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Devil in a Blue Dress |
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 Devil in a Blue Dress byWalter Mosley Pocket Books 215 pages, 1990 ISBN 0671511424 Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart In 1990, it had been almost 20 years since black private eye "Shaft" burst upon the literary scene. Devil in a Blue Dress, the novel where Walter Mosley introduced readers to Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, was written in that same year. Easy is a black P. I. who quickly joined the ranks of great detectives in crime fiction. The time is 1948 on the streets of Los Angeles. The post-war boom may be happening for white folks, but for the African-Americans of the era, well life just hasn’t changed all that much. Easy is a young black veteran who has just lost his job at an aircraft plant. Not quite desperate, he’s wondering how he’s going to make the mortgage payment. His house is his dream, a move from the slums into middle-class America. He’ll do almost anything to keep it. A white man DeWitt Albright who dresses in all white, is looking for a blonde woman in a blue dress, the beautiful and sexy Daphne Monet. Daphne should be easy to find - a white woman with a predilection for black jazz and black men. Through a mutual friend, Albright hires Easy to find her. At first Easy is suspicious. Albright offers him enough money for a week’s work that would save his house and give him a little extra. This doesn’t happen to black men. However, the pride he holds in owning his own home makes him accept. Easy knows South Central LA: the after-hours pubs, the basement clubs, the places people go when they don’t want anyone to know where they are. Readers see an extremely different LA than the one Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade moved through. It’s dirty, gritty, mean, and raw - how the other side lives. Easy locates the missing woman, only to get mixed up in more than just earning his hundred dollars. Devil in a Blue Dress is an excellent mystery. The comparisons of Mosley to other great detective-genre writers such as Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler are not undeserved, as the author delivers well defined characters, a well thought out plot, plenty of suspense and above all, a believable story. Mosley has earned a new fan. |
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