What's up with Walter Mosley? Has the master of hard-boiled gone all soft and runny? Has the creator of Easy Rawlins turned his back on the genre that made him famous? Has the desire to be taken for a "serious" writer squeezed all the vitality out of one of America's most dazzling authors?

Who would blame a writer as talented as Walter Mosley for wanting to escape the pigeonhole of the crime genre? Anyone who reads Mr. Mosley's latest book.

Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History is a tedious, tepid essay on the threat of capitalist oligarchy. It's a bit like watching Michael Jordan play baseball. On the one hand, you want to say, "Hey, man, follow that dream"; but you also wonder why someone so abundantly gifted would concentrate his energies on something he doesn't do very well.

There's nobody in American letters quite like Mr. Mosley. He's not the first author to take the American crime novel to the black side of town (Chester Himes did it brilliantly, back in the 50's and 60's, with novels like Cotton Comes to Harlem ), but Mr. Mosley's five extraordinary thrillers, all featuring the reluctant private investigator Easy Rawlins and his homicidal homeboy Mouse Alexander, have become a rare crossover commercial success in one of the most thoroughly segregated industries in America: publishing.

Think I'm exaggerating racial bias in the book business? Consider the New York Times best seller list, a purportedly objective sales ranking. Popular black novelists like Omar Tyree and Eric Jerome Dickey can sell tens of thousands of copies of their books in a matter of weeks, numbers good enough to land any white fiction writer on the lower rungs, anyway, of the Times list. But Mr. Tyree and Mr. Dickey sell most of their books to a black readership in black-oriented bookstores–few if any of which are among the 4,000 bookstores polled by The Times . Imagine if box office rankings excluded films that feature a mostly black cast and are watched predominantly by black audiences: People would consider it blatantly racist. Yet no one seems to mind that the Times best seller list is in effect rigged against black authors.

Every once in a while, black female superstars–the Morrisons, McMillans and Walkers of the world–will top the charts. But during the last decade, only two black male novelists consistently made the Times list: E. Lynn Harris and Mr. Mosley.

The mainstream embraced Mr. Mosley with his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), and he was immediately given a facile media identity: the black Raymond Chandler. True, the first Easy Rawlins mystery is set in a seedy City of Angels in the 1940's, but Mr. Mosley's lean, laconic prose is far less mannered than Mr. Chandler's over-the-top grandiloquence. And easygoing Ezekiel Rawlins–who's almost always dragged into cases against his will–bears little resemblance to that jaded loner, the private dick Philip Marlowe. Can you picture Marlowe adopting, as Easy does, two L.A. street urchins?

The Easy Rawlins novels–particularly the masterful Black Betty (1994)–offer a kaleidoscopic social history of Los Angeles from the late 40's to the early 60's. Mr. Mosley artfully captures the rhythms of black American speech, but his ear for white dialogue, his California rednecks, Jewish Communists and Beverly Hills divas, is just as good. Easy's sleuthing gives the books their page-flipping momentum; his tortured relationship with the diminutive, rodent-faced Mouse Alexander adds moral complexity. Mouse is Easy's guardian devil, his trash-talking, ass-kicking, ultraviolent, amoral id. Easy rarely fires a gun. Whenever any killing needs doing, he usually calls on Mouse–who's only too eager to oblige. Easy depends on Mouse and he lives in terror of him, especially after a secret affair with Mouse's lady, Etta Mae.

In 1996, Mr. Mosley published A Little Yellow Dog . If it isn't the best book of the series, it's certainly the funniest and the most emotionally involving. Easy and Mouse are both trying to go straight, working on the custodial staff of a junior high school. Naturally, they manage to get tangled up in a few murders. But Mouse, now in his early 40's, has suddenly acquired a conscience and begins to wonder if he has killed one man too many. On the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Mouse takes two bullets to the chest. When last seen, a comatose Mouse is being kidnapped from his hospital bed by a pistol-wielding Etta Mae. Easy Rawlins doesn't know if his partner is dead or alive.

And Mr. Mosley's readers still don't know: The Easy Rawlins series came to an abrupt halt.

