Welcome to booktvs fiction edition. Youve written 50 fiction books. Lets start with devil in a blue dress, the book that launched a series who is easy rawlins . Guest a kind of every man for the black community in the middle of the twentieth century. His whole view of himself has changed. He came back to southern texas and realized he could no longer live there because of what he has learned and he and thousands of others, from texas and louisiana moved to los angeles. What we do is follow him as a kind of unofficial detective. What he does is reveals what life was like in parts of los angeles that havent been talked about. Host how did you come up with the name . Guest i was writing a story and there was a voice speaking firstperson talking about a party he was given and how he was trying to raise money to pay his rent and a woman he was in love with who was in love with another guy and mouse comes in and looks at the person who is talking and says hey, e the, how are you doing . That is where he came from. Host what voice is he supposed to represent . Guest it is interesting. What he represents is how the africanamerican voice is one of the voices in the choir of america. Host did you set out to use him as a vehicle for social commentary . Host any good novel. Guest doesnt have to be a great novel or a very good novel but any good novel that talks about any character has to talk about how that character is anchored in society and the culture and the politics. If you dont do that it is not, you dont have a real character so it seems to me that everybody does that. What is different is not a lot of people were doing it with black mail heroes. Becomes a Strong Social commentary not necessarily because that was my intention but i was the only person doing it for a while. Host a review of your book, for once a black mans feelings are honestly expressed in traditional detective literary form. Host guest that is true, the traditional form and a black character. I am not trying to take anything from either of those things because otherwise the people i am representing, that is one thing i dont want to do. Host did you aim to create this as a series . Guest not necessarily but i had written another book called gone fishing. They were younger coming of age and the swampland. All the publishers said it is a wonderful book but not commercial and it is not commercial because this is back in the late 80s, white people dont read about black people, white women dont like black women and they dont read. That was the notion. They couldnt publish it. They were wrong but the fact they were saying it made it true. That i wrote devil in a blue dress and when i went to the publisher this is great because they have black detectives now but then they said we dont just want to buy one book, we will buy two so the decision was made by the publisher that it would be a series, wasnt my idea but i liked it. Host you call him a hero. You describe him as a gun in one pocket and a short fuse in the other. Host a lot of our heroes that are on battlefronts have to be willing to explode into violence and defend themselves but how they make decisions whether or not to do it and to control that is the point. In moby dick the cook is throwing detritus off the side and the sharks are in a feeding frenzy and they are eating it and the chef starts to lecture them. Angels are just sharks that learn to control their appetite, trying to tell sharks they dont have to be what they are and that is what you have with your character. Host when does devil in a blue dress take place . Guest 1948. It is an amazing event for change. Los angeles, 240,000, may be 300,000, 100,000 people a year in Southern California from then until now. Part of that was black people from southern texas and louisiana. This is an amazing amount of change more than any place else in the country. The ideas are building, the culture is building, the relation between the races is building. A wonderful time. Host he is a world war ii veteran. What story are you trying to tell by making rawlins a world war ii veteran . Guest world war ii was an amazing change for everybody. From southern texas, louisiana, one of my fathers stories is he left to go to the war was 100 people that he knew and they were in it together and went all the way through, 10 or 12 died, most not from violence or disease but when he got back to texas almost everyone he knew was dead already. He realized he was safer in the largest war in history of the human race than he would have been at home in his bed. Host when e. Z. Rawlins returns after world war ii and makes his way from texas to los angeles how is he treated in texas or los angeles . Racism was institutionalized in the south, institutionalized and so for one thing there were no jobs he could yet. Whatever he learned in the war he wasnt going to get those jobs in texas or tennessee or mississippi or anywhere else. This is the first and biggest problem. I cant make a decent living. I cant own anything that cant be taken away but the biggest problem, in los angeles you have an extraordinarily rich police departing, police. You and if youre a white woman, they will definitely stop them and they can do what they want to him and he represents something certain people want to hold down and they are afraid of but theres a lot more opportunity. Host inside of that in los angeles. Guest any job you want. Almost any job you want you can get. Nobody will take your property based on race. You will never have a sign saying whites only. Guest part of the great migration happening, why did you make that part of the story . Guest i am from los angeles, the black people in la, one of the most important streets on central avenue, the major music of america started there or moved through their. These people stories havent been told. There is a giant part of los angeles history that no one was going to write about. You dont exist unless you exist in fiction. People like nonfiction but dont pick up history books because i want to learn something, better to talk about it and store it. Host you are right, devil in a blue dress, half the people in that crowded room migrated from houston after the war and not before. California was like heaven to the southern negro. People told stories about getting out of work to retire when they. