Walter Mosley has finished up with his Easy Rawlins series and is moving on to new characters. Mosley's new book is The Long Fall (Riverhead), which features ex-boxer named Leonid Trotter McGill. Mosley talked about his new direction with CNN.
CNN: Did you approach this book differently than you did when you were writing the Easy Rawlins mysteries?
Mosley: Yes and no. All books are different, so each of the Easy Rawlins books I wrote I approached differently. [Leonid] is a new character and he has a unique life that I had to begin to learn. I knew Easy very well, but Leonid I had to learn who he was.
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CNN: What do you like about McGill?
Mosley: This is the first time in my experiments in crime fiction that I've written a hard-boiled detective character. This is going all the way back to the beginning of the genre in the '30s, where you have a guy who gets thumped upside the head a lot and he's just as bad as the people he's after.
In the old style, you never knew what was going on inside the hard-boiled character's head, but in these stories I am actually discovering the underlying character of the hard-boiled detective, and for me that's been a great deal of fun.
We're looking forward to reading Walter's new book.