The author's next book, Gone Fishin' (1997), was an Easy-Mouse prequel set in 1939 in the Texas swamplands–but it's not a crime novel. Though it's about Mouse's murder of his stepfather (an incident often alluded to in the other novels), Mr. Mosley switches from detective mode to a brooding, solemn tone. Gone Fishin' reads like RL's Dream (1995), Mr. Mosley's first attempt to break out of the crime novel genre–in this case a labored, self-conscious and maudlin tale of a dying blues man, Soupspoon Wise.

It takes guts for a popular author to turn away from the genre that has made him a household name, and Mr. Mosley is nothing if not fearless. Though he continues to publish at a Grisham-like pace, he has never been a recycler of formulaic stories. His most successful post-Easy work, by far, has been the pair of exquisitely written short story collections featuring Socrates Fortlow, a grizzled ex-convict with a heart of gold who roams contemporary South Central Los Angeles, doing good deeds, dispensing bits of jailspun wisdom and inflicting grievous bodily harm upon anyone who messes with him.

Socrates Fortlow is no Easy Rawlins–but he might be considered a distant cousin of Mouse Alexander. After he "killed a man an' raped his woman," in 1961, Socrates Fortlow served 27 years in a penitentiary. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998) chronicles Socrates' post-prison life on the mean streets of Los Angeles–his transformation from lonely quasi-bum to thoughtful working man. In Walkin' the Dog (1999), "Socco" becomes a full-blown urban sage. Mr. Mosley writes about Socco's ongoing adjustment to life outside the joint with aching poignancy: "He carried prison around in his pockets like a passport or a small Bible." Everything from getting a job to ordering a telephone is alien to him. When he moves into a new apartment, the ex-con thinks, "The living room was big enough to contain three single cells."

He's quite a piece of work, this geezer in the 'hood. Unfortunately, there's something a bit dry and didactic about the Socrates stories. Though they're all beautifully sculpted, they're moral lessons rather than engrossing narratives. Intriguing plot lines develop, then evaporate. The other characters are often sketchily drawn; they exist only in order to learn from Socrates.

Like a lot of assiduously "serious" fiction, the Socrates stories are sometimes boring. But they're infinitely preferable to Mr. Mosley's misbegotten Blue Light (1998), a bizarre acid flashback of a novel about close encounters between Bay Area Bohemians and sundry extraterrestrials. The tone is set on page 1: "I was once simple flesh like you, a man filled with meaningless words. But I was also a sleeping streak of blue light, scant seconds in length, jarred to consciousness after an age of silence." Duuuuude!

Beneath all the cosmic blather, Blue Light is supposed to be an allegory about the need for peace, love and racial harmony on planet Earth. Now, with Workin' on the Chain Gang , Mr. Mosley makes it clear that he is no longer satisfied with being a novelist: He wants to be considered a thinker . (His essay is part of a series called the Library of Contemporary Thought, which features modern-day philosophers like Edwin Schlossberg and Don Imus engaging in intellectual onanism. Titles include the earnestly edifying, The Virtues of Aging , by Jimmy Carter, and the cringingly high schoolish, Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life .)

The theme of Workin' on the Chain Gang is that virtually all Americans are victims of a new form of subjugation: "The problem is the enslavement of a whole nation to the rather small and insignificant goals of the few who own (or control) almost everything." And who exactly are these sinister power mongers? Bill Gates? Steve Case? Oprah? Mr. Mosley doesn't say. While massive generalizations have served many an essayist well, it's hard to get away with 114 pages of them. Mr. Mosley's rambling complaint is curiously flat and impersonal. Rather than a profound thinker, he sounds like a perpetually grouchy caller on late night talk radio. When Mr. Mosley equates working in some Dilbert-type job with the 250-year atrocity of African-American slavery you want to scream, " Oh, come off it! "

Fortunately, Walter Mosley is only in the second act of a major literary career. Mr. Jordan, when he finally quit baseball and returned to the hardwood, came back hungrier, badder and, arguably, better than ever. The same might be true of Mr. Mosley if and when he decides to revisit Easy Rawlins. Imagine Easy and Mouse unraveling mysteries as Los Angeles plunges into its late 1960's apocalypse–now that would be a great read.