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasnt like the dream was life is so hard in la and if you work every day you still find yourself on the bottom. What were Race Relations like . Guest problematic Race Relations with the police but also the sub conscious and unconscious of america there was a notion for a long time that the best thing to be was right, whatever that means. The best thing to be was to be inculcated with this european culture, Something Like you were better, even if you didnt work hard you are better because of what you were, not what you do. If you were very smart, chicano or black or asian people look down on you and make assumptions about what you could do it couldnt do it if you did better than you should be able to do there was anger and resentment. That was a lot to go through. It was hard. It is still hard today but it was hard then for people to see what they were looking at without putting something on it that wasnt true. Host how is it for black men versus black women . Guest there are no verses between black men and black women. People are more afraid of black men, more afraid of their anger and also what has happened to them. The response of women is usually not violent, men it is. Black men have been kept out of the hero category even in the greatest black literature of the twentieth century. The black characters were less heroes and more protagonists. People like Richard Ellis or almost anyone. I want to be that guy. Guest industry becomes the next plantation. Guest i dont remember reading that. When i hear it i feel that it is your labor. The interesting thing, that people of color suffered from working hard. Today in america, as well, and they dont care what gender you are. America is responding to that. It is their fault this has happened but it is not worth it. And unchecked capitalism. Host easy rawlinss home is important to him. Not just in the easy rawlins series. Small Business Owner with the bookstore in la in the 1950s. The concept of ownership. Who has it, who doesnt . Guest if you go back to the beginning of america a citizen has to be a property. There is a political connection, that you have citizenship with. If you are not a Property Owner you are a migrants interview ari migrant you are not that important. You cant vote and people dont Pay Attention to you. People gerrymander you out of the system but to own property that cant be taken away this is my land because most people before the war are rural so whether you are raising cattle or growing cotton it means something in the fact that makes me a citizen. Host this is a mystery novel, crimes are committed and easy rawlins has fought on the Justice System. I thought it was wrong for a man to be murdered. And more Perfect World i thought the killer should be brought to justice but didnt believe there was justice for negroes. I thought there might be justice for black man if he had the money to brief it. Money isnt a sure bet. The closest to god i have ever seen in this world. Host i wrote that. Most people in america, when i wrote this book i think a lot of people thought there is justice and justice is not based on how much money you have or who represents you or how popular you are. If i dont have money i wont have a fair shake and if i dont have money i wont get a fair shot. Black people in america have known since we have been here, time has gone on many more people understand it. First they only understood their appreciation of music and culture like the blues and certain elements of jazz. As time has gone on and general knowledge. Guest host part of the motivation, did you choose the form of a mystery novel because of that . Guest i chose the form because i like mysteries and liked Raymond Chandler and ross mcdonald. The Justice System just appeared. It wasnt like it was my goal to write it out. Anyone will make different decisions. I think this is right or wrong. As a fiction writer i never try to tell you what you should think. I will tell you what easy rawlins thinks and Raymond Alexander thinks but i wont tell you what you should think. Host i watched a review of one of the easy rawlins books, she suggested to her audience you really need to read the whole series. Could Walter Mosley be from beginning to end because if you pick up one book you dont know how easy rawlins knows could there be an index for how he knows . Guest it means when you see a book and wants to read it, you got to read all 14 of them. You barely have time to read one. Each book, you may not know the events that led up easy rawlinss relationship but we do know how he knows mouse, how he feels, and not a chapter. Host you continue on in devil in a blue dress and focus on easy rawlins in la. Your latest book down the river takes place in new york, blackandwhite pd investigators or protagonists, what inspired you to write this story in this city where you are in new york . Guest there was like a political spark that inspired me to write this story. Eddie conway, in pennsylvania. The people protesting in san diego in new orleans. The response to a community that a guy walking down the street and the police will stop me and they search him and question him and let him go. As angry as this guy gets just walking down the street, has to make sure he never expresses that anger because he expresses that anger because something bad happens so if you add to that guy, a journalist or political activist, anyone who makes a movement, anyone who does that they get a target on front and back and both sides. I want to create a detective who was a policeman, even though he was black he was a policeman it is not going to feel sensitive about this and on death row. As he investigates the guys case and sees what happens he proves to himself beyond a shadow of a doubt this guy probably killed them. As far as he can tell. What happens when you know Something Like that and what decisions you make. Host what you said a little bit to remind our viewers who that is guest a political activist journalist in philadelphia who the police say got into a gun battle with them, he was sentenced to death. For me if you kill