Novelist Walter Mosley on the delicate art of writing dirty

Walter Mosley, the 54-year-old author of 30 books ranging from detective potboilers to young adult romps, says that writing is primarily an unconscious act. "Despite what most writers would have you believe," Mosley says, "it comes from the gut, not the brain." This may be especially true in Mosley's latest novel, Killing Johnny Fry (hitting shelves in January), a fantastically filthy tale of a cuckolded man in search of revenge and reinvention.

Like his 1990 breakout detective mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress, Mosley's newest novel is a noir. But this one is a quantum leap in versatility and bears the unmistakable earmark of the red-headed stepchild of the literary arts: hard-core pornography. Killing Johnny Fry tells the story of a black man named Cordell, a milquetoast, strictly-missionary translator of marketing material in his forties who one day stumbles upon his longtime girlfriend getting reamed up the ass by a white man named Johnny Fry, who happens to have a giant penis. The trauma sends Cordell into a downward tailspin: he quits his job, takes up drinking, and plots the murder of Johnny Fry. The ensuing story is a gritty journey through a melange of insatiable sex—anal intrusion, double penetration, priapism, golden showers, etc. Cordell is after revenge, but he's also in search of himself, and the only way he's going to find himself is by fucking his way to enlightenment.

Mosley calls this murky erotic extravaganza a "sexistential noir," and says Johnny Fry comes from the same place as Camus's The Stranger and Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. But there's also an equal portion of De Sade and Vivid Video.

RADAR: You've written a remarkably diverse body of work, from the Easy Rawlins detective series to 47, a young-adult novel. So where did Killing Johnny Fry come from?
WALTER MOSLEY: This is sort of a universal story, I think, about an everyman. Everybody has sexuality, everybody is spurned; we're all lonely. A couple months ago there was a front-page story in USA Today about how one out of three people in America have no friends they could confide in. Here's how that's changed: Twenty years ago, it was one out of four. That's what this book is about: existential loneliness. Any kind of book that you write has to have a body to hold it together, and sex experience is one of the big ones that holds human beings together. Along with survival and love itself.

Existentialism theorizes that people wander between choice, freedom, and angst. Please help me understand the term sexistential.
Well, this is primarily an existential book. Cordell is looking for meaning in his life. Who am I? What am I? Why live? These are very basic questions. And the path that Cordell takes to find that meaning is a path of sexuality. The Stranger is probably my favorite novel. 100 Years of Solitude is pretty good, too. As far as I'm concerned it's a very similar book, about a guy who is set free by events and goes looking for himself through the act of fucking.

"I'm looking for Mister Everyday, and Mister Everyday has a dick, and most people don't want to talk about Mister Everyday's dick, even though it's the most important part of him"It's sort of a hypersexual midlife crisis?
Well, it's not wrong to equate existentialism and midlife crisis. At some point in life, you realize that it's not getting better, it's getting duller.

Put plainly, this is a filthy novel. Some of the sexual scenes are quite imaginative. Were any of them taken from your life?
Why yes, Mike, they were [laughs]. Look, every writer takes events from his life. You can't escape that. In my life, I had these things happen, like finding out that a girlfriend was seeing someone else. I didn't necessarily walk in on her getting anally violated by a large-cocked white man, but that's fiction for you [laughs]. But if asked, I would say that 25 percent of the prose is more explicit than I've ever experienced.

What's the trick to writing a sophisticated anal sex scene?
The same trick as writing any other kind of scene, I suppose. They combine research and draw from personal experience. Look, if you're asking me, Have you ever had anal sex? then I will tell you, Yes, I have. It's been a long time since any mainstream literary writer has written a book about sexuality that is literary, erotic, and pornographic. It's also very rare to find a heterosexual approach to erotic literature that talks about how the man is feeling emotionally, and how the feelings are attached to his body. Usually it's his power that is written about, not his sexuality. If you come at it from that angle—what does it feel like, and how does he feel?—it works.

When writing the sex scenes, were there any passages you left out because you thought they might cross the line into pornography?
One or two, maybe, but not many. I'm pretty sure I left them out because they just weren't good enough, not because they crossed any line. There are also some I feel like I missed out on, like a scene with an older woman.

For me, fiction is all about discovering. When I was young, I was in a constant state of sexual discovery. I remember the lotharios in my class, and though I wasn't one of them, I wasn't sexually inert. When you're younger you have sex. When you're older, you have less of it. Cordell is the perfect example of a receding sex drive. He is engaging in proscribed, repetitive sex. He is more or less happy with it, but he doesn't even know how unsatisfied he is. He could have sleepwalked to his grave in that state. But when he walks in on Johnny Fry, everything is over for him. This is the moment in the lives of many men and women, when the truth comes out.

Cordell has an erection for close to 100 straight pages.

