Mystery man

Pioneering author Walter Mosley has made a career out of defying expectations

- CRAIG SISTERSON

When Walter Mosley walks on stage on July 6 to accept the Diamond Dagger honour from the Crime Writers' Association (CWA) at an awards dinner near the Tower of London, the 71-year-old storyteller will have travelled a lot further than the 5500km plane journey across the Atlantic. Thirty-five years ago, Mosley was told no one wanted to read the kinds of books he wrote, nuanced stories about black men in America.

It would have been easy for Mosley, an aspiring novelist who had been working as a computer programmer in the 1980s, to be discouraged and move on to something else. Born and raised in Los Angeles, the son of a Jewish mother and African-American father who couldn't get a marriage licence in the 1950s, Mosley had few if any examples of writers who looked like him.

But he kept writing. Every day, for more than 30 years. "I just had to remember to stay true to what I thought I was doing as a writer, and not what somebody else wanted me to do," Mosley tells the Listener over a video call from his home in New York. "I didn't realise it at first, but I was writing about black male heroes. If you don't exist in literature, you don't exist in the culture. That's still true today, even though we have all these popular movies. So, one of the things I wanted to do is write like Émile Zola, who says, 'I'm going to write about the history of France' in the Rougon-Macquart series, and writes dozens of novels. I'm writing books to talk about a part of American culture that doesn't make it into literature."