Walkin’ the Dog
Walter Mosley
Serpent’s Tail hbk, 272 pgs, £14.99 (since issued in paperback)
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
Walter Mosley’s Socrates Fortlow exists in the hinterland between short story and novel. If his literary debut, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, was a conscious attempt at collected but separated fictions, then this new one pushes the envelope further - although not quite all the way - towards being an actual novel.
Fortlow is the ex-con who served 27 years in Indiana for a drunken slaying. He’s a big man, a big black man with ‘rock-breaking hands’. But dexterous with his fists as he undoubtedly is, here too is the man who’s learned from his past. A Watts resident and low-paid supermarket bagman, he has dedicated himself to more, if you will, Socratic methods; a credo to Do The Right Thing. Black men like Socrates are trapped, Mosley says, ‘by the reality of their existence and the unreality of their existence.’ And if sometimes that, reluctantly, necessitates a return to violence (‘Socrates couldn’t shake the fists out of his hands’) then he has a gun squirreled away where he prays the law cain’t be finding it.
Because when we rejoin him for Walkin’ The Dog the law are all over Socrates Fortlow like a rash. A young woman in a silver minidress was subject to a brutally professional killing not far from his home. And he’s black and poor, and he’s got a record and that has never been more than enough in good old America. Even if you got a girlfriend and a boy to help raise and two-legged dog named Killer and a code to live by:
‘The policeman, the salesman in the store, the newspaperman or the TV anchor, Socrates didn’t trust any one of them. He knew their jobs were to hold him down and rob him, and then afterward to tell him lies about what had really gone down.’
Even more so than in the acclaimed ‘Easy’ Rawlins cycle, the Fortlow stories are Mosley’s way of exercising his own moral dog. Certainly what can look trite in precise - should he accept a new job at the expense of his freedom; how to honour the memory of a Death Row prisoner of his acquaintance - are filtered both through what is a surprisingly complex moral universe, and Mosely’s beautifully etched prose. That he is a remarkable stylist (though let’s not be so crass as to call him a ghetto poet) allows him philosophise without labour, press home his didacticism without making you feel you’re chewing carpet.
This book is all the better too for coming in the wake of the leaden and insufferably dull SF novel, Blue Light. Mosley’s willingness to open up his literary horizons is admirable, but whenever he steps out of, for want of a better word, genre (evidence: RL’s Dream), ingenuity deserts him. Like Socrates Fortlow, Walter Mosley seems out of touch once he leaves the neighborhood. Within it, though, he is virtually without peer.