Yes, he has a persistent erection. If you've ever found yourself in a highly aroused state, the erection goes on forever. But especially if you feel as though something has been taken from you. If you're just happy with somebody, it's sometimes yes, sometimes no. But this guy's in a very fevered state.

Are you worried this might paint you as a tawdry writer in search of a lucrative controversy?
No. It'd be funny if people thought that. I believe that Americans, especially the under-40 crowd, are urgently looking for someone to tell the truth, and the sexuality of this book reeks of truth. Every day in this world of ours people are raped by their parents, abandoned by their mothers, lied to, deceived, disappointed. But everybody falls in love, and everybody has sex. In America, we say, No sex here! I'm shocked that there are no other books like this in mainstream literature.

Did you have trouble shopping this around to publishing houses?
Yeah. Initially, publishers' reactions were along the lines of, The story doesn't seem to work. I said, "What the fuck are you talking about? This is my 30th book. If this isn't a good character I've never written one." There's a whole lot of people out there like Cordell. I'm looking for Mister Everyday, and Mister Everyday has a dick, and most people don't want to talk about Mister Everyday's dick, even though it's the most important part of him. More important than his knees, toes, his job, what he drives or buys. You need to talk about it in literature. It's like having movies where nobody ever goes to the bathroom.

Did you have trouble coming up with a sexual vocabulary that wasn't repetitive? Did you run out words for the penis?
It was a challenge. I mean, you don't want to write phrases like "throbbing member," or "the straining of my cock against the fly," or "her pussy just opens like a flower." That sort of garbage takes away from the story. The trick is to say exactly what happens physically: "You feel his cum splashing on her ankle." It's sexual, very brutal in a way. But it's unexpected, and it brings you somewhere. I continually tried to get to a place where the language is fresh. But that's not just when you're writing about sex, but in all kinds of writing. You want to avoid clichés like "the clouds are like cotton candy." Clichés suck whether they involve clouds or cum.

You just wrote a young-adult novel called 47. Did you find any problems transitioning from that novel to this one?
Not at all. I mean, I don't think that a child would mistake Killing Johnny Fry with a kids' book. That would be the only problem I would see, but I'm quite sure they'll be in very different sections of the bookstore. I write everything from political to mystery to science fiction to so-called literary fiction. So I don't have a problem crossing genres. The book exists in your head. What a writer does is hold onto the notions, and the notions grow.

I'm sure you've read erotic writers like Henry Miller before, but were there any you sought out to prepare for Johnny Fry?
I've read a lot of Marquis de Sade, and Miller, and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, but over the course of my life, not when I was writing the book. For this, I read Hogg, by Samuel Delany. It makes my book look like the Hardy Boys, and it's every bit as good as Toni Morrison.

When you're writing anything, you're using words to create images. There should be no out-of-bounds. None. But a lot of things have changed today. Nabokov could never publish Lolita today. Death in Venice could never be written today. But we have to go there, to find out what we're all about. Who human beings are is deeper than what they believe. You can't exorcize Freud. In this culture today, people are lonely. We want to believe that all we have to do is do this or say that and our life is perfect. But you know what? You can just walk home one day and everything changes.

"Look, if you're asking me, Have you ever had anal sex? then I will tell you, Yes, I have"Sexually, are you a better man for having written Johnny Fry?
Well, I don't know yet [laughs]. But knowing that I could write that story, and place it in the world of sex, was very good for me. In America, you specialize in something, and you do that thing. I put the left front hubcap on the Toyota. That's my job. I can't put on the hood ornament, or the steering wheel. I have had to work to not be just a hubcap installer.

Were you surprised by the finished product?
I was surprised that I was so cruel to Cordell. In a way, walking in on your "loving" girlfriend getting fucked in the ass is perhaps the worst thing you could imagine. I mean, you're seeing your loved one having more fun with another partner. It's the worst thing you can think of. And for Cordell to slink away like that, without confronting them.... It's emasculating.

Why do black men like white women? Vengeance?
Cordell asks himself that question toward the end. He says, "no."

What are your thoughts on modern pornography?
I'm not an expert on pornography or its development. But there's no place you can go in history that doesn't have a great deal of it. The Canterbury Tales, ancient Rome. Have you watched that HBO show Rome? The sexuality there is outrageous compared to today.

Is there a correlation between sex and politics?
I'm quite anti-Bush but just as strongly against the Democrats. When people ask me about politics they say, Why did the Midwest vote for Bush? I say, listen man, you go to a party, you meet two gorgeous women, one says, You are so much like my father—I would love for you to come with me and be my boyfriend and meet my father. The other says, You're hot—you want to go someplace after the party? Which one is telling the truth? The one who wants you to meet father. Which one are you leaving with? The one who says you are hot. Because there's a chance there. One thing that our president understands is this: I only have to compliment them in a certain way, and they'll do what I want.

Photos, from top: Vincent Laforet; Getty Images