[In the following review of R. L.'s Dream, Stuart praises Mosley for his clearly drawn characters and his lyrical prose which resembles the rhythms of blues music.]

Being nominated as President Clinton's favourite author doesn't seem to have hurt Walter Mosley's career. In fact, with the publication of this new novel and the film version of Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington, opening to rave reviews in the U.S., it would be fair to say that right now Mosley is—as the saying goes—“shitting gold”. One of a small number of great detective writers who have used their genre to explore wider moral dilemmas, he is also the only real heir to Chester Himes, the visionary black crime writer whose picture of Harlem life in the 1950s has had such a seminal influence on black literature.

Mosley made his name with his bruised and battered L.A. detective, Easy Rawlins. A highly moral man who tries to do right but often fails, Easy is a latter-day Don Quixote, but one who doesn't often feel compelled to leave the 'hood. Less a detective than a rescuer, his knowledge of his community, rather than his investigative skills, provide the key to solving crime. His compassion and his distance—like that of his half-Jewish, half-African-American creator—give Easy his unique insight into the curious moral contingencies of American life.

Reading these novels, though, one felt more and more that Mosley was about to break his banks; that the genre couldn't contain him any longer. R. L.'s Dream is the product of this overflowing. The novel is about a fictional blues player, “Soupspoon” Wise, and his relationship to the music of the real legendary bluesman, Robert Johnson. In failing health and advanced years, Soupspoon is rescued by a young white woman from the streets of New York—a woman with her own bitter secrets—and is brought back to life by her care and by his fervent desire to get back to the blues.

In R. L.'s Dream, Mosley is attempting to do what Toni Morrison aspired to in her novel Jazz—turning the music into words. And in many ways Mosley's book, albeit more modest, is more successful. Some of this has to do with the music itself. Unlike gospel, with its message of transcendence; or jazz, whose clever complexity inspires such cerebral appreciation, the blues message is simply about ordinary pain. The kind that dogs you when you get up in the morning, and lingers with you last thing at night. The blues tells you no lies about the “by and by”; it promises no salvation in the hereafter; instead, it pins you down right here and right now with a sound full of blood and loss and failure.

Or that is how it is when Mosley plays it. At a crucial point in the novel, Soupspoon laments: “I never played the blues, not really. I ran after it all these years. I scratched at its coat-tails and copied some notes. But the real blues is covered by mud and blood in the Mississippi delta. The real blues is down that terrible pathway where R. L. travelled, sufferin' and singin' till he was dead. I followed him up to the gateway, but Satan scared me silly and left me back to cry.”

It has been a long time since a book has affected me like this one. Reading R. L.'s Dream is a lot like listening to R. L. Johnson perform “Come On in My Kitchen”, on one of those scratchy recordings made in some forgotten motel room. The writing makes you want to cry or shout Amen. There are moments when it casts you down so hard you can feel the dirt in your mouth. What is miraculous about Mosley is the way that he lets the story tell itself. He never stands on a soap-box, or proselytises; he just draws his characters so clearly that they become irresistible.