Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Socrates Fortlow Series #1) by Walter Mosley

From the Publisher

New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley introduces an "astonishing character" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) in this acclaimed collection of entwined tales. Meet Socrates Fortlow, a tough ex-con seeking truth and redemption in South Central Los Angeles — and finding the miracle of survival.

"I either committed a crime or had a crime done to me every day I was in jail. Once you go to prison you belong there." Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his huge, rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working for the Bounty supermarket, and moving perilously close to invisibility, it is Socrates who throws a lifeline to a drowning man: young Darryl, whose shaky path is already bloodstained and fearsome. In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.

Playboy

Tough but touching stories.

Booklist

Powerful...hard-hitting, unrelenting, poignant short fiction.

Elle

Mournful, insightful, and mystical. It is also Mosley's best work of fiction.

Denver Post

A wonderful book...[with] characters who seem as real as the reader.

Publishers Weekly

Unveiling a new, bigger-than-life urban hero...Mosley...confer[s] on the mean streets of contemporary L.A. what filmmaker John Ford helped create for the American West: a gun-slinging mythology of street justice and a gritty, elegiac code of honor...A maverick protagonist.

The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned is the work of a writer unafraid of pushing forward his own notions of responsibility and entitlement.

Sonoma County Independent

An insistently probing, philosophical gem...set in a world where standard notions of right and wrong have been blown to hell.

Library Journal

Mosley introduces an unlikely hero in Socrates Fortlow, a rough-hewn yet thoughtful ex-con who, like his Greek namesake, is prone to asking big moral questions. Having spent 27 years in an Indiana prison and now living in Watts (in Los Angeles), Socrates is trying to redeem a misspent life while avoiding his own worst tendencies. He risks his safety to help a young boy struggling with his own conscience and tries to show mercy to an old friend dying of cancer. When he attempts to help a dog run over by a callous motorist, Socrates gives in to his anger and suddenly finds himself on the verge of returning to jail. While the novel can be a bit contrived or didactic in places, readers will find Socrates an intriguing enough character to overlook these flaws. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/97.]Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass.

Elle

Mournful, insightful, and mystical. . .Mosley's best work of fiction.

What People Are Saying

Sven Birkets
A striking departure from the familiar event-driven world of Easy Rawlins. The 14 loosely linked vignettes and tales incorporate the Platonic dialogues as a kind of ghost melody; signature strains of the classic are vamped up in the rough demotic of present-day Watts.

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Interviews & Essays

Walter Mosley: Thanks for having me. I am glad to be here.

Walter Mosley: Most cultures in America have been limited to white audiences, and that is changing. As far as your second question goes, there is always a resurgence of film noir. Until people realize that noir is low-budget, it will always have trouble.

Walter Mosley: It is not at all autobiographical. I didn't go to prison for 27 years.

Walter Mosley: I started writing not because of other writers but because of storytellers, the most important one being my father. I love existentialism and novels like THE STRANGER, but also I am crazy for sci-fi and different kinds of literary works. I like to read.

Walter Mosley: I had dinner with him once at the White House, and I went once just to say hello. He seems to read an awful lot. He reads early in the morning, like 1 to 3am. He is a very smart man.

Walter Mosley: I didn't do that much research. It is a novel about inner-city life juxtaposed with the Socratic method. I had already read Plato, and inner-city life I have had a pretty good knowledge of also.

Walter Mosley: Not always.

Walter Mosley: Socrates. His most outstanding feature are his hands, which are called the rock breakers. It is the attempt of the designer to show hands of great character and great strength.

Walter Mosley: Thank you very much for the compliment. My next book will be a sci-fi book but BAD BOT BRAWLY BROWN is my next Easy book, and we will have to see about Mouse.

Walter Mosley: Yes, I did write the screenplay for the movie, and I was the co-executive producer with Laurence Fishburne.

Walter Mosley: I have started a publishing institute at the City College of New York. That publishing institute is running, and they have 58 students of color. We are trying and are very successful in having them support this institute.

Walter Mosley: My childhood was kind of poor and then ended up being middle-class. I didn't realize that I wanted to be a writer until my early 30s.

Walter Mosley: I thought it was a very good movie, and I think that Carl Franklin was very successful, because it was a movie about black people, but it could be identified with by anyone.

Walter Mosley: Stout, McDonald, etc. -- the regular guys.

Walter Mosley: I wrote this book because this was a way to address the deep thought coming out of the black community. Also it was a story that older and younger people could read. Easy will be back along with all the other things I write.

Walter Mosley: SIMPLE is a starting point for me. I wouldn't say they are based on the tales, but the idea of having a black man commenting on the times in Black Africa is one of the reasons why I decided I could write the Socrates stories.

Walter Mosley: I am coming out with a series of essays from Norton. One is by me, and there are other writers. I am the editor of the book, which is my excursion into the realm of nonfiction. But fiction is really my love.

Walter Mosley: Not really. Real people inform my stories, but the characters soon gain their own lives and go their own way.

Walter Mosley: I will be reading at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in New York sometime in December.

Walter Mosley: It is a hard question. The thing that is least mentioned in the film industry is that it is really a collaborative process. It takes a lot of people to make a movie, and any successful movie knows how to use all the people. The other thing about film is that it all starts with a pencil and a piece of paper.

Walter Mosley: Very different process A novel is creating a world in language and words, whereas a screenplay strives to create a world of images.

Walter Mosley: I am happiest about being a writer. More important than any award or recognition is the joy I get from writing books and getting them published.

Walter Mosley: Two things If you keep writing and adhere to writing, sooner or later you will be published. And in order to write and be most productive, you must write every day.