somebody, whatever the law has to say that is what you have to do. If there were extenuating circumstances, it is true of him but a lot of people here. When you see somebody on top of somebody and shooting him, a policeman should never be doing that, never. And what everybody else is thinking and feeling and how they will respond and that is what the novel addressed. Host did you speak to lamea . Guest now. Host how did you grab from that story . Guest that story is our story. I was watching a guy, more than anything else the guy was being interviewed, there was another one here. That the Police Become people who are trying to force you to fit inside an order that may not be conducive to your life and your lifestyle. Because of that you have to write about, so down the river even though its about these black characters, is about kind of like america and understanding that america and goes back to the issue about how much money you have and who is protecting you and whos taking care of you and who feels that you are in any. Host the next book is john woman due out in september. What is it about . Guest john woman, its a novel about a guy who is a historian but hes a historian and starts when hes a kid, hes going up, he killed a guy. Selfdefense but he kills a guy. And he completely recreates himself so that who he was he doesnt have the same name, he doesnt have the same birth certificate, doesnt have anything to same but he does become, he becomes what he has done so it becomes a deconstructionist historian. Its following him through this path of how he sees himself, how he sees the world around him, how he teaches and he discovers things about himself. One of the things he discovers is hes a sociopath. And that has helped him in america become successful. Wonder the things i believe, i believe that if there something wrong with you, if youre a sociopath of any sort, you will probably be more successful in america than if you werent. Host how do publishers respond to your ideas that are not in track to the hated. I go to the publisher, give them a couple of readings and then i said ill write a book like john woman or fortunate son, rls dream, all these books ive written here what i wanted to give them of that book they say no. I to another publisher, if you publish this book all right another history. Okay. Then i will publish the book and mystery and then they go no, no, no. Only mistress from now on. So then i go to another publisher. Its gone on forever. Host youve written a lot of books as you said. Do the characters in the book reflect people in your life . Guest thats a hard question to answer because obviously it must in some way. I dont write about myself. I dont write about people i know. I dont write about my mother and my father but i write about worlds that are experiences. So in a way mostly no. Host who is Raymond Alexander and how did you come up with the idea of his character, known as mouse . Guest mouse is an interesting character for me. When i was a kid my father had a friend who was, he was just as crazy as a mouse and he made his living doing lots of things but one of them was hijacking liquor truck. He would hijack a liquor truck and get a whole bunch of cases of whiskey and he would bring one of the cases to my father, hold this for a week while i come back. Of course my father put it away but one night that people come over and say ive got some whiskey, maybe another party would happen. When the guy would come back there would only be nine or ten bottles left and so he would say how much do you only, right . My father would pay him for the bottles. That guy was in a crap game in the barbershop and he got in an argument with a guy and he says you owe me a nickel. The guy said i dont tell you anything. I paid everything. He said you only a nickel and youre going to pay me right now now. The guy says no, so he kills them, just shot him right in the barbershop he was arrested and spent the rest of his life in prison. In a way i know what my father knows discovered i was too young to remember him so i never knew him. I dont remember him. I dont think about him but the story sparked mouse for me. Mouse is a very different character, but it comes from that story. Host 15 youtube review of your book, the women asked if you would make a book about Raymond Alexander, maybe right a book or two about him drinking you know host as a protagonist. Guest rayman is a pure sociopath. John woman is not a pure sociopath. He belongs inside the system from most of the things that he does. Everyone a certain set of circumstances happen, hes going to go with outside the box, but only then. Mouse lives outside the box. If youre a sociopath living outside the box its that interesting because you know what hes going to do. I never had a story in my head about raymond all by himself. Host who is jackson blue, who is he based on . Guest he has a lot of my characteristics him and paris mitten, they are very smart, really like the sedentary, intellectual pursuits, reading, writing, thinking, debating. Jackson blue is a technologically really brilliant and he does everything about computers before computers know them themselves. I like writing about the characters because its a rare thirst only things that are not written about black men but one of them is this guy is a genius. He can do anything. Hes also really a coward. Hes afraid of his own shadow and a shadow goes a great distance but hes completely frightened of it, and i like that also because not everybody has to be big and strong and courageous. Hes small and scrawny and afraid of anything. Also i like that character, special because its also a genius. Host hes a computer genius. You were a Computer Program director does. I was not a computer genius but i was a programmer and i like kind of giving him that problem. Host in one of the books easy rollins says about jackson blue that he only kept bookshelves everywhere in his home once he made it, and only kept books he was going to read twice. You have that same philosophy . Guest because its kind of a waste. You look at your bookshelf and 12 books you have on the top that you have a look at them for 12 years. They are not do anything on the shelf but you know if you give them