Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (short stories) - Walter Mosley Audiobook

Written by Walter Mosley
Read by Paul Winfield
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Socrates Fortlow Series, Book 1
Publisher: Phoenix Books, Inc.
Release date: April 17, 2007
Duration: 06:14:01

Unveiling a new, bigger-than-life urban hero and a new series set in an updated version of Easy Rawlins’s South Central Los Angeles, Mosley seems determined to confer on the mean streets of contemporary L.A. what filmmaker John Ford helped create for the American West: a gun-slinging mythology of street justice and a gritty, elegiac code of honor.

Socrates Fortlow is an earthy ex-con with the stoic grandeur of an aging cowboy, who can “lift a forty-gallon trashcan brimming with water and walk it a full city block,”

Three decades ago, young Socrates Fortlow murdered a man and woman in cold blood with his huge “rock-breaking hands” while in a drunken rage. 27 years of hard time in an Indiana prison followed. Now he is out, living in a cramped two-room apartment in an abandoned building in Watts, scavenging bottles and delivering groceries for a supermarket. The tough, brooding ex-con is determined to understand the violence and anarchy in the world around him- and in his soul.

Socrates finds himself in a series of confrontations with a circle of friends and archetypal strangers (a thief, an adulterer and a Vietnam vet) with whom he frequently holds streetwise Platonic dialogues on ethics, remorse and retribution. He fraternizes with neighbors who, against the odds, have helped his community at the grass roots, like Right Burke, whose irascible wife maintains a rooming house for poor blacks, and Oscar Minette, who runs an independent bookstore. He teaches lessons about remorse and manhood to Daryl, a local teenager finds a job bagging groceries in a more prosperous neighborhood and reluctantly helps the police catch a local arsonist.

Fans of the intricately plotted Easy Rawlins novels may be surprised by the episodic format here, in which the linked stories are presented in short chapters with such didactic titles as “History” and “Double Standard” In creating such a maverick protagonist, Mosley has produced a not-quite novel that reads like a philosophical treatise, memorable less for any character insights or resolution than for its indelible vision of “poor men living on the edge of mayhem.”