Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mystery)

Enjoying every page Easy Rawlings is a smart man. I like the way he gets the information he needs by thinking and using his head. I look forward to reading all of the books in the Easy Rawlings series. Mr. Mosley is quite a writer. Invest the time and money, the rewards will be many.

This is a nice twist, the first Easy Rawlins novel, Black hard boiled. Authentic racial stuff. Easy and his folks are real no doubt, but the femme fatale , this devil with a blue dress, is just too screwed up to make the story believable...either that or all the men in LA, 1948, were total dimwits.

Ripping into this first book in the Easy Rawlins series was like studying an instructional manual on how to set up your reader for a thrill ride. The character descriptions, the settings, the dialog (though dated in its use of dialect) sent me on a spiraling dive into the underbelly of a 1948 LA I didn't know - s tough, ruthless, bloody underbelly. Where violence, sex, drinking are all indulged to, many times, horrific ends.
Easy Rawlins trudges the hero's path, his goal to make enough money to hold onto his small home, to pay the monthly mortgage. He's a rebellious, proud and angry man which is why he loses his job at the plane factory despite his skills. It's difficult at first to figure out who is friend or foe, but a supposed friend hooks him up with a white crime boss - DeWitt Albright. He needs Easy to find a woman for a friend, the eponymous devil In a blue dress. With little alternative to meeting his mortgage payment, Easy takes on the job and gets sucked into a dark crowd of high rollers, low rollers, drinkers and criminals, many of whom he already knew from Houston, his home town.
It's surprising to read the anger against whites that Easy holds from a lifetime of insults and unfair dealings. Surprising because in mainstream books, those thoughts usually seem to be less sharp and more submerged. Not our hero. His fury is right on the surface.
In a story full of memorable characters (a lot of them) - Joppy, the bar owner; Mouse, a murderous friend from his past; Frank Green; Ronald White, the man with too many kids; in all, too many characters to name - each with a story that filled the book with the atmosphere and detail that the best novels have. Mosley did not set himself a simple task in his first book. He tore into it with all the thinking, ideas, and emotions he'd gathered to that point, and then peopled it with individualistic, colorful characters. (I could have used a listing in the front like those seen in nineteenth century novels.)
Of course, the most interesting character of all is Easy. Mosley ekes out his backstory in tantalizing drops. Let's just say he's got his issues.
I don't know why Daphne Monet, the devil, didn't move me. Even the surprise ending let me down, probably because the build up throughout the plot raced towards a climax that should have exploded, and fell short. But this first book by Mosley is a humbling read. To see what he's accomplished in his first outing sets a very high bar for any mystery writer.

Dear Lord! This story is fantastic! Let me just say that after consuming a lot of pulpy low-brow crime fiction, this story feels enriching, textured and wise by comparison. This is less like a clichéd serial, and more like the acclaimed literary contributions that shaped our culture. Michael Boatman's audio performance is the finest I've ever heard. His performance of DeWitt Albright is a thousand times better than the 1995 film adaptation's interpretation of the character. After hearing his stellar performance, I refuse to listen to any prior audiobook versions read by others.

This book is firmly on my list of favorite novels. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is a young black WWII veteran who has lost his job and is eager to jump at an opportunity when a shady white businessman hires him to locate a pretty white woman named Daphne Monet, who is known for gettin her party on at black nightclubs.

This is not only one of the best debut crime novels, but also features what I think is one of the best characters, especially in the detective genre. I think that Easy is a wonderful character and dissimilar to other film noir detectives in a number of ways. He is a totally reluctant investigator. He doesn't have an office or a secretary, and proves to be great at the job because of his wits, his relationships, his awareness of race and being in touch with his community. And you can actually believe why women are attracted to him. It's great witnessing the change in him as he uncovers secrets that he is unprepared for. I love how evocative the book is of 1940's inner city Los-Angeles, especially in the South Central area. It has a complicated and intriguing plot, and because of Walter Mosley's soulful and effortless prose, this detective story never gets boring.

An awesome running start to a wonderful series that evolves in great ways. The series should definitely be read in order but other standout novels in the series include A Little Yellow Dog, as well as the later novels like Little Scarlet, Cinnamon Kiss, and Blonde Faith.

This was October's monthly Pulp Fiction Group read over on Goodreads site. I can't honestly recall whether I voted for this or one of the three alternatives, but having read this debut novel many years ago, I wasn't too unhappy to re-visit it.
Mosley's Devil In A Blue Dress was originally published back around 1990 and introduces us to one of the author's enduring characters - Easy Rawlins. To date, there have been twelve books in the series. Ten of the titles have colours in them; red, white, black, yellow etc - and two titles, curiously in my opinion don't - Gone Fishin' and Six Easy Pieces. (Anyone know why? Just curious.)

