Touched by Walter Mosley

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on October 10, 2023

Walter Mosley has a laminated spot on my list of three favorite crime writers. When he strays from crime fiction, I’m less enthused about his novels. Touched is a horror novel. It’s based on a puzzling concept and isn’t nearly as compelling as his Easy Rawlins novels, but Mosley has mastered the art of holding a reader’s interest.

Martin Just is arrested for exposing himself, naked and erect, to a distant nine-year-old girl while he is standing on the second-floor deck of his home. His wife believes he was sleepwalking. Martin knows he was awake but isn’t sure how he came to be on the porch — or, for that matter, back on Earth.

Martin believes he is one of 107 people who were taken from Earth, trained for a millennium, and returned to change the Earth in 107 different ways. A pile of glowing blue rocks told him that mankind will reach a state of interstellar domination that will result in oblivion, ending all existence — not just on insignificant Earth, but throughout the entire universe. Martin woke up with that knowledge and with an erection. That’s a lot for Martin to process.

At least some of the 107 have made it their mission to wipe out humanity. Martin takes a different approach. Martin is the Cure. Or the Antibody. Sometimes he’s called the Antibody Cure. Martin wants to save the universe by fixing humanity rather than destroying it. This perspective puts him in conflict with the destroyers.

Maybe this was all a dream. Maybe Martin is delusional. But Martin believes that his newfound beliefs are true. The reader will agree with that conclusion before the novel reaches its midway point because the story is better if Martin is really waging a war against those of the 107 who want to end human life. Still, Martin’s explanation of his return to Earth and his newly split personality (he’s sharing his mind with a more toxic version of himself he calls Temple) never rises much above incoherent babble. In fact, the notion of choosing and training 107 humans to save the universe by fighting each other makes very little sense. At the very least, it needed further development.

Martin is Black. Before the battle with the destroyers begins, Martin needs to deal with the police, who decide to punish him for exposing himself on his deck. They place Martin in a cell with a large and brutal white supremacist who decides to strangle him. When Martin wakes up, he discovers that he is charged with murdering his cellmate. Fortunately, there were no witnesses and he likely acted in self-defense, so a judge releases him on bail. Mosley’s confidence in the judicial system is surprising, given that Mosley is far from naïve.

As Martin tries to explain all this to his wife, he realizes that he has physically changed. He feels younger. He’s stronger and more vigorous. Thanks to Temple, he’s become a sexual dynamo. That change pleases his wife (Martin feels a bit jealous that she loves shagging Temple) but she also seems to be changed by his touch. His wife takes steps to change his two children, making them soldiers in his war. This leads to a minor side story about his wife’s former (and possibly not so former) lover, but like most of the novel, that story is essentially thrown away before it develops into a significant subplot.

Mayhem ensues as Martin and his small army of reformed criminals (plus his family) battle a reincarnated killer, a demon dog, and a powerful member of the 107. That battle is essentially the heart of the novel, but it’s over too quickly to amount to much, given Temple’s ability as a warrior.

With no disrespect intended — again, I love Walter Mosley — the story seems a bit silly. Why did Mosley write it? I suppose Touched is a contemplation of death. Mosley’s point seems to be that death never defeats life. Everyone dies but in a universe that has existed for billions of years and will continue for billions more, the death of an individual life on a single planet isn’t all that significant. Death is “merely a prop for life, a yardstick that measured our advance.” It might be comforting to hold onto that thought until death prevents us from thinking. In any event, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the tiny specks we are in the vastness of space and time. A secondary lesson (and one familiar to fans of Mosley's work as a crime novelist) is that bullies can be defeated by showing them how “small and insignificant” they are.

