Walter Mosley grew up in Los Angeles and experienced firsthand what he considers one of the most crucial events in 20th Century American history: the 1965 Watts riots.

But it wasn’t hearing screaming police sirens or spotting bodies in the streets or men jumping out of windows with arms packed with loot that had the biggest impact on the renowned mystery writer.

It came from watching his father, Leroy Mosley, drinking and seeming upset.

“I’m not scared,” Leroy Mosley said. “I want to get out there. I want to riot. I want to burn. I want to shoot.” When Walter asked his father if he was going to do it, Leroy Mosley said no.

“It’s wrong to shoot people you don’t know,” the son remembered the father saying. “It’s wrong to burn down your own neighborhood. But I want to because I know why these people are mad. They shame me because they’re brave enough to do it, and it seems like I’m not.”

That mixture of rage and frustration pervades the latest in Mosley’s signature detective series, and in his broader thinking and writing about race.

Mosley, now a 52-year-old New Yorker, visited Chicago recently to promote “Little Scarlet,” the latest mystery featuring Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a custodian, adoptive father of two, World War II vet, tough guy. Oh, and he happens to be African-American.

In “Scarlet,” Rawlins is recruited to investigate whether a white man murdered a black woman who rescued him from the riots. If true, Los Angeles police fear that crime would revive the riots once more. So scared are they of political fallout that they give Rawlins a stay-out-of-jail-free card in the form of a letter from a deputy commissioner.

But the case troubles Rawlins more than others as he struggles through his feelings in the aftermath of the riots. And he learns the case proves far more complex then it first appeared.

“Even when you find out who committed the crime, he’s not really the criminal,” Mosley said cryptically. “There are other criminals. Easy finds this out, and it’s kind of a heartbreaking thing.”

Sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Monaco downtown, Mosley said he’d long wanted to set a story against the backdrop of the Watts riots. He added that the event often gets overlooked as a pivotal point because it had no central figure. But it forced the country to realize the depth of black anger.

“It changed America forever in five days, a completely amazing thing,” he said.

As proof of how different things are now, Mosley offered himself as Exhibit A.

“The fact that I can be a writer sitting in this hotel having this conversation with somebody thinking it’s interesting enough to put in a newspaper, that’s a big thing,” Mosley said. “The fact that I can write genre fiction, that’s a big thing. At one time, black people could only write about being black, and not many of us could do that.”

Yet at the same time, Mosley realizes how uncomfortable the subject of race remains and how many problems persist.

African-Americans “have a million men in prison; we’re still systematically kept out of neighborhoods, jobs, positions of power,” Mosley said. “Two million people who were somehow by mistake kept from voting, a million of them were black people. Young black women in the eastern South have the highest rate of AIDS, and it’s growing every day. There’s a problem in the community, and it has racial aspects to it.”

Still, Mosley is quick to say that blacks should be doing more to help themselves and others.

“I’m not into victimology,” he said. “Black Americans are the wealthiest, most powerful, most influential group of black people in the world. At this moment, we’re not necessarily living up to it. We’re not saving Rwanda, dealing with the Sudan, explaining to the rest of America why the rest of the world hates us. We’re not doing it. We should be doing it. We have a lot of power. And even though we might be victims to some degree, being victims doesn’t mean you don’t stand up for who you are, what you are, where you are, what you’re doing.”

That, he said, is what Easy Rawlins is all about. He is aware of the context he lives in, Mosley said, but he doesn’t allow it to define him.

“The minute Easy looks in the mirror and sees a black man, I’m in trouble,” he added.

Mosley said he intends to write an Easy Rawlins mystery for each of the next five years. He’s finished a draft of the next one, “Cinnamon Kiss,” and said he could see Rawlins continuing to grow old, possibly reaching the year 2000.

Rawlins, the character portrayed by Denzel Washington in the 1994 movie “Devil in a Blue Dress,” may be Mosley’s best known. But with a rare versatility, Mosley also has written science fiction, political essays and other literature outside the detective genre.

And so, between Rawlins cases will be what Mosley calls “these odder books,” including one to be released in April called “47.” That young adult novella revolves around an alien who befriends a slave in 1832 Georgia.

“The reason I have the science fiction aspect in it is because it’s very hard to talk to black people about slavery,” Mosley said “The great majority of slaves lived from the first minute to the last as victims of slavery with very few expressions of rebellion or freedom or whatever. And so who wants to read about it? I had to figure out a way to add a very positive aspect to the life of a slave.”

He also said he pitched a series to the USA cable network, and has people possibly interested in making movie versions of “Futureland,” a work in which a biological warfare effort by white supremacists backfires and leaves only those with black ancestry alive.

“A good prospect is a 1-out-of-10 chance, and I have a whole bunch of those,” Mosley said. “Unless you’re really in the business, it’s never a slam dunk. And even when you are, things can fall apart. So I never plan on it.”

In the meantime, he’s just pressing ahead with his work.

“I write every day,” he said. “I write no more than three hours. Because I always do it in the morning, and I do it right when I wake up. I’m usually not dressed, in case you needed to know that.”

Time to close that case.

By Raoul Mowatt

(Chicago Tribune)