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It was the weirdest idea I'd heard in a long time.
A couple of years ago, I went to see Walter Mosley, the author of the incredibly well-written series of mystery novels starring Easy Rawlins. You might have even seen the Hollywood adaptation of Devil In A Blue Dress with Denzel Washington in the title role and a devastating Don Cheadle as Easy's murderous little friend Raymond "Mouse" Alexander.
Walter Mosley draws black men of a certain age better than anyone else still running.
Not only does he hold his own with the best of the noir-oriented crime novelists but he completely inhabits Easy's skin. He lets us in not just on the aging detective's thoughts but his feelings, his rage, his suffering.
So it was a strange experience to see the author thinking out loud.
"I've been thinking," Mosley said to his audience, "About what it would be like to have a white man chained up in my basement."
Maybe this caused a few uncomfortable laughs but I don't remember because you could tell he was going somewhere with this.
"No, no," he said. "Not to mess him up. I wouldn't want to hurt anybody. Sometimes I would just like a white man down there so I could ask him questions, try to figure out why he does what he does."
I'll be damned if he didn't write it, too.
The Man In My Basement is narrated by Charles Blakey, another well-drawn young black man who has plenty of his own problems. He can't find a job, drinks too much and can't seem to find love even with girls who are plenty right for him.
The book has some of the essence of the brilliant and underrated Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, starring a down-on-his-luck convict named Socrates Fortlow, but where Socrates and his "rock-breaking hands" always seems to have the resources to combat the challenges he faces, Blakey is on the edge of falling apart. He's selling his African masks for rent money and is on the verge of losing his family home.
When a mysterious white man named Anniston Bennet offers Charles $50,000 to rent out his basement for the summer, it's odd enough. When Bennet moves into a specially-built prison of his own making, it goes completely off the rails.
It's interesting to see Mosley turn his thoughts on race relations and humanity inwards. Where both Easy Rawlins and Socrates Fortlow are dealing with the mean streets of Watts, for much of The Man In My Basement, it's just Charles and Anniston matching wits, two men in a cage match with Blakey's humanity at odds with opportunity. Anniston tries to manipulate his captor even as he's imprisoned in a cage of his own design. Meanwhile, as Charles listens to Bennet's bizarre reasons behind his punishment, he finds a mean streak he didn't even know he had.
It's a dark tale, straight out of The Twilight Zone, as the two men jab and joust over guilt and redemption with no guns or blunt objects, just the disquieting power of words to hurt, harm and ultimately, in the case of The Man In My Basement, ring false. Like the best crime stories, there's really not a definitive answer to Charles' crisis and there's never a bona fide test of whether Anniston is truly a murdering criminal or just some crazy white man who's buckled under his burdens.
Unsettling? Absolutely but it's some of Mosley's most powerful writing yet. Like a good drama or The Stranger, it's hard to know where the tale is going, even after it's finished. It's the story of people, one that Mosley has described as a "novel of ideas." It's not, as some people have leveled, a departure from the startling conflicts in his crime stories. It's the same story using a new set of weapons and a sharply simplified setting.
The faces are the same.