Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned - Hardcover

Mosley, Walter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393045390 ISBN 13: 9780393045390

Publisher: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997

Synopsis

After serving twenty-seven years in an Indiana prison for killing two people in a drunken rage, tough, brooding ex-convict Socrates Fortlow lives in a tiny apartment in an abandoned building in Watts, struggling to make sense of the anarchic violence in the world--and in himself. 100,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Walter Mosley is the author of six best-selling Easy Rawlins mysteries, the most recent of which are A Little Yellow Dog and Gone Fishin', and the novel RL's Dream. Sections of this book have appeared in Esquire, Buzz, GQ, and Story.His work is regularly seen on national bestseller lists and appears in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature.

Reviews

Mosley takes a break from his peerless Easy Rawlins series (Gone Fishin', 1997, etc.) for a cycle of non-mystery stories set in the same violent neighborhood of Watts. Like Easy, Socrates Fortlow has lived a long time with the dark side of life and himself. Thirty-five years ago, Socrates, addled with drink and lust, raped and killed a pair of acquaintances. Now, eight years after his endless prison sentence, he's living in a two-room apartment little better than his cell, and he still watches his back, avoids the Man, and assigns himself a grade at the end of every day. ``Once you go to prison you belong there,'' he says of the brutalizing effect his term worked on him. But no matter how hard he tries, Socrates can't turn his back on life. A walk on the beach stirs memories and desires he'd rather not face; a tense face-off with a neighborhood adulterer awakens both his sharpest censure and his sharpest self-criticism. And he's not just a survivor; amid the allures of the flesh and the fear and anger he feels about being a black American, his life also lurches forward. He pushes the staff of the Bounty Supermarket to hire him as a grocery boxer; he takes in Darryl, a boy he can tell killed somebody else, too; he gets together with a WW II vet to expel a crack dealer from the neighborhood; he wrestles manfully with the question of whether he should rat a homicidal firebug out to the hated police. Whether he's remembering the bookstore intellectuals he used to hang around with or teaching Darryl to stand up to a gangbanger, Socrates constantly judges himself. As he writes to an old girlfriend: ``I don't get into trouble even when it's not my fault.'' The elemental recurrence of fear and lust and rage are right out of Easy Rawlins, even if Socrates' story exhibits rather than extends Mosley's range. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mosley introduces a new character, Socrates Fortlow, an ex-con trying to redeem his life, who "risks his safety to help a young boy struggling with his own conscience," and tries to provide a measure of mercy to an old friend dying of cancer.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In these interconnected short stories about an aging black man, Socrates Fortlow, living in a makeshift two-room apartment in an abandoned Watts building, Mosley turns on its head the fundamental fantasy of the detective story, the notion that a single individual can unlock a mystery whose solution will, temporarily, restore order to a chaotic world. Unlike Easy Rawlins, the hero of Mosley's own acclaimed detective series, Socrates lacks the wherewithal to solve mysteries, to move at least reasonably easily through various levels of society. Socrates is an ex-con, having served 27 years of hard time for a double murder. He lives precariously, delivering groceries and attempting to quell the demons that threaten to stir his "rock-breaking hands" to still more violence. And yet, despite all that, Socrates, too, restores temporary order in a chaotic world. His triumphs are small, attenuated things, but they are chiseled from the unyielding bedrock of despair that surrounds him: a few vials of morphine, acquired from a pusher, to ease the pain of his friend's prostate cancer; a momentary safe haven for a teenage boy, at risk from the local gangbangers. Every detective hero, even one as cut from real cloth as Easy Rawlins, is finally a fantasy figure, somebody with the answers we lack; Socrates Fortlow, "always outnumbered, always outgunned," is a fantasy-free hero. These are often difficult stories to read; never sentimental, they are finally, one and all, about pain and how we live with it. Perhaps that's why those brief moments when Socrates eases someone else's pain deliver such a powerful sense of catharsis. Hard-hitting, unrelenting, poignant short fiction. Bill Ott

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton and Company
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393045390
• ISBN 13: 9780393045390
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208