Book Review: Devil in a Blue Dress

Spoilers!

Being a Black man in 1940s Los Angeles isn’t so easy for Easy, Walter Mosley’s famed character in his hardboiled 1990 book, Devil in a Blue Dress. Hardboiled books are such a blast to read because they pulse with electricity and mood. The dialogue crackles. Particularly of note is how Mosley code-switches, if you will, between how Black characters talk and how white characters talk, and even how Easy talks depending on which race he’s talking to.

Easy Rawlins is a veteran of WWII, recently fired as a mechanic, and sort of stumbles into doing a job for a white man, DeWitt Albright, on the advise of a former boxer bartender, Joppy, to help pay the mortgage on his home. That’s the thing: Easy’s really proud of his little home. But that home becomes the scene of much violence that unfurls from this “job.” Seriously, three different people accost Easy at his home in one way or another, including the corrupt and racist police. What’s so interesting about the danger Easy faces from Albright, along with Frank Green, a knife-wielding Black gangster, Mouse, his best friend who is a sociopath, a child-molesting would-be mayor, and as it turns out, Joppy, is that the police are always going to be the real threat. Because they can arrest Easy, for whatever. They can accost him. They can threaten and beat him. And it doesn’t matter because he’s Black and they’re the police with all the power. The real power.

The “job” is to find the “devil in the blue dress,” Daphne, a white girl (who turns out to be light-skinned Black and the half-sister of Frank), who a rich white businessman is looking for because he loves her (and also, she and Frank absconded with $30,000, which in 2024 would be more than half a million dollars!). That takes Easy through all these aforementioned other devils, where he gets walloped and interrogated and has to bargain Mouse down from killing everyone. Joppy made a bit of a fool of Easy, and was the one killing everyone on behalf of Albright who “contracted” Easy for the job in the first place.

Naturally, it wouldn’t be a hardboiled book if Easy didn’t get some loving in with a couple women, including Daphne herself, who leaves because she doesn’t want Easy to fall for someone who doesn’t exist, aka this persona she’s crafted separate from her real identity.

Mosley’s violent, sensual, and fast-paced quasi-detective story (I only qualify detective because this is the origin story of how Rawlins becomes a detective) is a fun romp through the mean streets of 1940s LA, and he intersperses the action and crackling dialogue with introspective commentary about race, crime, and class, the most poignant of course being that if a Black man is killed, it’s relegated to the last pages of the newspapers, if reported at all, but if a white man is killed, that’s a crime.

As my first introduction to Mosley and his character, Easy Rawlins, I definitely want to read more. In fact, I know I’m going to because this edition of the book features the short story, “Crimson Stain,” where interestingly, Easy is looking for Mouse! But the story concludes in Six Easy Pieces. Which now, I need to own.