Is there any 20th-century American icon who has been more banalized, neutralized and homogenized by mythology than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? From the day he was martyred in 1968, the civil rights crusader has been enshrined as a romantic visionary: the healing, nonviolent, nonthreatening integrationist. Honored as a national holiday, King's birthday gives Americans, black and white, conservative and liberal alike, the annual opportunity to appropriate his legacy and slather it with sentimental goo, to squeeze the complex ideas of a true revolutionary into four wistful words: "I Have a Dream."

Forgotten is the man who in his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"-written just four months before he delivered his "Dream" address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial-said that the greatest threat to freedom for black people was not the Ku Klux Klanner but the hypocritical "white moderate." The man who, in the year he died, said "most Americans are unconscious racists" has been neglected. The dangerous radical has been replaced by the image of the Safe Negro. As Jesse Jackson once so eloquently put it, King was not murdered for dreaming .

Michael Eric Dyson's I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. is not simply an important book-it is a necessary one. More reclamation than reinterpretation, it honors King by refusing to worship him. Mr. Dyson, a Baptist minister and professor of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago, examines King's words, deeds and misdeeds with a scholarly scrupulousness. But this book is more a work of social criticism than a traditional biography. In prose that is always sharp and engaging, Mr. Dyson uses King's life and legacy to take on everything from contemporary conservatism to hip-hop culture to the "national amnesia" that prevents Americans from confronting the past. Along the way, Mr. Dyson courageously explores King's excruciating weaknesses: his plagiarism, sexism and compulsive adultery. Here, at long last, is King without tears.

The book's title is taken from King's final sermon, delivered the night before his assassination in Memphis, when he seemed to know very well that he was about to die: "I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people, will get to the promised land." Mr. Dyson reminds us that King was, at that moment, a depressed and isolated figure: In 1967, for the first time in a decade, "King failed to make the Gallup Poll's list of the 10 most popular Americans. His growing radicalism was spoiling the canonization that had begun in earnest in 1964, when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, when he was murdered, King was unpopular with white America and had lost his sure hold on huge segments of the black population as well."

King's white support started to slip in 1965 when he took his protest movement from the vilified, segregated South to the supposedly more enlightened North and found, in Chicago, "the most 'hostile and hateful' demonstration of white racism he had ever witnessed." When he and his followers braved water cannons, police dogs and billy clubs in Selma and Birmingham, King was ardently embraced by Northern white liberals. "But when King began to say that racism was deeply rooted in our society," Mr. Dyson writes, "and that only a structural change would remove it, he alienated key segments of the liberal establishment."

Even King's black allies in the civil rights movement turned against him when on April 4, 1967-exactly one year before his death-he became the most prominent American to attack the Government's war on Vietnam. At the time, the vast majority of Americans, including blacks, supported the war. The media establishment, led by the pseudoliberal New York Times , trashed King for being so uppity as to criticize U.S. foreign policy. The black leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League said King had made "a serious tactical mistake."

Their fears that King's outspokenness would anger President Lyndon B. Johnson-a champion of civil rights legislation-were well founded; Johnson railed against "King, that goddamned nigger preacher." In a grotesque ejaculation of racist sexual paranoia, Johnson told King "that his criticism of the war had the same effect on Johnson as if he had discovered that King had raped his daughter."

Despite the attacks, King-"a man whose willingness to burn bridges in order to bring justice is nearly unparalleled in American history"-moved farther and farther to the left in his final months. Contrary to the claims of people like Jesse Helms and Ronald Reagan, King never endorsed Communism. "I didn't get my inspiration from Karl Marx," he said. "I got it from a man named Jesus." Still, King was disgusted by bare-knuckled American capitalism. Privately, he summed up his philosophy as "democratic socialism." Publicly, he called for a dramatic "redistribution of economic power." In the spring of 1968, King was planning a Poor People's Campaign in Washington: "Protesters would engage in massive civil disobedience, tying up traffic, staging sit-ins in Congress and in government buildings and shutting down business in the capital." A bullet in the neck ended King's life days before the campaign was to begin.

Mr. Dyson has a questing intelligence, and there's a quiet urgency to his writing. He burrows into the mystery and meaning of King like a master sleuth trying to get to the bottom of a case. He coolly demolishes whites who practice "racial evasion," who distort King's views to justify their opposition to affirmative action, as well as a black colleague who says, "Fuck Martin Luther King … The nigga was the worst thing to happen to black people in the 20th century." And his assessment of the current President is witheringly accurate: "When it benefits him, Clinton reaches out to blacks; when it hurts him, he withdraws the hand of racial charity. All the while he employs a racial cunning that belies his public persona as honorary homeboy."