Easy Rawlins is a black man getting by in LA after the war. A veteran of the conflict, Rawlins has seen and participated in his share of killing. Until recently he's been working as a mechanic at an aviation plant. Rawlins has pride, which for a black man can be an expensive commodity in post-war LA. You can hate him for his colour, but you better respect him. After losing his job at the plant, an acquaintance points mighty whitey De Witt Allbright in Easy's direction. Allbright want to engage Easy to find Daphne Monet. Easy with his home to protect and his mortgage coming due accepts the job.

Rawlins starts asking questions around Monet's haunts. After a late night drinking session and then more intimate discussion with Coretta James, after her man passes out drunk, Easy gets pumped himself for detail. A day or so later he's arrested and beaten by the police for reasons then unknown. When our man finds out that Coretta is dead and certain other parties seem interested in locating Daphne, LA becomes a dangerous place for a black man who can either be a patsy for the police and framed for the death of Coretta or a casualty at the hands of Allbright if Easy doesn't come through for him.

Verdict.......short at 220 pages long, detailed with a great depiction of LA shortly after the war. Mosley shows us life within the black community and the problems encountered when crossing over the racial boundary geographically and also when interacting with white authority. There's a reasonable amount of carnage and death along the way, as Easy with the assistance of an old friend, Mouse eventually survives the fall out to breathe another day. (Having previously mentioned that this is the start of a long-ish series, I hardly think I've gone and spoilt it for you!)

I'm looking forward to reading more from the series in the next year or two - only 11 to catch up on!

4 from 5

I acquired my copy recently second hand and cheap after being unable to locate my original

What is it about bright, sunny Los Angeles that makes it the perfect setting for noir?

Chandler's stories were set in L.A. So were James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Films, too. Sunset Blvd., Chinatown and L.A. Confidential off the top of my head.

Does it work so well because it shows the contrast between the light of the environment and the darkness that we sometimes see in the human soul?

Maybe.

If so, Walter Mosley heightened that contrast by bringing black detective Ezekiel Rawlins to life in 1948 to explore, take advantage of and be victimized by an additional aspect of color - Rawlins going into the dark places of men's soul in sunny L.A.'s white and black neighborhoods.

I feared it would be heavy handed and over-wrought. Not to me.

I liked that Devil in a Blue Dress, like most of the best noir is a grounded story. It doesn't reach for any overarching theme, the story doesn't `reach for the highest corridors of power' (usually something to do with the mayors office). It doesn't or put civilization in peril (Kiss Me Deadly). That had to be a big temptation when writing about a black detective in 1948. Nope. It's `a girl is missing. Please find the girl, Mr. Rawlins.' He finds the girl using brains and brawn and persistence.
.
The only drawback I found were that I had trouble keeping track of the secondary characters. The baddies didn't seem well-drawn out and I kept mixing them up.

Interesting depiction of a noir world from the 1940s black perspective.The themes of racial prejudice and the inherent fear of the white police is very relevant to today's news headlines. The very convincing depiction of a black society and black underworld from that time period makes this novel quite fascinating on that level alone.
Two negatives:

1) The female characters are not truly believable. The Devil in the blue dress (Daphne Monet) is a very mysterious character that never gels into believability for me.
2) The plot becomes very complex and convoluted -- unnecessarily so, in my opinion.

Because the narrative is well-written, and some (not all) characters are well-developed, and the world depicted is so full of shadows and atmosphere, the negatives are overshadowed by the positives. In truth, I would give this 1st Easy Rawlins mystery 3.5 stars.

I had the opportunity to read Walter Mosley's novel "Devil in a Blue Dress" (1990) when it was presented as part of a Black Voices reading group at the local public library. It was my first experience with the author. Mosley (b. 1952) is best-known for his series of noir mysteries featuring a tough African American detective named Easy (Exekiel) Rawlins. Although I have some familiarity with noir, this book was also the first I have read with an African American protagonist and a predominantly African American setting. "Devil in a Blue Dress" was the Mosley's first novel. In 1995, it became a movie starring Denzil Washington.

