10 Quick Questions for Walter Mosley

What’s on your reading list right now?

I’ve been getting back into [Herman] Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener [Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street]. I was teaching at Sundance just recently in the screenwriters lab, and one of the fellows had written a script that was very much like [Melville character] Billy Budd. I think that’s what brought me back to Melville. There are science fiction writers I love: Roger Zelazny, who I think is just wonderful. Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss. I have a science fiction book coming out in the middle of the year from Grove Atlantic called Touched. A lot of modern science fiction, I’m just not interested in. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not bad writing, and I understand what it’s doing. It doesn’t strike me as some of the older science fiction does.

In Mosley's newest novel, an investigator becomes entangled in a dangerous case when he's asked to find out whether or not a white nationalist is being framed for murder.

Mulholland Book

As a crime novelist, do you read any other crime novelists?

I stopped reading crime novels as a rule quite a while ago. ... The thing is, [with] a real well-crafted mystery, you don’t know where you’re going, and it gets deep, deep, deep into you. I remember this one time, I was writing this [book about private investigator character Easy Rawlins], and when I finished reading it, I said to myself: You know, this looks familiar … and I realized I had taken somebody else’s plot. I really stopped after that. … It’s funny because mysterious things are insidious that way.

You’re in the writers’ room for FX’s show Snowfall. What's more fun, writing a book or working in a writers’ room?

Oh my God. Writing a book is so much more fun than writing for the screen. The kind word to use about writing for the screen is that it’s “collaborative,” but it’s not like you’re collaborating with Herman Melville and Roger Zelazny, Octavia Butler. What you’re doing is collaborating with producers saying, “The audience won’t like this, or I don’t understand that.” It really is challenging, and I don’t mind doing it — it pays well — but when I write a novel, that’s just me writing. And if an editor has something to say, I listen, and maybe I do something about it, and maybe not.

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Are you working on any of your books/characters for the small screen?

Lots of them. I have a book called Parishioner that I’m trying to do a series about. I’m trying to do Easy Rawlins with Apple. I’m also trying to do a Western for Apple. ... There’s a movie — you can say I cowrote it because I wrote the first draft, the director changed it somewhat, so we cowrote it — based on my book The Man in My Basement that we’re supposed to be shooting in the middle of next year.

What’s on your to-watch list?

I recently realized that I never saw the first two years of Remington Steele. I just love the writing on it, and because it’s a silly comedy, people don’t know that, but it’s right on point. … I’ll watch the great old films. It’s a great joy to me. My favorite old film is The Third Man.

Any travel plans in your future?

One of the episodes I wrote for Snowfall had to be shot in Ghana, and I went there. I thought it was beautiful. That was wonderful. I just came back from Utah for Sundance. I hadn’t been there in three years. It snowed every moment I was there. That’s my traveling. I travel for work. I usually have a good time doing it, and it’s the only time I do it. Vacation stopped being of interest for me quite a while ago. It’s like, I understand if you have some kind of job working like I used to, as a programmer, [where] you do want to get away, [but] I love my life. I get up every day and I’m writing. What could be better? If I go away, I still get up every day and I’m writing.