Unfortunately, Mr. Dyson turns bitter when discussing the King family's attempts to control and commercially exploit King's words and image. Mr. Dyson is particularly harsh on King's widow, Coretta, and his son Dexter-a frequent media whipping boy. To be sure, the family's efforts to "cash in" on the King legacy and their tactics in protecting their copyright privileges on the great man's texts have often been reprehensible. King would probably not approve. But at a time when America's age-old obsession with money is more fervent and widespread than ever before, the Kings are simply doing what their fellow citizens do with gloating pride: looking out for their own financial interests.

Sometimes I wonder: Would people have more respect for Mrs. King if she'd married a Greek billionaire? Would Dexter King be treated more kindly in the media if he used his good looks, savvy and famous name to start up a slick magazine that merged racial politics with celebrity culture (calling it Frederick , as in "Douglass"), married a skinny blonde who worked for Calvin Klein, took up flying and crashed his private plane in the waters off Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard? Would he be mourned as a lost American prince?

In any event, the King family could not prevent Michael Eric Dyson from writing a bold and challenging book on King, an indispensable contribution to American social criticism. King died trying to get America to let go of its illusions about itself. Now is the time for America to let go of its illusions about him.

Remember Joseph Jett? He occupies a curious place in this decade's pantheon of scandalous black American men. His 15 minutes of infamy occurred in April 1994, about two and a half years after Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings and two months before O.J. Simpson's Bronco chase.

A 36-year-old bond trader at Kidder Peabody & Company, Mr. Jett was accused of defrauding his firm of $350 million. When I first read of Mr. Jett and saw a photo of him–with his bemused smirk and huge, James Baldwin eyes–I felt a perverse pride that a young buppie might be as bold a crook as Ivan Boesky or Michael Milken; and a sense of relief that here, for once, was a scandal about a black man that had nothing to do with sex. How wrong I was.

After five years and three grueling investigations, Mr. Jett has never been convicted of fraud. Moreover, his downfall offers a chilling case study of how machismo and sexual paranoia work in the financial community. At the center of his autobiography–co-written with Sabra Chartrand–is the story of what happens when some Wall Street traders renowned as Big Swinging Dicks find, in their midst, a Big Swinging Black Dick.

It's the same with any my-side-of-the-story exposé–open Mr. Jett's book and up pops the question: Is it credible? Quite.

Unlike a lot of memoirists, Orlando Joseph Jett (evidently, no one ever nicknamed him O.J.) does not present himself as a role model. His self-portrait reveals a man who is arrogant, avaricious, vindictive and status-obsessed, contemptuous of the poor and bereft of any sense of altruism or a social conscience. He is, in short, the quintessential Wall Street trader.

He was reared in Ohio, the son of a grimly driven entrepreneur who believed that the "only hope" for African-Americans "was in economic independence." If the junior Mr. Jett has one salient conviction, it is that his race should be insignificant. "I'd chosen Wall Street as a career," he writes, "precisely to avoid being judged by the color of my skin. Wall Street is a meritocracy–all anyone cares about … is the bottom line. How much money you make. Color, gender and age don't matter when it comes to profit."

Born in 1958, in the heyday of the civil rights movement, Mr. Jett grew up to believe that "affirmative action is living on your knees." After earning two degrees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and attending Harvard Business School, Mr. Jett lashed out at a minority recruiter from Shearson Lehman: "We're always running around trying to find some white person to like us. It doesn't matter. Let them hate. If I have the ability, I'll still overcome."

Indeed, Mr. Jett, in his professional life, never set out to win any Mr. Congeniality Awards. After turbulent stints at Morgan Stanley and First Boston, he joined Kidder Peabody as a trader of U.S. Government bonds. "I didn't care about winning friends," he declares. "I wasn't about to accommodate anyone, to compromise my methods or objectives." At Kidder, the central relationship of the book emerges, the one between Mr. Jett and his boss, Ed Cerullo, the embodiment of Wall Street's macho social code. Athletic and ultra-competitive, Mr. Cerullo, interviewing Mr. Jett for the job, asked if he worked out and boasted of the laps he swam twice a day. Every winter, Kidder's top traders were invited to Mr. Cerullo's estate in Vail,Colo., to test their manhood on treacherous ski slopes.

