Note: this transcript was generated by AI and only lightly edited, so there may be errors or typos.

[00:00:00.000] – Walter Mosley
You are listening to Meet the Thriller Author, the podcast where I interview writers of mysteries, thrillers, and suspense books. I’m your host, Alan Peterson, and this is episode number 215. For today’s episode, I had the honor of speaking with a true legend in crime fiction, Walter Mosley. Walter Mosley is a literary powerhouse known for crafting unforgettable characters and razor sharp social commentary. He’s the author of more than 60 books across genres, from crime and science fiction to political essays and memoir. You may know him best for his iconic Easy Rawlins series, starting with the ground-breaking novel, Devil in a Blue Dress. But today, we’re talking about another compelling character in his literary universe, Joe King Oliver. In his latest novel, Been Wrong So Long, It Feels Like Right. Mosley brings Joe King Oliver back for his third heart-pound case. Joe is an ex-New York City cop turned private investigator who is caught between two explosive assignments, one involving a billionaire with a dangerous agenda and the other, a search for his estranged father at the request of his 93-year-old grandmother. It’s a gritty, fast-paced ride, and I really enjoyed this novel, so I was excited to welcome Walter Mosley back on the podcast.

[00:01:11.830] – Alan Petersen
Before we dive in, a quick reminder. Be sure to visit my website, thrillerauthors. Com, for show notes, an archive of past episodes, and updates on my own thriller books. If you’d like to watch a video version of this interview, head over to my YouTube channel at Thrilling Reads and subscribe for more author conversations. Now, let’s get into it. Here is my conversation with the legendary Walter Mosley. We’re excited to welcome the legendary Walter Mosley to the podcast. With a career spending more than 60 books and infirmable characters like Easy Rawlings and Joe King Oliver. Walter continues to redefine crime fiction. His latest, Been Wrong, So Long, It Feels Like Right is out right now. Really enjoyed it, Walter. Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:01:57.380] – Walter Mosley
Thank you. Great to be here.

[00:02:00.080] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. When I said legendary, you went ug. When you hear people like me describe you that way, is it like, how does that feel?

[00:02:12.270] – Walter Mosley
I don’t know. I mean, it’s fine. This is not a problem with what people think about me or my brand of people. But I think it’s But a problem because the best thing about writing for me is writing. I love to be a writer. I love to make words work and put things together. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing a play or an introduction or a memorial or a novel. It’s really good to be writing, and that’s what I like the most. You don’t do it legendary. You do it to do something you love to do.

[00:03:05.910] – Alan Petersen
In this book, of course, this sets up two intense personal investigations for Joe, including one tied to his own family and finding this Mystistic woman. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How do you approach balancing these two story lines and about his estranged father? How does that all fit together?

[00:03:24.240] – Walter Mosley
Again, it’s so interesting because there’s the external thing, that’s the book that’s finished. Once the book’s finished, it no longer belongs to me. It’s out in the world. People read it. Everybody who reads it really reads a slightly different book because the book is partly the words and then partly who they are. They’re bringing words in and they’re creating the world. They know what the characters look like and sound like, but I don’t know what they know, which is wonderful. It’s great. I went about writing it. I just started writing. One of the things that I love about the idea of a mystery is how do you write a book that somebody else is reading? There’s an end. It’s going to happen, but they’re not supposed to know. They read it thinking, I got to solve this mystery. Then the end comes, and it’s always something somewhat different. A lot of people said, Well, I was thinking that. But really, they were thinking five different things, and that was That’s one of the things. When I’m writing, I don’t know what the end is. I actually don’t even know. I wrote that first chapter with Marley Mann, and I thought that, Well, maybe that’s what this book is about.

[00:04:46.710] – Walter Mosley
Then I start the next one, and Joe’s back at his office, his daughter’s there, and his grandmother, his 94-year-old grandmother is there. I think, Wow, that’s interesting. So that’s what’s happening. But then she starts saying, Well, listen, I have a job for you. I go, Really? And it’s like, Oh. And then the job is about his father, and he has a very complex emotional relationship because he hadn’t seen his father since he was 13. He has a very complex emotional relationship with him. But now the grandmother says, You have to find him. And he goes, Okay, well, why? Is it because I’m dying? The story is growing, and I know it because I wrote it down, but I have no idea where it’s going. That’s really what the fun is about the writing. It’s like you give yourself hints. I believe, and I don’t think this is true for all writers, but I know it’s true for me that a lot of what I write comes from unconscious motives. I’m writing and I go, Okay, fine. This is this guy working out his relationship with his father, and to a great degree it is. But it’s many other things.

