By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 5, 2002; Page C01

Nobody is doing what Walter Mosley is doing.

At 50, he's writing mysteries and more-serious fiction and plays and essays and science fiction, and he's injecting them all with overarching questions of how African Americans and other Americans see each other and how human beings see themselves.

He has so many ideas and so little time, he occasionally tinkers with a new artistic way to tell stories without words. He calls his quick-sketch method Alien Script.

More on that in a while.

Right now he is standing before 150 or so people -- mostly African Americans -- on a recent sweltering midsummer's eve. They are waiting for Mosley to read from his new novel, "Bad Boy Brawly Brown," at the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library downtown.

He's a provocative and popular writer who happens to be black and who happens to write about black America. He tells intriguing stories and paints vivid portraits while lobbing little grenades here and there.

Toward capitalism: "The nearby Goodyear plant ran twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. The people who worked there had simple, straight-ahead lives. They got up an hour and a half before they were supposed to be at work, then they worked eight hours, and maybe a little overtime. They were citizens of a nation that had won the major wars of the century and now they were enjoying the fruits of the victors: mindless labor and enough of anything they wanted to buy."

Toward race: "The one edge black people have always had over whites was that they never truly understood our motivations. And just because a man understands you, that doesn't make that man your friend."

Toward idiots: "Life was too short and too sweet to be spent in the company of fools."

Mosley -- a big, balding man, dressed in dark suit, gray shirt and bright yellow-and-red tie -- steps to the microphone. He has a Letterman-like gap between his upper teeth and a scar above his right wrist from the time he punched a window. Sporting his signature Panama hat, he looks a lot like a mystery writer.

He sets his hat upside down on the lectern and adjusts his glasses.

He reads from his new book, which is set in 1964 and is about a young man who gets caught up in the pre-Black Panther revolutionary movement. The protagonist -- as in six other Mosley novels -- is a working-class hero named Ezekiel (aka Easy) Rawlins. The fiction is sexy, dangerous, with a smattering of smart-aleckiness. "John and Alva were living in a box-shaped apartment building near Santa Barbara and Crenshaw. The outside walls were slathered with white stucco that had glitter sprinkled in it. There were bullet holes here and there, but that wasn't unusual. That part of L.A. was full of Texans. Most Texans carry guns. And if you carry a gun, it's bound to go off sooner or later."

When he finishes reading, he fields questions.

Yes. This is the last stop on his book tour, and he may never do another one. He's going to read tonight at the library, the next night at a bookstore, then "I'm never going to do it again," he teases the uneasy crowd.

No. He won't write simpler stories, but he suggests that readers try his "Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned" collection of Socrates Fortlow tales about a philosophical ex-con.

Yes. He will eventually explain what has happened to Mouse, a character in his Easy Rawlins series who seems to be dead in this book. He calls Mouse's absence the "negative space" in "Brawly Brown."

No. He's not just going to write mysteries from now on. He's going to keep pushing the envelope. (Though he does plan to follow Rawlins through the 1960s -- Vietnam, the Watts riots and the Summer of Love.)

Yes. He is going to take some time off from writing -- when he dies.

No. He doesn't know exactly how long it takes to write a book. He wrote "Brawly Brown" in about six months. Other novels take longer. "R.L.'s Dream" took three years.

Yes. He has favorite novels by other writers. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and "The Stranger" by Albert Camus, which is, he says, "close to perfect."

Folks line up to get their books signed.

Critics like Mosley. This from the Los Angeles Times: "With 'Bad Boy Brawly Brown,' a story with the same imaginative vigor and the same unflinching honesty as its predecessors, Mosley continues to put a strong claim on urban crime fiction, a claim that says as much about the city of Los Angeles as it does about America at large. In his success, he once again leaves us eager for more."

And from The Washington Post: "Mosley isn't merely out to write an entertaining whodunit: He uses his books to examine problems and social issues facing African Americans while also underscoring the universal relevance of those issues. Easy Rawlins therefore stands tall as a distinctively American character, a proud, resourceful truth-seeker who will insist on his right to make a better life for himself and his community."

Black men read him, Mosley says, "because I won't embarrass them."

"He's helped my camerawork," says professional photographer Seth Washington, 36, before Mosley begins. "He's helped me look for details in color, minute details, like in the petals of flowers.

"There's one scene in 'Gone Fishin',' " Washington says, "when he describes the garden in front of a house. It was so amazing -- the colors. I wanted to go see the place."

"He's my boy," says freelance TV producer Ernest Champell, 37, who used to live in California. Champell says he has been reading Mosley for years. "I learned a lot about Los Angeles in the 1940s, about how blacks migrated from the South -- places like Texas and Louisiana -- and how they adapted to living out West."

Black women read Mosley. Priscilla C. Johnson, 39, who works for the Maryland Commission on Human Relations in Baltimore, enjoys the way Mosley introduces timely matters. "He deals with a lot of issues we deal with -- racism, discrimination, sexism."