Mr. Jett was wary of his boss from the start, but their relationship took a turn for the weird when Mr. Cerullo fired Mustafa Chike-Obi–Mr. Jett's only high-ranking black colleague–for sexual harassment. Mr. Cerullo privately "warned" Mr. Jett about fraternizing with white females in the office. "The Kidder culture," said Mr. Cerullo, "is particularly sensitive to issues involving black male sexuality and black male sexual aggressiveness."

From that day on, Mr. Cerullo regularly hauled Mr. Jett into his office to inquire about the nature of his associations with certain white women. Even when Mr. Jett was seen going out to lunch with a white woman who did not work at Kidder, Mr. Cerullo lectured him: "I get reports about what you do," Mr. Cerullo said. "If people cannot control their sexual aggressiveness, then I have to do something about it."

A twisted variation on the Othello-Iago dynamic took hold, with Mr. Jett cast as the vulnerable Moor tormented by his crony's insinuations. The bizarre thing is that there's no Desdemona here. Mr. Cerullo's insinuations are all about Mr. Jett, who consistently proclaimed himself innocent of any office dalliance: "I'm not trying to date her," he said of one white colleague, in a typical defense. "I have no interest in her." Instead of quitting or suing for discrimination, Mr. Jett attempted to neuter himself socially: "When a woman said hello in passing, I responded with a zombielike expression and a mantra: 'Discipline must be maintained!' and walked away.… I refused any interaction with the white women in the office."

Yet, as Mr. Jett became more successful–earning $34 million in 1993 and being named Kidder Peabody's Man of the Year–Mr. Cerullo's warnings became more hysterical. Mr. Jett believes he was simply looking for a reason to fire a rival: "He wanted to get rid of me as soon as possible, and trumped-up charges of sex harassment probably looked like a tidy way to do that."

Mr. Jett simultaneously sucked up to Mr. Cerullo and plotted to overthrow him. His fatal error, as he tells it, was getting involved in Mr. Cerullo's scheme to wrest Kidder from its parent, the General Electric Company. In order to attract a buyer for the firm, "Cerullo was adamant that Kidder grow." But G.E. had tight restrictions on how much Kidder could spend. "So we spent more than G.E. allowed," Mr. Jett writes, "and then had to trick G.E. into believing that we operated within their guidelines."

The details of this scam can be mind-boggling. "My explanations of my trading strategy sounded complicated and confusing even to me," Mr. Jett admits. He calls it a shell game and insists that plenty of top guns at Kidder–first and foremost, Ed Cerullo–were in on it. But when the shell game resulted in a $350 million loss and G.E. was looking for someone to blame, guess which Big Swinger ended up on the chopping block?

Mr. Cerullo and the others claimed ignorance, and Joseph Jett was isolated, set up as a "rogue trader." Summarily fired, excoriated in the media, he found himself under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Association of Securities Dealers.

The inquisitions soon turned to allegations about Mr. Jett's sex life. The S.E.C. files on the case read like a G-rated Starr Report. Instead of fellatio and sex-toy cigars, the files chronicle "rumors" heard by a group of white male Kidder employees about Mr. Jett's alleged affairs with white Kidder females. In a typically sizzling incident, while watching a movie with a blond colleague–outside the office–Mr. Jett "placed his hand on her knee."

Ultimately, Mr. Jett was exonerated by both the F.B.I. and the N.A.S.D. The S.E.C. did not find him guilty of securities fraud but nailed him for juggling Kidder's books. In the memoir's final chapter, we find Mr. Jett working mainly as a manual laborer, for cash and food stamps. He owes an $8.4 million penalty to the S.E.C. and millions more in legal fees. Ed Cerullo, meanwhile, was allowed to resign from Kidder Peabody with a slap on the wrist and a $7 million severance package. Score one for Iago.

If it is impossible to like Joseph Jett, it is easy to pity him. He put his faith in the myth of the American meritocracy and wound up an embittered fall guy. He learned, rather late in life, that even in this oh-so-enlightened age of ours, America is not so much color-blind as blinded by color.