Touched isn’t as substantial as Mosley’s crime fiction but it might appeal to horror fans who are satisfied with a bare-bones story. I recommend it to that limited audience with the caveat that readers looking for Mosley at his best are likely to be disappointed.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Blood Grove by Walter Mosley

Published by Mulholland Books on February 2, 2021

Walter Mosley has a permanent position on my list of three favorite crime novelists. He secured that position with intelligent prose, credible plots, and complex characterizations. Add compassion and humanity, and you've got a storyteller who rises about the crowd. All of those elements combine in Mosley’s most recent Easy Rawlins novel.

Blood Grove takes place in 1969, a century after the Civil War ended “but the remnants could still be felt, still killed over on any street corner in the country.” Easy has earned the respect of a few members of the LAPD; many others would be happy to shoot him because of his skin color.

Easy is enjoying some alone time in his office when a man named Craig Killian walks in. Killian thinks he might have stabbed a man to death. He was in an orange grove where he saw a woman tied to a tree. He also saw a man holding a knife. Killian fought him and eventually realized that the knife was deep in the man’s chest. He lost consciousness after battling the man and, when he woke up, the man and woman were gone.

Killian endured some trauma in Vietnam and suffers from what would now be diagnosed as PTSD, but he doesn’t seem delusional. He wants to know what he might have done. He believes the woman called the man Alonzo. Since Alonzo was black, someone suggested to Killian that Easy might be in a good position to ask around and learn Alonzo’s fate.

Killian’s story is missing some pieces but Easy is a soft touch for damaged veterans. He takes the case, embarking on a twisting plot involving mistaken and multiple identities. His investigation leads him to a sex club, a bank heist, an embezzler, more murders, and multiple encounters with dangerous people. Along the way, Easy enlists the services of his own dangerous people, including series regular Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.

Other series regulars, including Jackson Blue and his wife Jewelle, make appearances, Jackson having made a career change that gives him the self-confidence he always lacked. Not lacking in self-confidence is Easy’s adopted daughter Feather, who meets her blood uncle for the first time, a hippy who must overcome Easy’s protective skepticism.

What is there to say about a new Easy Rawlins novel? Mosley has developed Easy and the secondary characters in such depth over the years that, at this point, only the plot details distinguish one novel from the next. And the plots are always good. Easy pounds the pavement, makes civilized inquiries, and calls in favors while waiting for the moment when a white cop decides to put him down. Through persistence and deduction, he moves closer to the truth a step at a time. Like every Easy Rawlins novel, Blood Grove is a treat for fans of intelligent crime fiction.

RECOMMENDED

The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosley

Published by Grove Press on September 15, 2020

Walter Mosley is known for crime fiction that has the depth, complexity, and prose style of literary novels. The protagonist in the story “Haunted” submitted 1,000 stories to literary journals. Each was rejected because of its “genre” themes. Perhaps Mosley wrote that story as a reminder that fiction of literary quality can still engage themes that are common to genre fiction. Mosley’s fans (and fans of other extraordinary writers of genre fiction) understand that a literary work does not cease to be literary because its characters are not upper middle-class New Yorkers who spend their time regretting failed marriages while doing little to interest readers who are not upper middle-class New Yorkers in failed marriages.

Notwithstanding Mosley’s excellence as a writer of crime fiction, most of the stories in this collection do not fit within a genre. These are stories of life. The protagonists are educated black men of varying ages. Some work for banks or insurance companies. Others are professors. They are awkward for many reasons. The younger ones are uncertain of how they might fit into the world. The older ones don’t know how to talk to women or bosses. Some are insecure. One feels “sure that any woman who showed any interest in me were the ones who had given up, deciding that they’d never get the kind of man they’d really wanted.” When a woman does seem to take an interest in that character, she turns out to be a thief.

Many of the men have been betrayed by women in various ways, although the long-married salesman in “The Letter” is getting over the end of his third affair. Some of the men are going through a crisis, wondering about their relationships or the purpose of their lives. They often question themselves, wonder about the choices they made. Sometimes they question their faith in humanity.

Some of the men struggle with their place in a society that holds them apart. They are burdened by the complexity of life, incapable of glib or superficial responses to social or workplace situations. A man who feels “stuck” has two therapists and lies to them both.

