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Summary
Summary
Walkin' the Dog
Author Notes
Walter Mosley was born in Los Angeles, California on January 12, 1952. He graduated from Johnson State College in Vermont. His first book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was published in 1990, won a John Creasy Award for best first novel, and was made into a motion picture starring Denzel Washington in 1995. He is the author of the Easy Rawlins Mystery series, the Leonid McGill Mystery series, and the Fearless Jones series. His other works include Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 47, Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, and Twelve Steps toward Political Revelation. He has received numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mosley returns to character Socrates Fortlow (debuted in Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned) in this follow-up collection of short stories. Fortlow is an aging ex-con, having spent more than half his life in an Indiana state penitentiary for a long-ago killing. Now, living in Los Angeles, working a menial supermarket job, Fortlow still subscribes to a prisoner's code of ethics: he is suspicious, vengeful andÄabove allÄuncannily wise. For him, "Everything seemed to have reason and deep purpose." He's testing himself as he edges his way back into society. His boss offers him a better job, but he feels strange taking it. Meantime, he is questioned by police for a murder he didn't commit. Conversely, he kills a mugger in a confrontation and is never questioned. Serving as a role model, he fosters a young protg, Darryl, a boy whose simmering violent nature seems all too familiar to him. Actor Winfield richly brings Fortlow's trials and triumphs to life, his voice imbuing a sense of the ex-con's heroic fatigue as he struggles to carry the weight of the world each day. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997), ex-con and convicted murderer Socrates Fortlow fought a kind of rear-guard action to bring a little kindness into the troubled lives of the people around him in his besieged Watts neighborhood: a few vials of morphine, acquired from a pusher, to ease the pain of a friend's prostate cancer; safe haven for one teenage boy, at risk from the local gangbangers. Almost in spite of himself, the 59-year-old Socrates now feels compelled to do more. As his personal situation improves--a new job as produce manager in a grocery story, a real apartment rather than makeshift digs in an abandoned building--Socrates finds himself more and more troubled by the pain he sees on the street. In this second volume of interconnected stories, Mosley gives the Socrates Fortlow saga a new political dimension. As Socrates debates questions of race and responsibility with his friends from the neighborhood, his anger rises, and he must struggle again with the violence that lurks in his "rock-breaking" hands. But Socrates goes another way, risking his hard-won security to expose the evils perpetuated by a rogue cop. Overtly political fiction is desperately difficult to pull off; nothing saps the life from an author's characters as fast as an author's message. Mosley avoids this lethal trap by portraying Socrates' commitment to help change his neighborhood as the inevitable result of a single individual's agony rather than the triumph of an idea. If we hear a little of Tom Joad in Socrates' declaration that he's "gonna do somethin'," we also feel Ma Joad's melancholy, her yearning for safety. Mosley's triumph is that, in telling the story of a saint, he makes us wish the saint was free to be a man. --Bill Ott
Guardian Review
The uncompromising world of Walter Mosley is a place where people behave like dudes in a gangland ghetto and debate like philosophers in the Athenian forum. Mosley has the knack of welding strange things together - his hero, Socrates Fortlow, is a 60-year-old ex- con with "rock-breaking hands", who gets his daily fix of soul food from a diner made out of two old yellow school buses suspended above a scrap yard. Fortlow made his debut in the masterful Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned , and has developed into one of the most distinctive protagonists in modern fiction - a reformed criminal attempting to trace a straight path through a crooked world, though he has difficulty getting his mind to override his fists. The new volume finds Socrates installed in a good neighbourhood with a fine woman and a two-legged dog called Killer to share his happiness. Yet it only serves to remind him of "the deepest lesson a convict ever learns: never to trust in your own good fortune". Caption: article-vvvvv.1 The uncompromising world of [Walter Mosley] is a place where people behave like dudes in a gangland ghetto and debate like philosophers in the Athenian forum. - Alfred Hickling.
Kirkus Review
Mosley's probing and stirring follow-up to Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997) presents a dozen further adventures of Socrates Fortlow, the ex-con struggling to protect his marginal, yet deeply rooted, life in blasted Watts. Despite their resolute refusal of melodrama, ``adventures'' is the word for these episodes, because Socrates is so far from the American dream of upward mobility that he never changes anything in his life'moving up to a new job as produce manager at the Bounty Market, moving out of his rent-free alley squat to a proper home'unless he feels he has to. It's an adventure for Socrates to plant a tree and sleep with a woman in memory of a jailhouse friend, or to follow the sound of a sad jazz horn to its source, or to invite the Wednesday night discussion group that usually meets at Topper Saint-Paul's funeral home to his house and tell them the story of a slave revolt in long-ago Louisiana. Once he's laid down the rhythms of Socrates's life in a spare prose that makes it clear what a gift it is to be ``safe at least for one night more,'' Mosley describes his hero's run-ins with criminals and the law in the same matter-of-fact way, shorn of the self-seriousness that sank his sci-fi thriller Blue Light (1998). Socrates kills a mugger and waits for the police to come and get him; even though they've been all over him for every crime in the neighborhood for months, they leave him unsettlingly alone. The casual reminiscences of another ex-con shake him so deeply that he disconnects his newly installed phone and gets an unlisted number. Finally, he goes up against a killer cop in a climactic story that shapes the series more firmly than Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned without going for easy answers or easy sentiment. Delicately balancing the demands of individual stories and the whole cycle, Mosley uses his perpetually angry, sensitive hero to show that ``bravery ain't no big thing . . . . It's love that gives life.'' (Author tour)
Library Journal Review
This is the second appearance of Mosley's new character, Socrates Fortlow, a convicted murderer who served his time in an Indiana prison and has been back home in Watts for nine years. His profound fatalism is tempered by a deeply rooted sense of morality. He doesn't hope for much and is always surprised when a little something better comes along. He has a protg (a foster son in practice, if not in law) who looks to him for guidance, and a circle of friends, male and female, who get together every week. His boss at the supermarket promotes him to full-time produce manager, enabling him to rent a house and get a telephone. Paul Winfield's narration is purposefully flat, reflecting Socrates's caution about getting too excited about anything. For popular collections.--Nann Blaine Hilyard, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
