of his 12th story,Little Green) has progressed to 1967. Mosley also created the character of ex-convict Socrates Fortlow, the modern-day protagonist of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, and two other novels. Both Rawlins and Fortlow were adapted for the screen in the 1990s. Denzel Washington portrayed Rawlins in 1995′s Devil in a Blue Dress, directed by Carl Franklin. Laurence Fishburne portrayed Fortlow in 1998′s Always Outnumbered, directed by Michael Apted for HBO. During production Mosley met producer Diane Houslin, and in 2012 they partnered to launch a new production company: Best of Brooklyn Filmhouse. Other Mosley creations include Fearless Jones, portrayed by Bill Nunn in the final episode of Showtime’s anthology series, Fallen Angels. He has also authored several science-fiction stories — the latest being The Gift of Fire andOn the Head of a Pin, which were released together by Tor Hardcover in May, 2012. Camera In The Sun interviewed Mosley in the summer of 2012, as he was editing Little Green, and discussed how his books have been adapted for the screen — including past and future versions of Easy Rawlins.
The dates have been announced for the Little Green National Author tour, May-June 2013 in the following cities; Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, Scottsdale, St. Louis, Austin, Houston, Philadelphia, Raleigh, Brooklyn, New York, Washington DC.
Browse the Events Calendar(to the right) or click “Appearances” to see a list of readings in your area.
Walter Mosley. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $9.99 e-book (279p) ISBN 978-0-345-80444-0
Many of Mosley’s heroes are men who are or have been brutal and are certainly still dangerous—men like Fearless Jones, Leonid McGill, Easy Rawlins, and Easy’s friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander—and all have their redeeming qualities. Xavier “Ecks” Rule may be the worst, having “beaten, raped, and murdered my brothers and sisters,” until he meets Father Frank, whose Seabreeze City, Calif., congregation consists of 96 similarly lost souls. Father Frank gives Ecks a mission to aid Benol Richards, who as a young woman 23 years earlier helped her lover, Brayton Starmon, kidnap and sell three babies. Now Benol wants to make amends, and Ecks reluctantly agrees to help. Sordid tales mingle with trials, redemptions, and philosophy grounded in gritty experiences as Ecks follows cold clues into hot action. Ecks’s world is populated with some of Mosley’s most colorful and memorable characters, from Father Frank, who never invokes God, to the edgy parishioners who make up his flock. No Mosley fan should risk missing this scintillating novel. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency. (Dec.)
A brand-new, eBook original crime novel from bestselling author Walter Mosley, Parishioner is a portrait of a hardened criminal who regrets his past, but whose only hope for redemption is to sin again.
In a small town situated between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, a simple church of white stone sits atop a hill on the coast. This nameless house of worship is a sanctuary for the worst kinds of sinners: the congregation and even the clergy have broken all ten Commandments and more. Now they have gathered to seek forgiveness. Xavier Rule—Ecks to his friends—didn’t come to California in search of salvation but, thanks to the grace of this church, he has begun to learn to forgive himself and others for past misdeeds. One day a woman arrives to seek absolution for the guilt she has carried for years over her role in a scheme to kidnap three children and sell them on the black market. As part of atoning for his past life on the wrong side of the law, Ecks is assigned to find out what happened to the abducted children. As he follows the thin trail of the twenty-three-year-old crime, he must struggle against his old, lethal instincts—and learn when to give in to them.
Vintage; Available December 18, 2012; Random House Digital, Inc.
GIFT OF FIRE / ON THE HEAD OF A PIN Coming from Tor Hardcover On-sale: May 8, 2012
The Gift of Fire
In ancient mythology, the Titan Prometheus was punished by the gods for bringing man the gift of fire—an event that set humankind on its course of knowledge. As punishment for making man as powerful as gods, Prometheus was bound to a rock; every day his immortal body was devoured by a giant eagle. But in The Gift of Fire, those chains cease to be, and the great champion of man walks from that immortal prison into presentday South Central Los Angeles.
