Walter Mosley

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

From the best-selling author of A Little Yellow Dog—the eagerly awaited debut of Socrates Fortlow, a bold and original new hero. Basis of the HBO movie.

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned introduces Walter Mosley's most compelling new character since the debut of his immortal detective Easy Rawlins: one Socrates Fortlow, a tough, brooding ex-convict determined to challenge and understand the violence and anarchy in his world—and in himself.

Three decades ago, the young Socrates had, in a burst of drunken rage, murdered a man and a woman with his huge "rock-breaking hands." Twenty-seven years of hard time in an Indiana prison followed. Now Socrates lives in a cramped, two-room apartment in an abandoned building in Watts, scavenging bottles and delivering groceries for a supermarket. In each of the stories that comprise this richly brooding novel, Socrates Fortlow, like his namesake, explores philosophical questions of morality in a world beset with crime, poverty, and racism. He is an unforgettable presence and his perceptions cast a glow of somber lyricism upon an often harsh world. Socrates is a creation of stunning originality; the book he inhabits is Walter Mosley's most powerful and eloquent to date.