[00:06:02.980] – Walter Mosley
I think if I tried to figure it all out beforehand and put it down in an outline, it would be a lot less complex and a lot less satisfying.

[00:06:12.760] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, because I remember that from last time. You’d like to You usually don’t ever outline, right?

[00:06:18.260] – Walter Mosley
Sometimes, but even when I do, I don’t follow it. I put everything down and I say, one, this happens, two, that happens. But I get down to six and all of a sudden, I’m going in another direction. I think outlining helps people if you need to write faster. But still, all things being equal, I like to just start writing and see where I end up.

[00:06:41.300] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, you mentioned Joe’s relationship with his father because that really did feel so raw and unresolved. Basically, like you said before, the only reason he even went looking for him is because he can’t say no to his grandmother, basically. I was wondering, can you share your thoughts on how family How many legacies have shaped Joe and the story?

[00:07:04.910] – Walter Mosley
It’s interesting. When you go all the way back to, not all the way, it’s just three books, you go back to the first book, and Joe, who’s not a perfect guy, makes a lot of mistakes, especially when it comes to women. He’s married and he has a daughter, but if some girl gets up in front of him, he’s going to run after her or run away from her. It really is the same thing in the end. But he was tricked into being with this woman so he could be blamed for an assault. Called, which wasn’t committed. That was really a lot of fun because you see who in the end cares about him and who doesn’t. His wife doesn’t care about him, but his young daughter does, and his grandmother does. Both of these are people in his life. If everybody loves you and takes care of you, you might take it for granted. But if only a couple of people do, that becomes incredibly important. Those connections, and even the idea of those connections become so strong. He’s so deeply connected to his grandmother who came to visit him every day when he was in jail.

[00:08:24.090] – Walter Mosley
His daughter, who refuses to… She lives with her mother in the beginning beginning, but she refuses to hate her father because her mother wants her to. She has, Look, dad made mistakes, you made mistakes. What do you want? I think that that is what really brings… You can talk about love when there’s the internal conflicts, or as Aristotle would say, the dialectics of the drama.

[00:08:54.430] – Alan Petersen
It does get much more intense than being in prison for something that you didn’t do. Some people I believe you, like you said, but most people don’t.

[00:09:02.950] – Walter Mosley
Yeah. Well, this is the thing, understanding America, which so enjoys having millions of people imprisoned, and not in prison, but then after being in prison, you can’t even get a job. I’ve known people who’ve been in for a long time, 20, 30 years. But they get out and they got They got an electrician’s degree, a plumber’s degree, a housebuilder degree, but they can’t get a job because they also have a felony. It’s that that you go, Wow, this is… America is a great place, but it’s also a hard country. It’s easy to go broke. It’s easy to go broke. A lot of people are realizing that right Now, you have to… I’m always writing about that aspect of culture, partially because of my own background, but just partially because that’s the way it is in America.

[00:10:14.300] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, especially the big cities like New York City, Los Angeles. I mean, those are so expensive to begin with for anybody. They made somebody come out of prison.

[00:10:23.290] – Walter Mosley
But at the same time, places like Wyoming, Mississippi, Alabama, you have Even Louisiana, which a state I love, but you can really be poor in Louisiana. You know what I mean? But you’re living in the country. Still, buying a sandwich is a big deal.

[00:10:44.030] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. And then the What’s the side of the coin in this novel is the California billionaire who hires Joe in the beginning. Did any of the current billionaires that we see in the news a lot? How did that shape into the story at all? Or can you tell us a little about that process?

[00:11:00.820] – Walter Mosley
I love Roger Farris. I mean, he owns all the silver in the ground in the world. He’s the richest man in the world. I think in the second book, they figured it was like $800 billion strong. For whatever reason, Roger has fallen in love with Joe’s grandmother. The billionaire is 92. She’s 94. Before. She lives in a room in his house, or she has this central room in the house, a place that’s an exact copy of the cottage she lived in out in the woods in Tennessee. It’s like… Because really, I’m writing about a billionaire who’s a hero. He’s my hero. I don’t know somebody else’s hero. He wants to give his company back to his employees. Because of that, his children want him dead. But it doesn’t matter to him that the children want him dead. He’s going to give everything back. I love that because there are people in history, Carnegie, who actually think things like that, that you should be living a life in a country where everybody can make it. Everybody can make it. If I don’t give my children a billion dollars, whatever, it doesn’t matter because they can get a job and pay their rent and have a good life.

