Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley, 58, the prolific L.A.-born, Brooklyn-based crime novelist, has a lot to say about pop culture ? but it isn't about books. His latest is "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. " What were your favorite books this year? That should be an easy question, although I didn't read a whole bunch of new books this year. I was reading "V. " by [ Thomas] Pynchon and old Roger Zelazny, books that I had read before. . ? My problem is ? the industry publishes 150,000 books a year, and you get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of it. Are there any new writers you're watching?

Edgar Award-winning author Naomi Hirahara published her first Mas Arai mystery in 2004; the series starring the Japanese American gardener and crime solver is now on its fifth novel, "Strawberry Yellow. " She visited our video booth at the L.A. Times Festival of Books to talk with staff writer Carolyn Kellogg about the character and its connection to her heritage. Japanese gardeners were iconic in Southern California in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, Hirahara explains. But detectives -- not so much.

reporting from new york He's got an elusive black mistress and a bored Swedish wife who doesn't love him. He's raising three kids, only one of whom is his. A low-level mobster wants him to kill someone, and the men he's tracking for a shadowy detective are being murdered one by one. ? Leonid McGill, the protagonist of Walter Mosley's new mystery, "The Long Fall," is a harried, middle-aged African American.

Here are six books (and book events) to which I'm especially looking forward: a preview of the writes of spring. April 2 "The Flamethrowers" by Rachel Kushner Scribner Rachel Kushner's first novel, "Telex From Cuba," was a sensation: Set in the years before the Cuban revolution, it was a national bestseller and a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. Her follow-up, "The Flamethrowers," operates in the space between creativity and politics, the saga of an artist who travels from Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s to become immersed in the white hot center of Italian radical politics.

The Movie That Inspired Me David Fincher, celebrated director of "Fight Club" and "Zodiac," presents George Roy Hill's William Goldman-scripted "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in this month's installment of the UCLA Film and Television Archive series. Post-screening, Fincher and series host Curtis Hanson will discuss the lighthearted 1969 chronicle of the notorious leaders of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Billy Wilder Theatre, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. 7:30 p.m. $9. (310) 206-3456. cinema.

Walter Mosley's latest, "When the Thrill Is Gone," is the third installment (after "The Long Fall" and "Known to Evil") in the series featuring Leonid McGill, a tough, philosophic African American private detective who plies his perilous trade in today's New York City. The book is as complex and thoughtful as its narrator-hero and is also smartly paced, well plotted and elegantly written. And yet, when compared to the author's initial, career-igniting novels about Easy Rawlins, it seems to lack a key ingredient: originality.

Known to Evil A Novel Walter Mosley Riverhead: 326 pp., $25.95 Walter Mosley's last novel, "The Long Fall," was the detective fiction equivalent of a system reboot, a riff on the author's favorite brand of story. Instead of Los Angeles, we have New York; instead of the past, there is only the present (or, at least, the 2008 variety of present). Instead of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins stumbling through tumultuous social change with lethal sidekicks and an unorthodox family, meet Leonid Trotter McGill, "a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world" who stumbles through his own prolonged internal crises backed by a lethal sidekick and a most dysfunctional family.

Walter Mosley, author of "Devil in a Blue Dress," is being sued by his ex-wife for money she says he agreed to pay out of income from several of his books. Joy Kellman says in court papers that Mosley owes her at least $500,000, plus interest, from earnings on 11 books as provided by their divorce agreement. Some of the books were published after their divorce. The two were married from Sept. 5, 1987, to June 19, 2001, and had no children.

Diablerie A Novel Walter Mosley Bloomsbury: 184 pp., $23.95 * At first glance, Ben Dibbuk has a pretty good racket. The protagonist of Walter Mosley's new novel, "Diablerie," makes a six-figure salary as a computer programmer at a New York bank. He and his wife, Mona, a freelance magazine editor, live on Manhattan's East Side, while their 19-year-old daughter studies downtown at New York University. The 47-year-old Ben also keeps a young Ukrainian lover on the side.