Walter Mosley: I had been at college and started writing. The teacher at the head of the program asked to see my book, which he did; then he came back the next week and had secretly given it to his agent. Within six weeks I had sold my book.

Walter Mosley: I don't really relate better to anyone. This book and the way of writing it is more of creating 14 individual spheres and putting them in relationship to each other, while writing a novel is like writing one large globe that contains a larger story.

Walter Mosley: I don't know what I learned, but I had a great time reveling in the blues as one of the central forms of life in America.

Walter Mosley: If I wasn't making money being published, I would probably be teaching literature or writing, and if I couldn't do that, I would go back to my old standard, computer programming.

Walter Mosley: No plans yet, but it could happen in the next few years.

Walter Mosley: Well, writing starts at the first sentence and ends with the last version of the last sentence. It takes a lot of work and it might be difficult, but it might be a labor of love.

Walter Mosley: Two and a half years. Writing is difficult -- it takes many drafts to make it work. It doesn't come that easy to anyone.

Walter Mosley: BLUE LIGHT, which should be in bookstores in about ten months.

Walter Mosley: Yeah, I relate to all my characters. BLUE LIGHT is about if the chromosomal base life is only half the equation of true life.

Walter Mosley: Well, I appreciate the interview, and I hope all the people out there enjoy the new book.

Read an Excerpt

Crimson Shadow: Section One

"What you doin' there, boy?"

It was six a.m. Socrates Fortlow had come out to the alley, to see what was wrong with Billy. He hadn't heard him crow that morning and was worried about his old friend.

The sun was just coming up. The alley was almost pretty with the trash and broken asphalt covered in half-light. Discarded wine bottles shone like murky emeralds in the sludge. In the dawn shadows Socrates didn't even notice the boy until he moved. He was standing in front of a small cardboard box, across the alley -- next to Billy's wire fence.

"What bidness is it to you, old man?" the boy answered. He couldn't have been more than twelve but he had that hard convict stare.

Socrates knew convicts, knew them inside and out.

"I asked you a question, boy. Ain't yo' momma told you t'be civil?"

"Shit!" The boy turned away, ready to leave. He wore baggy jeans with a blooming blue T-shirt over his bony arms and chest. His hair was cut close to the scalp.

The boy bent down to pick up the box.

"What they call you?" Socrates asked the skinny butt stuck up in the air.

"What's it to you?"

Socrates pushed open the wooden fence and leapt. If the boy hadn't had his back turned he would have been able to dodge the stiff lunge. As it was he heard something and moved quickly to the side.

Quickly. But not quickly enough.

Socrates grabbed the skinny arms with his big hands -- the rock breakers, as Joe Benz used to call them.

"Ow! Shit!"

Socrates shook the boy until the serrated steak knife, which had appeared from nowhere, fell from his hand.

The old brown rooster was dead in the box. His head slashed so badly that half of the beak wasgone.

"Let me loose, man." The boy kicked, but Socrates held him at arm's length.

"Don't make me hurt you, boy," he warned. He let go of one arm and said, "Pick up that box. Pick it up!" When the boy obeyed, Socrates pulled him by the arm -- dragged him through the gate, past the tomato plants and string bean vines, into the two rooms where he'd stayed since they'd let him out of prison.

The kitchen was only big enough for a man and a half. The floor was pitted linoleum; maroon where it had kept its color, gray where it had worn through. There was a card table for dining and a fold-up plastic chair for a seat. There was a sink with a hot plate on the drainboard and shelves that were once cabinets -- before the doors were torn off.

The light fixture above the sink had a sixty-watt bulb burning in it. The room smelled of coffee. A newspaper was spread across the table.

Socrates shoved the boy into the chair, not gently.

"Sit'own!"

There was a mass of webbing next to the weak lightbulb. A red spider picked its way slowly through the strands.

"What's your name, boy?" Socrates asked again.

"Darryl."

There was a photograph of a painting tacked underneath the light. It was the image of a black woman in the doorway of a house. She wore a red dress and a red hat to protect her eyes from the sun. She had her arms crossed under her breasts and looked angry. Darryl stared at the painting while the spider danced above.

"Why you kill my friend, asshole?"

"What?" Darryl asked. There was fear in his voice.

"You heard me."

"I-I-I din't kill nobody." Darryl gulped and opened his eyes wider than seemed possible. "Who told you that?"

When Socrates didn't say anything, Darryl jumped up to run, but the man socked him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, pushing him back down in the chair.

Socrates squatted down and scooped the rooster up out of the box. He held the limp old bird up in front of Darryl's face.

"Why you kill Billy, boy?"

"That's a bird." Darryl pointed. There was relief mixed with panic in his eyes.

"That's my friend."

"You crazy, old man. That's a bird. Bird cain't be nobody's friend." Darryl's words were still wild. Socrates knew the guilty look on his face.

He wondered at the boy and at the rooster that had gotten him out of his bed every day for the past eight years. A rage went through him and he crushed the rooster's neck in his fist.

"You crazy," Darryl said.

A large truck made its way down the alley just then. The heavy vibrations went through the small kitchen, making plates and tinware rattle loudly.

Socrates shoved the corpse into the boy's lap. "Get ovah there to the sink an' pluck it."

"Shit!"

"You don't have to do it..."

"You better believe I ain't gonna..."

"...but I will kick holy shit outta you if you don't."

"Pluck what? What you mean, pluck it?"

"I mean go ovah t'that sink an' pull out the feathers. What you kill it for if you ain't gonna pluck it?"

"I'as gonna sell it."

"Sell it?"

"Yeah," Darryl said. "Sell it to some old lady wanna make some chicken."

Copyright © 1998 by Walter Mosley