[00:12:40.970] – Walter Mosley
I think that that’s the way Farris thinks. I really like that. Also, I like that because without that, you put your character living in a place where he doesn’t have as much intellectual purchase as as he does with knowing everybody from the corrupt police that he likes and people who are in trouble in the street. But on the other hand, there’s somebody who says, Oh, you need to get somebody out of prison and escape, man, use my jet. I don’t care. It’s fun.

[00:13:22.220] – Alan Petersen
Between Joe King Oliver and EasyRawlins, so they’re just curious because they’re two different You’re a lot of investigators, obviously. Is your process the same when you’re writing for Joe or you’re writing an Easy Rawlins novel? Or how does one become the other when you get started with the idea of the story?

[00:13:42.730] – Walter Mosley
Well, there are two different things, I think, in that. One, of course, Joe and Easy lives… Right now, I just finished a book about Easy called Gray Dawn. It’s 1972. I’m also writing a book about Joe, another one, and it’s 2025. Those things alone are going to make them different kinds of books because it was a different America, it was a different world. That’s different. But once I have in my mind the character I’m writing and the time I’m writing them in, then the process is the same. I said, Okay, easy as going to… Because we’re all humans, and humans have the same That thing going on when they start thinking about getting hungry, getting horny, getting happy, all of that stuff is part of being a human being. I think I can put all the feelings anywhere.

[00:14:45.370] – Alan Petersen
What about the… I don’t know why it’s puffed my head back. I could just see you like, do you ever are writing about Easy Rawlins, and then you accidentally have them on a cell phone and you go, Oh, wait a second. I don’t do that exactly.

[00:14:57.340] – Walter Mosley
But sometimes I’ll be writing about a show and a guy says, Hey, how are you doing? He says, Easy. I go, No, I didn’t mean that. No, it’s not easy. It’s Joe. But it’s fun. I mean, it is fun, and you can make mistakes. And that’s the reason when you’re writing. Every once in a while, I’ll be at some public event and some person, young person, usually a guy, will ask, I’m writing a novel, Mr. Mosley, and the biggest problem I have is I don’t know when it’s finished. I don’t know what to do. And I said, well, you write it and then you reread it. You see what needs to be changed, then you change it. Then you reread it and change it. Reread and change. Going like that. Keep on going. You might do it 20 times, you might do it 30 times. But at one point, you reread the book, you see the things that don’t seem to be working, but you don’t know how to fix it. That’s when the novel is finished. It’s You do it and do it and do it until anything you do does not make it better.

[00:16:06.790] – Walter Mosley
Then that’s when it goes out into the world, first to editors and readers and stuff, and then finally to the world in general.

[00:16:15.000] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, because a lot of writers, especially the aspiring writers, get stuck in there, never finishing it, never finishing that novel.

[00:16:22.940] – Walter Mosley
Yeah, just get stuck because they’re looking at perfection. I hold the universities or responsible for that. Ever since the university has taken over the novelists that they are the ones who’re going to teach people how to write novels, they’re the people who know the least about how to write a novel and how to do a novel. You get into a class and somebody starts talking to you about Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, and you’re saying, God, I’m just trying to write a story. I got to be Dostoevsky in order to write a story? What? I can’t do that. You look at these people, you look at somebody like Melville or Gogel in Russia or Dickens. Then go take a class. And on top of that, the university, the problem is they want to own it. They want to own literature. And you can’t. It’s a growing thing. It’s an evolving thing. And you have to be able to allow that to grow.

[00:17:35.180] – Alan Petersen
I agree with that 100 % because that happened to me when I went to college. I got scared, and then I basically didn’t write for 20 years because If you’re already insecure, it starts messing with your head.

[00:17:50.020] – Walter Mosley
Well, yeah. Of course, the thing is, is you make yourself vulnerable to the university. Because they’re in business to make money, they’re not in in the business to make writers. You could come to a school that has certain teachers and certain expectations, and you could see somebody’s a really wonderful writer. If they say, Listen, this school is not for you. You should not be here. Nobody ever says that because if you can pay for it, they’re going to let you in. It’s ridiculous. The writers are not students. We’re not philosophers, we’re not teachers, we’re not students. We’re trying our best to tell a story and to share that story. I always tell these people I was in Atlanta with a couple of writers, and there was a A lovely young woman, and she was showing us around. We walked past these three guys on a corner, and they were talking and smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and having a good time on the corner. The young woman walks past, and then we’re walking past, and the guy just stopped, and one of the guys looks at her and he goes, Girl, you got to stop.

