Name: Devil in a Blue Dress
Rating: 3.5 (18 reviews)
ISBN: 9781417651368

Walter Mosley

Mosley honors the tradition of the classic American detective novel by bestowing on it a vivid social canvas and the freshest new voice in crime writing in years, mixing the hard-boiled poetry of Raymond Chandler with the racial realism of Richard Wright to explosive effect.

Devil in a Blue Dress

I need to find somebody and I might need a little help looking ... The summer of '48 in the city of Angels and there's heat on the streets when Daphne Monet hits the sidewalk. Heat when she disappears with a trunkload of somebody else's cash.Easy Rawlins is a war veteran just fired from his job. Drinking in a friend's bar, he wonders how to meet his mortgage when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will locate Miss Monet, a blonde with a reputation. It's a simple decision, but for one thing. Nobody warned him - better the devil you know ...

Tim Pendry

This is, to all intents and purposes, a Raymond Chandler novel written by a black American and herein lies a problem - do you give a book stars because of its literary merit or because it is sociologically or culturally important? I go for literary merit in general and, though Mosley writes crisply with a fine ear for black dialect, there is none of the poetic magic of Chandler who defined an era by being there and not through observing it forty years on. Sociologically and culturally though, it is an important book. Easy Rawlins might be, on the surface, just a dark skinned migrant version of Philip Marlowe, but the black experience of America has to be told and a reliance on 'Roots' is not going to be enough if white Americans are to understand the perspective of others who call themselves by the same name of 'American' but who have a very different historical experience. Sadly, Americans go too far in thinking the experiences of Easy Rawlins to be peculiarly black - peasants, working class people and other migrants of every colour have much the same experience as Easy because the issues are about class and power and not colour of skin. An accident of history and 'black' potentates would have enslaved 'white' people as the North African slavers did long before the main Atlantic slave trade emerged. As someone of working class stock who got a top notch education through the welfare state in its prime, I can testify to the discomfort a young man feels when introduced to a world of codes designed to turn him into something he is not. I can also testify to the ability of those who have a stake in the system to bully those who have not simply because of where they stand in the game of power - how much worse it was for people who, in an otherwise free society, could be marked out at thirty paces before they had even opened their mouth. Still, Mosley is not here to talk about history in the round but to write of the specific experience of blacks in 1940s California, those who migrated from the pauper American South to get jobs in the burgeoning military-industrial complex where labour demands based on fat Cold War government contracts required willing and easily replaced low wage but skilled workers(as in the auto industry of Detroit). Where Mosley does score, beyond the intricately plotted but fairly standard Chandleresque crime story, is in reproducing the psychological bullying that underpinned white dominance of black culture, where half the job of social control was being done by the black community itself who had little choice in the matter. Black Americans seem to have adopted an uneasy combination of isolationist quasi-criminality alongside a troubled determination to keep their heads down in an attempt to find solace in a small degree of prosperity and respectability. The character of Easy Rawlins is designed to show how difficult it was to avoid straddling these two worlds - which helpfully gives him a stronger back drop for his troubled internal morality than the existentialist Mr. Marlowe. Neither mode of social being, criminality or respectability, had blacks (not African Americans at this stage in history but 'blacks') seeking to be noticed by whites in this period so the criminals preyed on their own rather than bring down the sledgehammer of white policing, while respectable souls were forced into compromises with their integrity to avoid contact with a culture whose power was far more arbitrary than it should have been according to its own standards. The roots of aggressive black pride and criminal defiance that emerged later in the 1970s were sown in the 1940s. Bluntly, observing the treatment of black Americans in the book, whitey really had it coming to him ... This is why Mosley is worth reading - not for the jolly crime novel aspect (though that is entertaining enough) but the accumulating insight into a culture of anxiety and fear which, to his great credit, Mosley does not over-play. The book is the more effective for being understated and, to his credit, any temptation to grandstand that might have arisen amongst angry lesser minds is firmly resisted.

Devil in a blue dress

Sarah Sammis

Like so many mysteries where the main character is brought on board to do something or find something (or someone) when no one else can, Easy's progress is lined with bodies. People die because he's poking his nose into places everyone else has had the sense to avoid. While the setting and characters are completely different, the basic narrative flow of Devil in a Blue Dress reminds me of another mystery I recently finished, Coached to Death by Victoria Laurie.

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Rose Stanley

Absolutely devoured this; more please. Is it wrong that Mouse is my fave? Probably.

I need to find somebody and I might need a little help looking ... The summer of '48 in the city of Angels and there's heat on the streets when Daphne Monet hits the sidewalk. Heat when she disappears with a trunkload of somebody else's cash. Easy Rawlins is a war veteran just fired from his job. Drinking in a friend's bar, he wonders how to meet his mortgage when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will locate Miss Monet, a blonde with a reputation. It's a simple decision, but for one thing. Nobody warned him - better the devil you know ...

Devil in a Blue Dress

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