Diablerie.

Mosley, Walter (author).

Mosley is a true original. With 29 books since 1990, however, it’s fair to ask whether he’s diluting his talents. Is he a renaissance man or a dabbler? His last non–Easy Rawlins novel (and one of three books he published in 2007) was the “sexistential” Killing Johnny Fry. As advertised, the protagonist’s journey was explicitly sexual. Though Diablerie doesn’t carry the same tagline, it weds Mosley’s continuing midcareer carnality to a noir story line: Ben Dibbuk is an emotionally detached computer nerd with a humdrum routine until his wife drags him to a launch party for a crime magazine called Diablerie. There he meets a woman who says she knows him and who drags him headlong into his debauched but forgotten past, where he may or may not have committed murder. Mosley’s clipped prose is becoming more idiosyncratic, and his story lines are, too: Dibbuk’s tale is a strange mix of psychology, criminology, and sexuality. Where in earlier novels Mosley championed stalwart, nurturing men (while giving them violent alter egos), lately he writes about men who yearn to dominate women sexually and whose primal instincts must be honored. Will Mosley’s many fans follow him in this new direction? One suspects that some may dust off their copies of his debut, Devil in a Blue Dress, and start over from there. Still, give him credit for continuing to take chances and confound expectations.