SOURCE: "Blues Out of Watts," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4825, September 22, 1995, p. 24.

In the following essay, Lively examines Mosley's themes in Devil in a Blue Dress, A Red Death, and White Butterfly (collected in The Walter Mosley Omnibus) and their relation to his departure from detective fiction in RL's Dream.

Walter Mosley is a writer who has made a sudden and sharp change of direction. He has made his name with three hard-boiled crime novels, all set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s and 50s, all featuring the same tough-guy protagonist and all now collected in one volume [The Walter Mosley Omnibus]. But his new novel, RL's Dream, is something quite different. The setting is contemporary, there is no crime to be solved, and the hectic pace of the earlier books is replaced by a narrative that is more leisurely and cyclical, less linear and more...