Keen On

The acclaimed American writer Walter Mosley has a new King Oliver book out: Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right, a novel that follows Oliver's search for both a missing woman and his estranged father who was released from prison nine years ago. But before getting to his latest mystery, I couldn’t resist asking Mosley to compare his most famous fictional character, Easy Rawlins, with King Oliver. Mosley explains how Oliver, a contemporary detective in New York, faces different, perhaps less racialized challenges than Rawlins did in 1940s Los Angeles. We then moved onto to Mosley’s observations about crime and punishment in white and black America as well as the importance of jazz music in his writing.Here are the five KEEN ON takeaways from this conversation with Walter Mosley:* The difference between his two detective characters reflects changing times in America: Easy Rawlins operates in a strictly black-and-white 1940s Los Angeles where his race defines everything, while Joe King Oliver works in contempo