Mystery Writer Walter Mosley

Detective writer Walter Mosley loves to dig deep into his characters. He wrote 11 books featuring the Los Angeles-based gumshoe Easy Rawlins (the first of which, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into a Denzel Washington film) before retiring him in 2007. His latest private eye, former mob crook Leonid McGill, stars in the new novel Known to Evil, the second in what Mosley hopes will be a 10-book series. Mosley spoke with TIME about why he doesn't read mystery novels, the importance of character names, and why he never benefits from inspiration.

You've written that Leonid is your first hardboiled character. How does that work for someone who has written in the genre for as long as you have?

The genre is crime fiction, which encompasses everything from [British] cozies to that romantic Raymond Chandler, slumming angel-type detective to Dashiell Hammett, who actually had hardboiled characters. Easy Rawlins is not hardboiled. He's around a lot of hardboiled people, but he himself is a family guy. He's domestic. He has some kids that he's adopted. I guess he has a real kid somewhere. He has a house and works in the garden, that kind of stuff. That's not a hardboiled character. (See TIME's weekend critic picks.)

Leonid McGill also has a family, but it's a whole different thing. One of the things about hardboiled is that the line between good and bad is blurred. Not for Easy Rawlins. But for Leonid, he's been on one side and he's trying to get to the other side, and it's not so easy once you've had a whole life in this other thing.

Before writing this character, did you re-immerse yourself in hardboiled fiction?

No. It's very important for me to not read crime fiction, actually. Plots in good crime fiction are so insidious that they get into your head and you don't even know that they're there. I was once writing a book — I forget which one it was, it was one of the Easy Rawlins ones — I was way more than halfway through when I realized, "This is very familiar to me." I'm talking to myself, saying "Well, of course it is, you just wrote it." And then I said, "No, it's familiar for some other reason." And then I realized that I had read it in another book. I was actually repeating a plot that I had read in another book, and I had to start over again. (Read a review of the Swedish thriller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.)

Which is why as complex as your plots can be, it's such a delight to actually see what seems to be a fully fleshed out character. Leonid McGill goes well beyond the typical, fairly bland mystery novel protagonist. Do you try to focus on character over plot?

With the original hardboiled detectives, there was an existentialism that entered the genre in the '30s and '40s. There was no connection to the world. No mother, no father, no sister, no brother, no friends, no dog, no regular apartment. If you get arrested, they throw you in jail and you can stay there because you don't have any responsibility outside of the case.

With a person like that, there can't be character development, so you actually give up one of the most important aspects of the novel. And that's problematic. The onus now is, How do I create character while also moving forward the mystery, the plot, the crime, the resolution?

Your characters have very unique names. More unique that most authors. Where do you come up with them?

The thing about poor people in general, their lives are all within arms length, right? If you're rich, you can reach back into history, you can reach out into outer space, you can do all sort of stuff if you're rich. And if you're middle class, you can at least imagine it. But poor people, what do they have? They have sex, and then they have children. And they have names for those children. And all kinds of hopes, and maybe despair, is tied up in the sex, and then later on in the naming of the children that came from the sex. And black history in America is very poor.

People skip over names. But names have lots of meaning. I had troubles in the beginning. People were saying, "You're going to name a black character Leonid? How can you do that?" And I'd say, "Why not? Does it make any more sense to call him John? I mean, if black people came from Africa, I should give my characters African names, you know?" But as a writer, as a novelist, names help to identify a character, and place a character in the world.

How much of a mental shift is involved in starting a new character that you think is going to be the foundation of a new series? How much of a character's life do you know at the outset?

I still don't know it. I just finished this morning the first chapter of the third Leonid McGill book. And I'm still learning about him. And I will be learning about him until I come to the last book, which I think will be number ten. And if I wrote an eleventh, I would find out even more about him. That gets back to the whole notion of character development. I see each book as a novel, but then I see the whole series as a novel — one big long novel. And so the character is always growing. If you know everything from the beginning, it's not interesting. It's hard to write.

What's your writing routine? Do you leave room for moments of inspiration?

What I do is I write every day, every single day in the morning. I just start writing. And things come up. And I'm not unaware of them, but I'm not completely in control of them either. Unconscious material start to become conscious. And when I stop writing, all during the day and that night, things are percolating. I wake up in the morning and there's more there. Things I didn't realize the day before. I'm completely confident in that. That's how I approach writing. So I'm always writing, and my writing always ends up in a book.

Inspiration is a charged word, like everything is beautiful. It sounds positive. So when you're having a character brutally murder another person, does that come from inspiration? Nooo. Some kind of convoluted notion of the world has come up, and you've recorded it. But to be inspired? 'Inspired' work really sounds awful: 'The day was beautiful. The person I'm with is beautiful. We were deeply in love. We got married. We stayed together. We never cheated.'

Was it hard to stop writing about Easy Rawlins after 11 books?

No. The books still exist. They are still there. But they would have gotten boring. One thing i know is that if I kept writing about Easy, it would have been a big mistake. I was finished. The story was over. It was time to move on.

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