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PW has a web interview with Walter Mosley about his latest, the Leonid McGill series. Here's some lowdown:

The series features Leonid McGill, a New York ex-boxer turned private eye who debuted in the 2006 short story "Karma." Leonid's got some baggage: a black guy with a white wife he doesn't like; three kids, two of which aren't his; a Communist father who abandoned him as an adolescent; a mother who died shortly thereafter; and the intention to now "go from crooked to slightly bent."

"With his history, you can see why he's tough," he says. "You're not just a good boxer if you have the talent. To be a good boxer, what's behind you has to be worse than what's in front of you. That's Leonid. His history is worse than anything he'll go through."

Leonid rumbles through some seedy corners of New York. He's friends with a shut-in computer genius and a "commercial serial killer," and has done enough deals with shady characters in his crooked past to make going straight a tricky and dangerous proposition. Some of the big issues he confronts--race, class, injustice, opportunities and lack thereof--carry over from the Easy Rawlins series, but, as Mosley points out, it's "not the same thing."

Read the entire profile.