The story is set in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1948. The hero, Easy Rawlins, immigrated to Los Angeles from an even rougher area in Houston. He saw extensive combat experience in WW II where he was fearsome in hand-to-hand combat and killed many German soldiers. Rawlins wants a peaceful, successful life. He completes his high school education and contemplates college. He gets a good job as a machinist in an aircraft production plant and saves enough money to buy a small house with a garden which he loves. Due to an altercation with his boss, Rawlins is fired and fears he will not be able to meet his monthly mortgage payment.

In his leisure time, Rawlins drinks at a small out-of-the way bar owned by an ex-boxer, Joppy. Joppy introduces Rawlins to a white man, DeWitt Albright of questionable business and connections. Albright offers to pay Rawlins for information about the location of a young white woman, Daphne Monet, who is known to frequent African American establishments in the Watts area.

With misgivings, Rawlins accepts the job and gradually realizes the trouble he has brought on himself. Finding Daphne brings Rawlins into a complex picture of murders, double-crosses and mysteries. Along the way, Rawlins is arrested and beaten by the Los Angeles police and nearly loses his life at the hands of several competing parties with their own reasons for finding Daphne. Several of Rawlins' friends are killed. In the process of the tale, Rawlins introduces a welter of sinister yet fascinating characters including Rawlins' violent friend "Mouse", Albright, and Daphne herself. The plot is tangled.

Character development and atmospheric portrayal of late 1940's Los Angeles are much more important to this book than plot development. The book offers a grittily realistic portrayal of African American life in the Watts of its time as the scene shifts among several bars, romming houses, brothels, liquor stores. Much of the story shows the nature of African American -- white relationships as Rawlins is harassed by the police, fired from his job, and thwarted in his efforts. Rawlins and Albright are in a way complimentary characters. Daphne is a pivotal figure in the racial tension developed in the novel.

The book makes highly effective use of African American speech patterns. "Easy" Rawlins develops and gains trust in himself during the book. He calls upon his war experience and his toughness to stay with the situation and not run away after he finds himself in over his head. At critical points in the story, he listens to an internal "voice" which tells him what to do. A basically conscientous and decent man, Rawlins learns to hold his head high and to do what he needs to do in the situations that present themselves.

The story is jambled but became relatively clear with close reading. The portrayal of Los Angeles life, the character development, and the observations about relationships between African Americans and whites, help bring this book to a level beyond noir fiction. I was glad of the opportunity to get to know this book.

Robin Friedman

Ezekiel Easy Rawlins has just lost his job, and his fear is that he's going to lose his home. Before the times become to trying his friend Joppy introduces him to DeWitt Albright, a white man, in search of a young white woman, Daphne Monet. Joppy tells Easy that it's easy money with virtually no commitment or real work.

What Easy finds is a whole lot of people that he's had contact with because of his search for Daphne Monet meeting with their untimely demise. When the police get involved, Easy is cornered and desperately trying to wiggle himself out of trouble.

When Raymond Mouse Alexander, his oldtime partner from Houston shows up, Easy knows that he now has someone to watch his back. He also fears that the number of dead will rise.

Can Easy find Daphne Monet, stay out of jail, figure out why all of the bloodshed and prevent himself from being amongst the casualties?

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS was a quick and easy read. I'd seen the movie years ago and didn't realize that it was based on a book. I'm glad I finally took the time out to add Walter Mosley to my library.

I'd been advised by another the store reviewer to read the Easy Rawlins series, so here I am at the beginning. And now I have that happy glow you get when you discover a very fine writer, and you know there's lots of good reading ahead.

Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins doesn't like to kill people, but he learned how to do it in the War. He also got used to being around white people. This story opens in 1948.

Easy doesn't know he's destined to become a private investigator. His first case is thrust on him by a scary white man with dead eyes who pays him to find a beautiful young white woman named Daphne Monet. Daphne likes jazz and the company of black people. The white man who wants her found can't go where she goes.

A lot of people die while Easy figures out what's going on. He himself narrowly avoids shooting anyone - or getting killed himself. He has a friend called Mouse who watches his back, which helps. But even Easy has to step softly around Mouse, who carries several guns and has a very short fuse.

There are two unforgettable lovemaking scenes in this book, funny and poignant rather than salacious. And there are many scenes of wonderful dialog between touchy males who just barely avoid going into attack mode. The quality of Mosley's prose is indescribably delicious, even when all hell is breaking loose.

Walter Mosley is one of the Great Contemporary American Writers, and he achieves this status from his reworking of a familiar genre - Raymond Chandler styled detective fiction - and giving it a fresh voice.

Easy Rawlins has the hallmarks of a Sam Spade, if you like, but he's an unwilling detective, a black man who just wants to get ahead in the promising environment of post-war Los Angeles. But he's thrown into a mystery that takes us, page-turningly, through the various strata of LA society and leads us both to a statisfying yet violent resolution of the whodunnit, while also taking us to a place of deeper understanding.