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. Longdead 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.
By Walter Mosley, Special to CNN
updated 8:26 AM EST, Thu January 26, 2012
GOP candidate Newt Gingrich appears at a campaign event on January 25 in Cocoa, Florida
Editor’s note:Walter Mosley is the author of more than 34 books, including the mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins and his latest featuring Leonid McGill. He has won an O. Henry Award, a Grammy and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. His newest book is “All I Did Was Shoot My Man” (Riverhead Books).
(CNN) — Newt Gingrich is a political opportunist. His job is to pack as much powerfully charged meaning into every sentence as he can, which makes him a working poet. So he knows full well that calling someone a “food stamp president” brings up the working person’s fear, looming reality, and in some cases the actual experience, of unemployment — while making a shout-out to racism and affixing a stigma to poverty. All the while hiding behind the symbol of a flag.
Given his potent combination of wildly colorful yet believable characters, it’s understandable that some fans of novelist Walter Mosley have yet to forgive him for apparently killing off Easy Rawlins, his most popular character, in the 2007 bestseller “Blonde Faith.’’
Rawlins was, fans argued, not just a character they could envision through Mosley’s words, but also a character they could relate to, one they wish they could have known.
A big city never looks the same once you’ve walked its streets with a hard-boiled private eye. Preferably someone as perceptive and thoughtful as Leonid McGill, the shady but honorable bruiser-for-hire in an addictive series of New York crime novels by Walter Mosley. A former mob fixer who has gone straight, McGill doesn’t so much walk the city as case it for danger. Keeping pace with him is as much an education as an adventure.
Mosley comes from the Raymond Chandler pick-up-sticks school of plot construction, so like the three previous books in this series, ALL I DID WAS SHOOT MY MAN (Riverhead, $26.95) is quirky by design. The inspired title comes from the mouth of Zella Grisham, who shot her boyfriend when she caught him in her bed — “under the quilt that my Aunt Edna made for me” — with her best friend. Although the no-good cheater survived, Zella did eight years hard time on evidence planted by McGill that falsely implicated her in the $58 million robbery of a Wall Street firm. Having engineered her early release, he thinks he has atoned for one more of the past crimes that still haunt him — until hit men start coming after Zella, looking for the heist money she supposedly squirreled away.
When Walter Mosley burst onto the literary scene in 1990 with his first Easy Rawlins mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress—a combustible mixture of Raymond Chandler and Richard Wright—he captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of readers (including future president Bill Clinton). Eleven books later, Easy Rawlins is one of the few private eyes in contemporary crime fiction who can be called iconic and immortal. In the incendiary and fast-paced Little Green, he returns from the brink of death to investigate the dark side of L.A.’s 1960s hippie haven, the Sunset Strip.
“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…. If there were an Edgar for best comeback player, Easy Rawlins would be a shoo-in.”
Walter Mosley is a New York City-based author, whose 37+ book literary career goes back to 1990′s 
Many of Mosley’s heroes are men who are or have been brutal and are certainly still dangerous—men like Fearless Jones, Leonid McGill, Easy Rawlins, and Easy’s friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander—and all have their redeeming qualities. Xavier “Ecks” Rule may be the worst, having “beaten, raped, and murdered my brothers and sisters,” until he meets Father Frank, whose Seabreeze City, Calif., congregation consists of 96 similarly lost souls. Father Frank gives Ecks a mission to aid Benol Richards, who as a young woman 23 years earlier helped her lover, Brayton Starmon, kidnap and sell three babies. Now Benol wants to make amends, and Ecks reluctantly agrees to help. Sordid tales mingle with trials, redemptions, and philosophy grounded in gritty experiences as Ecks follows cold clues into hot action. Ecks’s world is populated with some of Mosley’s most colorful and memorable characters, from Father Frank, who never invokes God, to the edgy parishioners who make up his flock. No Mosley fan should risk missing this scintillating novel. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency. (Dec.)
Illustration by Christoph Niemann
