Doing the right thing isn’t easy in a morally ambivalent world rife with racism, police brutality, scams, cruelties and tragedies including black-on- black violence.Īlthough stocked with clever narratives seasoned with suspense, Mosley’s musings are never merely whodunits, mindless junk for beach reading. “Black Betty,” the mystery he has been promoting from Boston to Los Angeles, is a hip, action-and- character-packed chronicle of Easy Rawlins, an African-American detective who tries to do the right thing.

Mosley, once an obscure computer programmer, says he’s glad to be near the end of a more than two- month, 21-city tour to promote his new book, “Black Betty” (Norton, $25.99). And recently, the Times declared that Mosley “beats the hell out of most of today’s contenders for consideration as a top-ranking writer in the mystery division.” While on the campaign trail in 1992, Clinton called Mosley his favorite mystery writer. But as a realist, he acknowledges he has enjoyed and profited from praise from such influential sources as President Clinton and The New York Times. Mosley, 42, takes a dim view of celebrityhood. Such media attention is now old hat for Mosley, who a few hours earlier had been interviewed on CBS’s “This Morning.” Looking a bit bored, yet professionally accommodating, he leans his bulky frame against a bleak side wall of a store so a news photographer can snap his picture. N his rumpled black summer suit, Walter Mosley, one of America’s best-selling mystery writers, wends his way wearily across the hot, steamy, traffic-clogged street in downtown New Haven just outside his hotel room.

Black betty mosley