The men are often philosophers, some drawing on the classics and others on the street to inform a perspective on purpose and meaning. Some of the men decide it is time to make a break from the past and to begin a new life. One protagonist, pondering the concept of equilibrium and balance, renounces everything material and, like a Buddhist monk, becomes a beggar during an interval in his search for identity. Another quits his job, walking away from a retirement package, and invites a woman he barely knows to join him as he travels to Italy. Yet another resists a promotion because he wonders whether the position will have a corrupting influence on his life.

Only a couple of stories in this collection might be a comfortable fit within genre fiction. “The Sin of Dreams” involves a murder trial, but it flirts with a common science fiction theme by imaging the transfer of data from a brain to digital storage.  The story asks whether a human soul exists independently of memories and explores the ramifications of replacing natural with synthetic bodies. The writer in “Haunted” dies angry and unpublished. He returns as a ghost to pay for his “small-minded, selfish ways.” It takes years of death to learn how to let go of the anger that consumed him in life.

Mosley’s stories dig into the heart of life. They are heartwarming and heartbreaking. Some of the protagonists have suffered a run of hard luck. Some have fathers who are killers or brawlers. Some of the men might have responded to adversity with alcohol or silence. They might lose hope for a while, but in the end, they might find a reserve of strength that helps them carry on.

Each story in this collection is thought-provoking and each reflects the intelligence and compassion that is emblematic of Mosley’s fiction. Mosley drills a deep hole into the interior of his characters to find the humanity that we have so much trouble discovering within ourselves. Decency is a common theme in the stories. Even when they disappoint themselves, characters generally behave decently because that’s how they are wired. Most of the men refuse to be anything less than caring or understanding when the chips are down, no matter how indecently they are treated by others. These awkward black men are, on the whole, models for all men as they confront the awkwardness of living.

RECOMMENDED

John Woman by Walter Mosley

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on September 4, 2018

In John Woman, Walter Mosley again proves why his inclusion in my list of three favorite modern crime writers is not just laminated, but anchored in cement. John Woman is a crime novel in the way that Native Son and Crime and Punishment are crime novels. The books combines a crime plot with philosophy, psychology, and Tolstoy’s view that historical truth is elusive if not impossible to discover. It is fresh and original and a masterpiece in concept and execution.

Cornelius “CC” Jones lived with his father, Herman Jones, but he learned about life from his mother’s stories about the gangsters she dated. Herman reveres the English language, suggesting he might be modeled after Mosley, whose love of language is revealed in the lovely language he uses to tell his tales. But Herman is losing his words and finds himself living in the past, robbed of the present by the creeping onset of dementia.

Herman is hospitalized when the novel begins and bedridden for the next several years. CC secretly takes over Herman’s job as a projectionist so that the paychecks will keep coming. In 1955, when CC is 16, he commits a murder and is later seduced by a female cop who (unaware of the murder) enjoys dominating him. His mother has disappeared, apparently having accompanied a mobster who fled from the law.

When the novel shifts ahead to 1974, CC had adopted the identity of John Woman to protect himself from arrest for a murder he knows will eventually be discovered. He is a professor of history at a university founded and operated by members of a new age religion, a subgroup of which is known as the Platinum Path. He teaches his students that historical truth is a mirage shaped by the political, religious, and cultural biases of historians — a view that other faculty members view as undermining history and historians.

John Woman is rooted in a murder, but it is primarily a story of decent people who treat each other decently, people who value life and who understand the importance of generosity, forgiveness, and acceptance. Their decency transcends race or religion. History is full of heroes who spend time shaping a legacy, but life is full of heroes who will never be studied by historians — the friends who sacrifice to help us get through tough times, the strangers who make an effort to be kind to another stranger, the ordinary folk who make a difference in unseen ways that nevertheless change the world.

