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Mosley's 'Blue Light' to LB
Judy Quinn -- 9/22/97
I don't think in the history of Norton we've published science fiction," said Norton editor Gerry Howard, explaining why Walter Mosley, author of the house's successful Easy Rawlins mystery series, will publish his next book, Blue Light, at Little, Brown. Warner Aspect editor-in-chief Betsy Mitchell and Little, Brown executive editor Michael Pietsch bought hard/soft world rights to this new speculative novel, with an option to acquire the others of a possible trilogy. They tentatively plan a fall 1998 hardcover release for the first book, set in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and centered around Chance, an African American man who encounters characters affected by a "blue light" from space.
For Mosley, this is not the first wandering away from Norton. Earlier this year he published Gone Fishin', an early unpublished Rawlins mystery, with Black Classics Press, as a supportive gesture to African American publishers. And Mosley strayed from Rawlins in 1995, when Norton published his R.L.'s Dream, a novel that explored interracial friendship and offered meditations on blues music (particularly one Robert "R.L" Johnson). This November Norton plans a big push for Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, featuring ex-con hero Socrates Fortlow (also in the works as an HBO movie).
But those who miss Easy Rawlins need not despair. Howard says the next in the series, Bad Boy Bobby Brown, is tentatively scheduled for spring 1999. With this book Mosley completes his Norton contract, with agent Gloria Loomis declining to say when she'll negotiate a new deal. Pietsch, whom Loomis said paid a "nice" six figures for the sf novel, would not comment on whether he'll be involved in that future negotiation, noting only that he was excited to be involved with Blue Light. Stay tuned.
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