Walter Mosley is an American novelist, born in Los Angeles in 1952, who is best known for his crime fiction and above all for the Easy Rawlins mysteries, which began with “Devil in a Blue Dress” in 1990. In 2020 he became the first Black man to receive the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Mosley was the only child of an African American father from Louisiana, who worked as a school custodian, and a Jewish mother, who was a personnel clerk. He graduated from Hamilton High School in Los Angeles in 1970 and later took a degree in political science at Johnson State College. He then worked as a computer programmer and moved to New York in 1981. While employed at Mobil Oil he enrolled in a writing course at City College in Harlem, where the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien was one of his tutors and encouraged him. He began writing at 34.
Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is a Louisiana-born veteran of the Second World War who works as a private investigator in the Watts district of Los Angeles, at first without a licence. The novels follow him from the 1940s into the 1970s, often alongside his ruthless childhood friend Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. “Devil in a Blue Dress” was filmed in 1995 with Denzel Washington, and the seventeenth book in the series, “Gray Dawn”, appeared in 2025.
Mosley has written several other series. They include the Fearless Jones and Leonid McGill mysteries, the Socrates Fortlow books, the first of which, “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned”, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and became a 1998 television film, and the King Oliver novels, which opened with “Down the River unto the Sea”, winner of the 2019 Edgar Award for best novel. He has also published science fiction, political non-fiction and two guides to writing.
He created and wrote the 2022 television series based on his novel “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey” and co-wrote the 2025 film of “The Man in My Basement”. The Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master in 2016, and the Crime Writers’ Association gave him its Diamond Dagger in 2023. His most recent novel is “Ghalen: A Romance in Black” (2026), and a fourth King Oliver book, “Hanging and Burning”, is due on 20 October 2026. He lives in New York City.