[00:19:11.190] – Walter Mosley
Which is wonderful because it was like a poem. Because it either to stop being so pretty or stop and talk to us. She didn’t do either thing. And you go, Yeah, those guys are going to tell a story that I’m going to be interested in. They’re going to talk about their lives and through their language and their histories, they’re going to tell the story. Somebody else is at a university. Anyway, I know. I shouldn’t be down on diversity, but because I don’t work for them, I don’t have to worry about them. I worry about people spending $30,000 a year to get a degree where they can’t even teach writing.

[00:19:57.200] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I get out with that big debt. I don’t think with these stories, the cities that seem to take our big characters, too, like Los Angeles or New York City. How does that shape the stories that you tell?

[00:20:13.340] – Walter Mosley
Well, how you live shapes your life, right? Every once in a while, I’ll read about the various Native Americans living in various tribes on the West Coast, Northwest Coast, Oregon and Seattle, and Washington. One of the things that was really true about all of them is their staple protein was salmon. One of the things is the whole village smelled of salmon because they were catching the salmon and processing it and smoking it and eating it and all of that. Your life has formed around the place that you live and what that place is like. It’s not just the way it’s smelled, it’s also what clothes that you make, what relationships you have with each other, with the genders, with the ages, all of that stuff. Whenever you’re writing, it’s not a general notion. It’s a specific place that you’re at. You’re in Los Angeles, you’re in New York. I mean, I wrote one thing about a slave on a plantation in Georgia in 1840. Well, this kid is in a plantation in Georgia in 1840. Where you’re living is like 90% of your life, right?

[00:21:42.410] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, absolutely. That’s why it shaped the story It’s hard, too, because that’s what we know. We’re like writing what you know versus writing for some place that you don’t understand or doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’d be hard, I would imagine.

[00:21:55.630] – Walter Mosley
Yeah. Writing what you know is a really important thing, but what you is a much larger thing than you think because you understand how all of us understand how systems work. Because no matter where that person is, let’s say you’re writing some science fiction story and it’s on Mars or beyond. But you say, Well, who’s in charge? Well, in the future, people are not in charge. This happens and that happens. I think that you can create a place because Listen, if I read about Los Angeles, I’m creating Los Angeles. I’ll give you an example. I was talking to a guy, really, 20, 25 years ago. I was doing a reading in LA and a guy. I’d say, Any questions, any reason? Hey, Mosley, you know that house you were talking about? The blue house on Dinkert Street, and Mouse was in that house? And I go, Yeah. He says, I was born in that house. Now, I made up the house. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t born in that house. You know what I mean? I made it up, and he took what I made up and applied it to real experiences in his life.

[00:23:10.160] – Walter Mosley
I mean, that’s what’s so interesting about the creative process in place and in character in fiction.

[00:23:23.270] – Alan Petersen
I was watching your master class, which you did a couple of years back, and there was one that really got to me was a little note about it was you talked about genre and the rules of fiction, but how it should be pushing our boundaries. I was wondering about that because a reader has a certain expectations when they’re reading crime fiction, for example? How do we balance that of pushing the boundaries but giving the reader what they’re expected of what they want?

[00:23:53.330] – Walter Mosley
It’s such a good question, and it’s so hard to answer. I I’m writing fiction, and almost all fiction has some crime in it, has some mystery to it. If you know everything that’s going to happen, like if I tell you in the first paragraph, well, in this thing, this is going to happen, and this is going to happen, and this is going to change, and that’s going to be this, and then everybody’s going to die, you’re less likely to want to read it. You’re like, Well, okay, I know that story. Let me try this other one over here. My hope is that when I write a mystery for anybody, for easy or for Socrates Fortlo or for Fearless Jones or Mouse or whoever, when I do that, I really hope that people are interested in it because I don’t want this to be a job where somebody comes up and tells me, Well, listen, when you make the quarter pounder, the sauce has to be like this. This is It’s like, Okay, fine, because I got to make the same thing every time. Some writers do that, and some readers want that. But I try my best to make it interesting to me, and I’m hoping that other people are going to want to like it.

[00:25:20.400] – Walter Mosley
I think that that’s a tenuous stance, but I think that in art, that that’s what it has to be.