The stories, she says, are "down to earth. You feel like you are a part of the story."

People of all colors read Mosley. During the 1992 presidential campaign, candidate Bill Clinton told reporters that he had recently enjoyed two Easy Rawlins books, "Devil in a Blue Dress" and "A Red Death." That put Mosley on the national map.

"Black Betty" and "A Little Yellow Dog" were national bestsellers in both hardcover and paperback. "Fearless Jones" was a Washington Post bestseller in hardcover. "Bad Boy Brawly Brown" is on most of the big bestseller lists, and Mosley's publisher, Little Brown, expects the novel to sell throughout the summer. There are already more than 175,000 copies in print.

Walter Ellis Mosley was born in 1952 in southeastern Los Angeles. He is an only child. "All of the attention of my parents is a good thing; all the attention of my parents is a bad thing," he says.

His father, Leroy, was black and from Louisiana. He died in 1993. His mother, Ella, is white and Jewish. In her eighties, she still works for the Los Angeles Department of Education. Mosley was influenced by growing up in the middle of two strong cultures -- Southern black and Eastern European.

There were books in the house. Mosley remembers the first one he ever read: A.A. Milne's stories of Winnie-the-Pooh.

He went to Victory Baptist Day school in Watts, which included African American history in its curriculum. He liked some courses and didn't like others. "It has always been hard for me to study things I wasn't interested in," he says. His parents moved to West Los Angeles, and he attended Louis Pasteur Junior High School.

The Mosley family bought a pair of duplexes and lived in one side of one while renting out the other three units. His mother still lives in one of the duplexes. Walter graduated from Hamilton High School in 1970.

"That was the hippie time," he recalls. "I hung out. I went up north and lived in Santa Cruz. I had long hair."

Eventually he moved east and gave Goddard College in Vermont a shot for a year or so. He transferred to Johnson State College and received a degree in political science in 1977. Set adrift, Mosley dabbled in pottery and catering. He thought about being a nurse. But "I don't like blood," says the man who writes blood-soaked books.

Through a friend, he tumbled into computer programming, and for years he told stories with ones and zeros. In 1982, he met Joy Kellman, a dancer. They married in 1987. He decided he wanted to write a novel.

He was inspired by Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and by Graham Greene's screenplay for "The Third Man." Like Greene, Mosley wanted to write a novel as a basis for a screenplay. That became "Devil in a Blue Dress." The book was published in 1990.

His marriage to Kellman ended in divorce. Mosley lives alone in Greenwich Village. He isn't particularly interested in sports, though he enjoys watching boxing. He doesn't play a musical instrument. He likes certain television shows, especially "Married . . . With Children," "V.I.P." and "Monk," the new USA series about an obsessive-compulsive detective. "TV," he says, "is better than cinema," which appeals to "the lowest common denominator."

He's not crazy about online communication. He says: "I don't want to start writing in e-mail."

A merry gourmand, Mosley hums as he sprinkles Tabasco into the sauce of his shrimp cocktail at the Four Seasons Hotel restaurant. After taking a few bites of a lobster sandwich, he reaches for a pen and a piece of paper.

He has always wondered, he says, whether there are other ways -- besides using words -- to jot down stories. To illustrate, he quickly sketches out an example of his Alien Script.

The strange-looking set of squiggly lines against a backdrop of parallel lines does not speak for itself. He tries to explain it to me, but I get confused.

Later, using one medium he doesn't like to describe another medium few will understand, he sends me an e-mail explaining the significance of Alien Script.

"When I was a child," Mosley writes, "I believed that there was all sorts of magic in books. My parents read to me the most fantastic stories and I believed these stories were somehow contained in the written word. I was very eager to learn how to write myself. I believed that I could create giants, and fairy princesses and beautiful oceans of scarlet and gold."

Instead, he writes, when he began school, "I was given a brown lined sheet of paper and urged to write the alphabet by rote. After a few weeks, my dreams began to fade, stories became mundane. And for a long time, I forgot my aspirations to magical realities."

Eventually, he concludes, "I began to draw. Using a ruler, I made equidistant lines across the page from top to bottom. Against these lines, I drew amorphous shapes and applied color from various media. These silly and abstract drawings to a great degree satisfy my childhood urge. The wild magic and daffy characters are the stories my untutored mind yearned to create."

To further explain, he overnights me a batch of examples.

The colorful little paintings, about the size of paperback covers, are intriguing. Whimsical, light, bright -- in ways that Mosley's novels are not.

Occasionally -- with a line here, a circle there -- he transforms his easy scrawlings into Keith Haring-like figures or dragons or mushrooms or dogs or Rorschach blots or amoeba-shaped symbols, not unlike the Cingular Wireless logo. There is not much negative space.

But as pretty and pleasing as Alien Script is, the drawings could never relay the entertaining and instructive adventures of Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones and Socrates Fortlow that draw hundreds of thousands of readers to Mosley's prose.

He doesn't even give folks the opportunity. When he's finished with one, he usually sends it to a friend.