UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Walter Mosley, Always Outnumbered, always Outgunned (1998)

             Mosley’s main character is called Socrates Fortlow, and he is not a detective like Easy Rawlins, the hero of Devil in a Blue Dress and most of Mosley’s previous books.  Socrates, like his namesake, is a moral philosopher.  But he is also a double murderer who spent twenty-seven years in prison for his crimes.  When he tries to show people around him the moral consequences of their actions, what their duty is, or that they need to feel guilty for wrongs done, he speaks from his own profound sense of guilt, and he usually fails to convey his own sense of rightness to others.  His own life is an attempt to live in strict moral rectitude, avoiding any dishonesty or harm to others, and he doesn’t always succeed.  But the attempt means that he is poor, he spends a lot of his time turning the other cheek, and nothing is very easy for him.

            There are fourteen chapters in the book, and although each is a stand-alone story that originally appeared separately in a magazine, there are some continuing threads, like the mystery of Socrates’s past and especially what sent him to prison.  There is also the question of what will happen to a young boy Socrates is trying to rescue from the gangs of the inner city.  In a way all these stories are about attempted rescues, as Socrates tries to redeem his own life and save what he can from the ruin around him.  And Socrates’ rescues are not limited to people; he saves a dog late in the book, an episode that almost lands him back in jail but instead has a happy and romantic ending.

            The book’s setting is a grittily realized piece of Los Angeles, Slauson and Marvane and other streets of Watts at the time of the Rodney King riots.  But its scope includes Socrates’s past, stretching back to the Vietnam War, and a repeated theme is that past actions have their consequences.

            Somehow the book manages to be bleak and hopeful at the same time: bleak in setting and in its overall picture of the world of south-central Los Angeles, but hopeful in the small triumphs Socrates brings about among his friends and the other people he touches. 

            Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned was made into an HBO movie in 1998 and Mosley has written a sequel titled Walking the Dog.