His struggle, as he puts it, is to “control his own urges”-including the urge to kill-when “those urges would wipe out all the good he had tried to do.” The violent aspect of Socrates's character comes forcefully to the fore in the many stories detailing his run-ins with the LAPD, which Mosley unflinchingly depicts as, if not entirely corrupt, then blighted with corruption and tolerant of the blight. Nonetheless, the goings-on of his neighborhood constantly test him-his ideals and his patience.
He has settled into what seems to be a blissfully mundane and quiet existence. He has an on-again-off-again girlfriend, Iula, and a black, two-legged dog named Killer (named Bruno in Mosley's previous series). Nine years after his release from prison, the sixty-six-year-old is still strong.
Socrates, despite or perhaps because of his criminal past, has grown into a man with a keen, if in some ways unconventional, sense of justice. Mosley is best known for his series of crime novels featuring Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a private investigator based in Watts, California. Previous to this, Socrates had already assumed the position of a mentor toward a local youth. Especially in some of the later chapters, the novel begins to self-consciously mine the associations of Socrates's name, as the novel partially adopts a dialectical format. Walkin' the Dog abandons traditional novel form to present Socrates's story as a series of loosely connected vignettes, their main unifying feature being Socrates. Fortlow, an ex-con imprisoned for almost three decades for rape and murder, is trying to reform himself after his release and live a straight life-easier said than done when surrounded on all sides by the temptations of the West Coast's seediest, most decadent city, Los Angeles. Walter Mosley’s novel Walkin' the Dog (1999) centers on Socrates Fortlow, a character from his short story collection, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998).
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