A detective rescues a beautiful woman from murderous thugs in Los Angeles in 1948. A professor hears voices in his head after a brain operation gone awry in a dystopian future society. These people may be worlds apart, but they live in the singular mind of award-winning novelist Walter Mosley, creator of thrills and suspense in any genre.
Born to an African American father and Jewish mother in 1952, Mosley is most famous for his bestselling hard-boiled mystery series featuring private eye Easy Rawlins. However, his prodigious body of work covers science fiction, nonfiction, and young adult fiction, as well. Mosley often tackles issues of race and class in his novels and has been recognized with the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which honors works that promote racial understanding and appreciation.
The Easy Rawlins novels are not only great mysteries, they also explore the complex racial and social fabric of Mosley’s native Los Angeles in the years after World War II. The series starts with Devil in a Blue Dress, in which Easy, a young black veteran, arrives in LA in 1948 having just lost his job. A chance encounter with a wealthy gentleman looking to track down a person of interest throws our hero into the fast-paced and danger-ridden detective life. The novel even inspired a film adaptation of the same name starring Denzel Washington.
What Mosley does with crime fiction he also does with science fiction, posing questions about humanity and the way people operate, whether they live in post–World War II Hollywood or in a similarly broken society in a different universe. In the novel Blue Light, a demon possesses the body of a man named Horace LaFontaine in 1960s San Francisco and wages war on the newly evolved, godlike inhabitants of Planet Earth.
Futureland is a collection of short stories set in a distant yet familiar future full of people on the run—chasing money and success or fleeing their own demons. In “Whispers in the Dark,” an ex-con is determined to ensure a bright future for his genius nephew—even if it means selling his organs. In “Little Brother,” a man is tried for murder not by a judge, but by a computer programmed to think like one. Futureland’s nine stories are loosely connected, but each offers a unique vision of a society gone mad.
You can watch Mosley talk about his approach to science fiction in this video. And by the way, Blue Light and Futureland are available as ebooks from Open Road Media, so don’t waste any time—dive right into the thrilling world of Walter Mosley!