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JEFFREY BROWN:And finally tonight, the return of a popular mystery series.
When last seen, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins was driving over a cliff, apparently to his death. Rawlins is the fictional private eye who in the course of a dozen books has become one of the best-known, longest-running characters in American literature. His latest adventure is told in the new novel "Little Green."
Author Walter Mosley has written more than 40 books in many genres and received numerous honors. He joined us here earlier this week.
Walter Mosley, welcome.
WALTER MOSLEY, Author, "Little Green": It's good to be here.
JEFFREY BROWN:The return of a dead man, right?
WALTER MOSLEY:Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN:You seemed to kill off your famous hero, and then brought him back to life. Why?
WALTER MOSLEY:Well, it was first-person narrative. He wasn't dead.
He went off the cliff, and everything went black. I didn't say, "I died." I just said he went off the cliff.
I stopped writing the books because I felt I was getting stale writing the character, and I wanted to stop. And then four, five years went by, and I went, I could come back to that and do that again. And so I started over again. I did intend to end the series, but here we are.
JEFFREY BROWN:I see comparisons to Sherlock—you know, Arthur Conan Doyle kills off Sherlock Holmes and brings him back again.
It's hard to kill off a character like this.
WALTER MOSLEY:Yes, it is difficult.
And people want you to rewrite it. And I'm not really sure why Doyle came—I mean, I know he came back and he wrote it again. I don't know if it was because he didn't have money or the people were just bothering him too much. I really want to write about Easy, so ...
JEFFREY BROWN:For those who don't know the Easy Rawlins books, they're set in a very particular place, Los Angeles, and particularly in the Watts area, in a time, post-World War II, from the '40s, and now this one up to the '60s.
WALTER MOSLEY:1968.
JEFFREY BROWN:Is all of that by accident, or did you sort of—did you just find a character and you wanted to stick with him, or did you want to explore a time and place?
WALTER MOSLEY:Well, there was a couple of things.
Definitely, that's where I'm from. I'm born in '52 in Los Angeles. My family came in, in 1945-'46, mother and father from different places. And in order to put people inside the culture, you have to be inside the literature. And the black population of Los Angeles just didn't have a literature, really, not much of one anyway.
And so I decided I would write these books, so I could write about Los Angeles. I could write about post-war Los Angeles. I could write about black Los Angeles. I could do all of those things together.
JEFFREY BROWN:You had that in mind, just that there was a vacuum among particularly black literature?
WALTER MOSLEY:Yes. Oh, yes, absolutely.
JEFFREY BROWN:Because one of the running jokes in the book, although it's a serious line, is often when somebody meets Easy Rawlins for the first time and they find out what he does and they say, I never met a black private eye before. And he says, “We're a rare breed.”
WALTER MOSLEY:Exactly.
JEFFREY BROWN:Which he is.
WALTER MOSLEY:Yes.
He's a new character for this world. And he's somebody who goes into places where other people can't go, being a black man, because nobody thinks that there's a black detective. So, he says, they don't see me coming. They don't know when I'm there. And they don't know I have left. That's the way he—that's the way his life is.
And it makes him an almost perfect detective.