Midafternoon, and we are sailing. The wide span of Century Boulevard seems vast in its possibilities, a seductive expanse with room to roam or expand. At quick glimpse, it is sparkling, but a brief pause at a light reveals something quite different--a poorly patched facade, a wall of chain link encircling nothing, rubble from some long-lost decade left to rot or rust. "Look at these giant streets!" Walter Mosley rides jump seat, taking in L.A.

You can take Walter Mosley out of Los Angeles - in fact, Mosley did so himself, moving to New York decades ago - but you can't take L.A. out of Walter Mosley. The master of several genres keeps the city present, from his Easy Rawlins detective novels set in black postwar Los Angeles to the Greek-myths-in-South-Central elements in one of the two novellas in his latest volume. Mosley appeared to wrap it up with Rawlins in "Blonde Faith" in 2007, but five years later, he's found more for his most famous detective to do, just as Mosley has for himself.

Walter Mosley's latest, "When the Thrill Is Gone," is the third installment (after "The Long Fall" and "Known to Evil") in the series featuring Leonid McGill, a tough, philosophic African American private detective who plies his perilous trade in today's New York City. The book is as complex and thoughtful as its narrator-hero and is also smartly paced, well plotted and elegantly written. And yet, when compared to the author's initial, career-igniting novels about Easy Rawlins, it seems to lack a key ingredient: originality.

Walter Mosley, 58, the prolific L.A.-born, Brooklyn-based crime novelist, has a lot to say about pop culture ? but it isn't about books. His latest is "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. " What were your favorite books this year? That should be an easy question, although I didn't read a whole bunch of new books this year. I was reading "V. " by [ Thomas] Pynchon and old Roger Zelazny, books that I had read before. . ? My problem is ? the industry publishes 150,000 books a year, and you get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of it. Are there any new writers you're watching?

Amy Clampitt Selected Poems Edited by Mary Jo Salter Alfred A. Knopf, $19.95 This collection serves as a kind of memorial to the gifted poet, who died in 1994. The Brave A Novel Nicholas Evans Little, Brown, $26.99 A documentary filmmaker with a complicated childhood must confront his past to deal with his estranged son, accused of committing atrocities while serving in Iraq. Canti Poems Giacomo Leopardi Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35 This thoroughly modern 19th century Italian's lyric poetry about the self and loneliness are given new freshness in this translation by Jonathan Galassi.

The Movie That Inspired Me David Fincher, celebrated director of "Fight Club" and "Zodiac," presents George Roy Hill's William Goldman-scripted "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in this month's installment of the UCLA Film and Television Archive series. Post-screening, Fincher and series host Curtis Hanson will discuss the lighthearted 1969 chronicle of the notorious leaders of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Billy Wilder Theatre, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. 7:30 p.m. $9. (310) 206-3456. cinema.

Known to Evil A Novel Walter Mosley Riverhead: 326 pp., $25.95 Walter Mosley's last novel, "The Long Fall," was the detective fiction equivalent of a system reboot, a riff on the author's favorite brand of story. Instead of Los Angeles, we have New York; instead of the past, there is only the present (or, at least, the 2008 variety of present). Instead of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins stumbling through tumultuous social change with lethal sidekicks and an unorthodox family, meet Leonid Trotter McGill, "a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world" who stumbles through his own prolonged internal crises backed by a lethal sidekick and a most dysfunctional family.

There was a reason Phil Jackson could be seen balancing a large stack of books earlier this week at a Los Angeles bookstore. The Lakers coach bought books for each of his players and distributed them before their eight-game trip, part of an annual ritual before a Jackson-coached team begins a long winter trip. Kobe Bryant , who rolls his eyes whenever Jackson gives him a book, probably won't be perusing what Jackson handed him: "Montana 1948," a Larry Watson novel about a middle-class Montana family torn apart by a scandal in the late 1940s.