John Woman reminds us that what we don’t know about the people society regards as historically important vastly exceeds what we do know. We know even less about all the equally important people who shaped but have been lost to history. Making that point in a lecture to the faculty nearly costs Woman his job. His freedom (and thus his life) is at risk because his history as a murderer might be discovered — but it is a history he shares with many murderers, and yet another example of undiscovered historical knowledge.

The novel’s multiple themes include: bringing courage and dignity to death, the importance of understanding history to understanding life, casting off the chains of childhood to become an adult, rejection of false certainties in favor of intellectual inquiry, the nature of fate and destiny (“our purposes are not necessarily our intentions”), the need to shape the future rather than obsessing about the unchangeable past, the possibility of rising above the limited role that society might assign to people of a particular race or origin, the empowering recognition that oppressors are victims of their own oppression, the myth of white identity, the notion that denying someone else’s past (pretending, for example, that people of an oppressed group were never oppressed) is a form of murder, the drive people feel to judge each other and how little right they have to do it. And this: “There’s no value in persecuting someone for overcoming their history in an attempt to forge a better future.”

John Woman is a surprising character — he never does the expected, and is capable of both great empathy and cold calculation, able at any moment to make either the most or the least moral choice. He likens himself to the coyote of mythology, the cunning trickster. The plot of John Woman is also surprising. For all the novel’s surprises, however, it always maintains credibility; none of the plot twists are forced.. The intersection of John’s life with the Platinum Path adds suspense, as does the question of whether John will go to prison (and perhaps be transformed into predator or prey) for the crime he committed almost two decades earlier. Still, this is a novel of ideas (“the most dangerous products of humankind”) rather than thrills, of complex moral choices rather than fights and shootouts. It might be Mosley’s best work.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley

Published by Doubleday on June 14, 2016

Set in 1968, Charcoal Joe is the latest chapter in the story of Easy Rawlins. Continuing a theme that began in Rose Gold, Easy’s life seems like it’s getting better. He’s started a private detective agency with Tinsford “Whisper” Natly and Saul Lynx. Things are going well with his daughter Feather. He’s planning to make his life complete by marrying the woman he loves. But Easy’s life is never easy. The question that series fans will soon ask is whether Easy will again be enveloped by the darkness that defined his life in Blonde Faith and Little Green.

Aside from the personal drama that afflicts Easy’s life, the plot of Charcoal Joe involves a job that Easy is hired to do for a friend of his deadly friend Mouse. The friend, Charcoal Joe, wants Easy to investigate the murder of two men. A young physicist named Seymour Brathwaite has been convicted of the crime. Charcoal Joe wants Easy to prove Seymour’s innocence.

During the murder investigation, Easy learns that are large sum of money has gone missing, as have some diamonds. Several unsavory characters, ranging from gangsters to a police detective, would like to find the money.

Charcoal Joe returns a number of familiar series characters, including Fearless Jones, Mouse, and Jackson Blue. Easy has assembled a makeshift family, many of whom are of dubious character, but they all take care of each other, which makes them easy to like, if not admire. Feather serves as his anchor, but keeping a lover in his life is problematic. Easy learns something new about life from every encounter with another character, and so does the reader.

Easy’s observations of life are sharpened by the dangers and petty insults that black men must endure to survive in 1960s Los Angeles. His is a world of “dark skin, darker lives, and a slim chance of survival.” Yet it’s a changing world and Easy is hopeful that the future will be better, for the sake of Feather and other members of the next generation if not himself. Then as today, the changes are arriving at a snail’s pace, leaving Easy at once impatient and grateful.

If only for the brightness of his prose and the clarity of the images he evokes, Walter Mosley is always a joy to read. The plot of Charcoal Joe is intricate but never padded or confusing. But it is the depth of Mosley’s exploration of his characters that puts him in the top ranks of crime writers. Danger forces Mosley “to appreciate life; to understand its frailty, transience, and its incalculable value,” but the burden of history forces Mosley to understand himself, or at least to try.

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