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.