Jake Lamar decided he wanted to live in Paris after reading James Baldwin's Go Tell It On a Mountain. Lamar, who grew up in a troubled family in the Bronx, identified strongly with Baldwin's retelling of his difficult early life in Harlem. When Lamar asked a teacher about Baldwin, he learned that the writer lived in Paris. Baldwin was following a tradition of African-American writers and artists, including Richard Wright, Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet, who found that France allowed them an escape from the constant pressure of race in America.

Many years later, Lamar, 49, has followed in the footsteps of his first literary hero. After attending prep school on a scholarship, he graduated from Harvard College in 1983 and landed a job at Time magazine. After six months writing the Milestones column, he went to the weekly's national section where he stayed for five-and-a-half years. He quit to write a memoir, Bourgeois Blues. Favorable reviews earned him a three-year writer's fellowship, enough to move to Paris.

"I knew one person in France, a former classmate," recalls Lamar over coffee in a deserted bistro on the Place de Clichy, a busy, diverse hub in the north of the city. "I didn't speak a word of French," he says. He met beat poet and musician Ted Joans, once a roommate of Charlie Parker, who introduced him to the city. "I really trace a lot of my friendships through Ted."

He has lived in Paris since 1993 and carved out a successful career as a novelist whose books are published in both French and English. He calls his books "thriller-ish." Most have been translated to French and made him well-known in a city that reveres writers. He also teaches a writer's workshop in one of the troubled "banlieus"(suburbs), of Paris, where many black and Arab immigrants live.

This has kept Lamar closer to the troubling issues of race and class than most expatriate Americans. His books have always addressed issues of race and identity. "I wrote about race in the four books set in America," he told The Root. "Once I changed the setting to Paris, these questions just exploded because it's so much more complicated here. In America, everything is about color, what you look like. Racism is all a question of what you can see." Lamar says racial hierarchies in France are much more complex than in the United States. "Here it's so much more subtle and insidious." His first book set in Paris, Rendezvous Eighteenth, plunged right into the issue. "What is the thing that defines you," he asks. "Is it your race, your nationality, your religion, your sexuality, your political bent?"