An only child, Mosley grew up hearing about the woes of life for African Americans in the South, as well as the horrors of anti-Semitism across the Atlantic. This unique African American\Jewish heritage made prejudice a major topic in the household. His father was an African American from the deep South, and his mother a white woman of Jewish descent whose family emigrated from Eastern Europe. Walter Mosley was born in southeastern Los Angeles in 1952 and grew up in Watts and the Pico-Fairfax district. Mosley an opportunity to raise scores of moral questions in a novel of little more than 200 pages. Bruckner added in the New York Times that Easy Rawlins “is trapped into becoming a private detective, and the way he is trapped gives Mr. As Christopher Hitchens said in Vanity Fair, “Rawlins is more of a fixer than a hustler, a kind of accidental detective who gets pulled into cases because of his reluctantly acquired street smarts and savoir faire.
Mosley has used Rawlins to expose the problems of getting by in a world where only a thin line lies between crime and business as usual. Unlike many detectives who populate the pages of hard-boiled prose, Rawlins is a multidimensional character who stumbled into his sleuthing career as a means to pay mounting debts. Much of Mosley ’s success has been due to the powerful recurring character of Ezekiel ( “Easy ”) Rawlins, one of the most innovative private investigators to appear in fiction. ” Librarys Journal ’s review of A Red Death noted, “As before, Mosley ’s inclusion of life in Watts, contemporary social attitudes, and colloquial speech contribute to the excellence and authenticity of plot and character portrayal. Lomax wrote in American Visions that Mosley has “a special talent for layering time and place with words and ideas.
He has also branched out into the areas of science fiction and social commentary.Ĭritics have praised Mosley ’s writing for its realistic portrayal of street life in African American neighborhoods of post- World War II Los Angeles. His novels are all written from an African American perspective. Walter Mosley has broken new ground as a mystery writer by incorporating issues of race into novels that stand on their own as gripping detective fiction.
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