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Read the first chapter of The Long Fall (author's website) http://www.waltermosley.com/?page_id=101

Walter Mosley was already a well-known and much-loved author when he got the endorsement that took him to a new level of fame.

It was 1992, and Bill Clinton, running for president for the first time, was asked who his favourite author was. He named Mosley, who was best-known then for his Easy Rawlins series of crime novels.

Mosley has since established himself as one of the greatest mystery writers ever. Last year, the London Times had him at number 35 on its list of the 50 Greatest Crime writers , ahead of names like Scott Turow, Harlan Coben and Dick Francis.

The Times called Mosley “a bold American voice, not afraid to tackle race.”

Born and raised in Los Angeles by a black father and Jewish mother, Mosley was a teenager during the Watts riots in 1965, an event he remembers vividly. His best-known character, Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins, is a Louisiana-born black private investigator solving mysteries in the post World War II years in the troubled Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles.

Mosley never spares the readers the prejudices and inequities faced by black people in the United States.

“You're born with a love for yourself,” he told an interviewer after the release of Little Scarlet in 2004, “but you learn to despise yourself: because people in school think you're stupid, or because whenever the police see you they think that you're a criminal to the degree where you finally believe that you're a criminal. It's like that Chris Rock line where he says the police stopped him one day in his own car and before they were finished he believed he'd stolen his own car. In school you're treated as ignorant and told that you're ignorant and people get angry at you if you show any intelligence. You can't get good jobs. You can't hope for a future for yourself or for your children.”

With his latest novel, The Long Fall , Mosley has taken a new direction in his fiction. It features the debut of his new detective, Leonid McGill, a black man whose father was a communist and whose great-grandfather was a Scottish slave owner.

Mosley also moves the setting of his books from mid-1900s Los Angeles to 21st-century Manhattan.

“For some time I've wanted to write a series of novels about a contemporary New York City detective,” he says. “New York has been my home for nearly 30 years. The city's diversity and depth is astounding. It's a place where suburban housewives and African princes sit side by side at the opera and in the subway. It's a forum where the powerful meet, culture is codified, and corruption defines the character of those who are not satisfied with enough when absolutely everything is laid out on the table before them.”

Mosley is now taking readers' questions; the deadline is noon on Tuesday, April 14. Readers can submit them via e-mail to webbooks@globeandmail.com or by posting them as comments on this story.

We will publish his answers online and in the Books section on April 18.