Leonid McGill, Walter Mosley’s ‘post-black’ hero, returns

As Bill Clinton pointed out just before being elected president in 1992, the crime novels of Walter Mosley are first and foremost crackling good stories, full of mystery, suspense and prose like good soul food: hearty, stick-to-your-ribs sentences with a spicy aftertaste. Their nutrient value is fortified — particularly in the case of the books featuring the African American sleuths Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins and Fearless Jones, both set in Los Angeles in the 1950s — by layers of insight into race relations in a time when a black detective’s life was never in so much danger as when he stepped into a bar full of white people.

Then there’s the case of another, rather different Mosley series character, Leonid McGill. Like Easy and Fearless, Leonid — so named by his communist father after Comrade Brezhnev — is black. Unlike them, he lives in New York and, more important, in the present. While Easy and Fearless struggle with the racial politics of their time and place, Leonid, an ex-criminal working as a private investigator, is relatively free of that burden. If he has any cross to bear, it has less to do with his race than with the fact that he’s short. (At a hair under 5-foot-6, Leonid is a bantamweight’s height, though with 180 pounds of muscle and a lifetime of boxing under his belt, he’s not the guy you want to back into a corner. The chip on his shoulder is all the heavier for being so close to the ground.)

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(courtesy of Riverhead/ COURTESY OF RIVERHEAD ) - ’The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey’ by Walter Mosley

“Leonid lives in the 21st century, and in the 21st century, things are different,” says Mosley, whose fourth McGill novel, “All I Did Was Shoot My Man” (Riverhead Books, $26.95), is due out Tuesday; Mosley will be doing a reading and book-signing at 7 p.m. that day at Politics & Prose. “In the 20th century, if I’m in Detroit and a young black man comes up to me and says, ‘It’s tough on a black man,’ I would say, ‘I know what you’re talking about.’ So would Easy and Fearless. But if a young black man in Detroit says that to me now, I’d say, ‘I’m sure there’s somebody in Kandahar who’d do an apartment swap with you.’ It’s a new world. There’s an awareness of race now, but there’s not the overpowering dominance of race that you had in the 20th century.”

Leonid, then, is Mosley’s first “post-black” hero, a black man whose race is far down the list of things that define him.

“There are still times he walks into a room that defines him by his race, but his world is much more complex, in some ways, than Easy’s or Fearless’s,” he says. “Easy and Fearless, they know what everybody in the room is thinking about them. They know how people are going to respond to them, and they know the kind of trouble they can get into. Leonid, he has to discover it. There’s a lot more freedom in his world, but also a lot more danger. When you know your enemy, staying out of trouble becomes a lot easier, because you always see it coming. Leonid never sees it coming.”

A lot of things are coming for Mosley, some of which he, like Leonid, can’t yet see clearly. “When I turned 59, I looked at that as the first day of my 60th year, so I’ve been 60 for the last 365 days, in my opinion,” he says in a telephone interview from his home in New York on his 60th birthday. “So I’ve been thinking all this year, I’m 60 — this is the time when I need to get some stuff done.”