Word: mosleyism
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Mystery writer Walter Mosley finished his first novel, Gone Fishin', in 1988, but he couldn't find an agent or a publisher who would touch it back then because they feared that a thriller about working-class African Americans would bomb at bookstores. Then along came Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale. Settling in on the best-seller list for 43 weeks, her tale about four middle-class black women proved there was an audience for commercial fiction by black authors and sent publishers scrambling to find the next black blockbuster. Mosley's second manuscript, Devil in a Blue Dress...
...four more hot-selling Easy Rawlins mysteries, a Denzel Washington movie based on Devil, and two visits to the White House later, Mosley, 45, finds himself in the enviable position of being able to bestow his work on whichever publisher he chooses. And when he decided to publish the once neglected Gone Fishin', he selected Black Classic Press, a small house in Baltimore, Maryland, that specializes in reprinting historical works by black authors. This is a significant move for two reasons. For starters it may show, as Mosley says, that "a black writer can bring his or her work...
...beyond that gesture of racial solidarity, the publication of Fishin' is noteworthy because it is, in some respects, the best of Mosley's novels. Set in East Texas in 1939, it is a morally murky coming-of-age story that explains why it ain't easy being Easy. The tale concerns a pivotal episode that Mosley has alluded to in the previously published novels: the murder by Easy's homicidal sidekick, Mouse, of his stepfather. Witnessing the killing--and accepting a payoff to keep quiet about it--is the original sin that dogs the rest of Easy's life...
...Mosley's other novels, the plot is mostly incidental, a prop for his rich characterizations and astute social observations. In Fishin', Easy emerges as an Everyman of the segregated pre-World War II rural South: semiliterate, marginally employed, the victim of numerous acts of offhand racism. He inhabits a blues-toned, all-black world of juke joints, odd jobs and broken people wrestling with the same dilemma: "If all you got is two po'k chops an' ten chirren, what you gonna do?" The answer: improvise and live with the consequences...
...less talented hands this could have become a heavy-handed tract, but Mosley never stoops to propaganda. And while his characters often verge on the bizarre, they are leavened by a reaffirming dose of humanity: Domaque, the hunchback with a thirst for reading; Miss Dixon, a half-crazed white spinster whose whims determine the fate of black families unlucky enough to live on her land; Momma Jo, the hoodoo priestess who forces herself on Easy in a hilarious seduction scene. But overshadowing them all is the enigmatic Mouse, who combines terrifying bloodthirstiness with naive romanticism; he murders his stepfather...