[00:25:27.610] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s great advice. That’s something I wanted to ask you, too, because I always ask my guests because I have aspiring writers that listen to this podcast, obviously. You’ve mentored so many people, so many writers, and you’ve championed diverse voices. What advice do you have for people who are aspiring writers?

[00:25:45.900] – Walter Mosley
Well, again, everybody’s different, and so some things work for some people. For instance, Georges Saint-Mainon wrote the May gray series, 80 books, I think, of 80 of those things. Those novellas, which I think are beautiful. He would be like this. He’d be in his house probably drinking a martini, some party. All of a sudden, he’d go, Oh, I feel a novel coming on. He would go to the apartment above his garage, and he would stay there and write until he was finished. It didn’t take long, but maybe four days, maybe five days. He had people who worked servants who worked in the house, and they would bring him his food and do that stuff. That’s wonderful. Most of us are not like that. The idea that I have about writing that works for me is that I write every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. I write every day. Some days I don’t have much time or I can’t do a lot, but I do a little. I tried to do at least three hours, which I think is, for me, a perfect amount of time. I think the more that you write, you write in the morning and you finish, and then over the next 21 hours, all these things are happening in the back of your mind, and they come up into consciousness.

[00:27:17.660] – Walter Mosley
And the next day, you have more to write about, you have more to say, you have prepared yourself to write more. I think that is the The best advice I can give, I don’t think it will work for all people, but I think it will work for the most of us. And the more you write, the more you know, the deeper you get into your own creative juices, and something will come from that. I can’t promise that the book you write will get published or that people will like it, even if it does get published. I can’t say that because I just don’t know. But the thing you have to love is the process itself and hope that what comes from that is what’s best for you and your career as a writer.

[00:28:09.920] – Alan Petersen
That’s awesome. What do you use to write? I’m not curious now. Do you use Word or do you use another tool?

[00:28:15.830] – Walter Mosley
Well, I work on my computer, and there are various things, ways that you can come at language in your computer, but word is one of them. Sometimes I write by hand. I’m One of my first teachers at City College, when I was going there, which only cost $1,000 a year, I want to say. When I was going there, Edna O’Brien was my teacher. She ran a workshop that I would go to. I just love that. I thought she was politically, artistically, socially. She was just wonderful. Edna, used to do, she would write her novel longhand. When she finished writing a novel, she would give it to the typist, and the typist would type it up and then bring back to her what she’d written. Edna would read it and make notes on the type thing and give it back there. It just went like that, back and forth and back and forth. I mean, that’s a great way to write. It doesn’t really matter. I always, somewhere in the middle, read the novel out loud. Because one of the things that happens when you’re going over it, those 20, 30 times, you start to make assumptions about what you said, and you’re not even right.

[00:29:42.180] – Walter Mosley
You’re not even really looking at what What’s there right now because it’s changed and changed and changed. But when you read it out loud, it’s looking at it from a different point of view. I think those different points of view are very important.

[00:29:55.900] – Alan Petersen
All right, Walter. Well, thank you so much for taking time to talk to us. Really enjoyed your new book. Thank you. Looking forward to. You said you have another EasyRawlins and another Joe Oliver coming out. So I’m excited about that.

[00:30:09.230] – Walter Mosley
Yeah. And also I have one other book that I wrote along the way called Galen, A Romance in Black. And I’m trying to, in my own head, reinvigorate the romance genre to be something a little bit different, but still about love. And that’s a lot of fun, too.

[00:30:30.560] – Alan Petersen
Is that out now?

[00:30:32.360] – Walter Mosley
No, it’s going to come out not this year, but next year. Okay. Awesome. Well, listen, thank you for having me. It’s been great. Yeah.

[00:30:39.500] – Alan Petersen
Thank you so much. Enjoy talking to you. Bye. Bye now. I want to thank Walter Mosley again for joining me and for sharing his insights into Been Wrong So Long, It Feels Like Right and his approach to storytelling. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, I highly recommend it. It’s a gripping, thought-provoking crime novel that you won’t want to put down. Of course, thanks to all of you for tuning in to meet the Thriller author. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your fellow Thriller fans. You can find more interviews with your favorite authors wherever you listen to podcast. And don’t forget to visit my website at thrillerauthors. Com for updates on upcoming episodes. Join my mailing list there and get info on my own Thriller books. That’s it for today. So until next time, keep those pages turning.