In fact Mosley's series of Easy Rawlins stories that follow this excellent novel maintain the high quality of suspense writing while tracing a credible, thoughtful post-war social history of modern USA, as seen through the astute and increasingly wary eyes of Rawlins. The series is great reading, and while Mosley uses the suspense genre to tell a deeper story he always writes with wry humour, deep passion, an eye for the ladies and a twitchy attitude to violence as part of life. His invention of Raymond "Mouse" as Rawlin's disturbingly trigger-happy friend from Texas keeps the plotting always one step from catastrophe.

This is one novel, incidentally, where the film version is every bit as good. Denzel Washington captures Easy Rawlins just perfectly, and the film direction is quite superb.

I love Walter Mosley and this book is no exception. I became familiar with Mosley's writing thanks to the Denzel Washington/Don Cheadle movie, but Rawlins, like so many of Mosley's characters came to life through his writing. It is a beautiful, poetic, yet highly entertaining book.

Mosley took detective fiction to a new level when this book was released. Not only is his storytelling every bit as gritty and hard boiled as classic detective fiction, but his subtle (and sometimes not so subtle!) social commentary provides a unique voice distinguishing Easy Rawlins from the many private [...] who have tread before him. Easy is a man with flaws, pressed into the business of gumshoeing due to his financial circumstances. Overall, he comes across as a real man, someone with problems people of all races can relate to. His experiences are as eye-opening as they are entertaining. Mosley also introduces us to one of the most cold-blooded characters in crime fiction, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. Mouse is ruthless, without remorse at his violent lifestyle, driven only by his needs for money, women, and fine threads. Even his friends tread carefully around Mouse and it's only with the greatest of reservations that Easy enlists the aid of his dangerous friend. Mosley's dialog and description are superb and its amazing to think that this was his first novel. The Easy Rawlins mysteries would continue to get better, but there are enough plot twists and dangerous dames in this first installment to interest any mystery fan.

Easy Rawlins is not the typical private detective, but he is the freshest one to come around in a long time. Easy is an African American WWII veteran from Texas, now living in 1948 L.A. where he proudly owns a modest home. The home is all he has to be proud of since he got fired from his job at a defense plant. Life for Easy is not easy at all. Then one day, a white man dressed in a white suit offers Easy good money to locate a beautiful blonde known to hang out at black clubs. For a man with a mortgage and no money coming in, the offer is too good to be true. But then offers like this usually are.
The plot sounds typical, but Mosley's writing is anything but. Mosley paints a clear and atmospheric picture of racial segregation in post-war L.A., but that picture is not overexposed. Easy not only has to endure the dangers of finding this girl, he must do it in a hostile background where white policemen and higher-ups look for any type of crime that they might pin on him. The story of the transplanted man from the south living on the west coast is not unfamiliar, but making him a black man facing prejudice on every side makes the story more alive and the plot more tension-filled. Again, this is not done in a heavy-handed way, but with a subtle touch that makes you want to turn the pages.
Mosley is very much at home with the hard-boiled style of crime noir and it shows on every page. This is not a Hammett or Chandler re-hash. This is a fresh, lively, exciting mystery from a very fine writer. If you haven't experienced Mosley and Easy Rawlins, pick up the Blue Dress and try it on for size.
215 pages

Walter Mosley wins half the battle of writing a good detective story by coming up with a unique, interesting protagonist. Easy Rawlins, a black man recently unemployed in post-War LA and desperate to make the payments on his little house, accepts the assignment to look for a white woman who frequents black nightclubs. He has access to a level of south LA society that white men do not, which makes his assistance invaluable to certain powerful individuals.

This first novel in the Easy Rawlins series succeeds for its portrayal of an inherently good man living in 1940s Los Angeles with all its racism, corruption, and opportunism. I hope Mosley's device of a voice that talks to Easy during times of stress is eliminated, or at least deemphasized, in future installments; it seems quite contrived. Although the violent criminal Mouse, an old friend from Easy's past, is a deftly drawn character, I hope our hero won't be so reliant on his help in the future. It makes sense in this first novel, when Easy is still getting his feet wet as an investigator, but the way Mouse swoops in from nowhere to rescue him at a couple points is too much of a deus ex machina.

There aren't many good African American mystery writers and there are even fewer black private eyes that you'd want to read about. Walter Mosley and Easy Rawlins, however, satisfy both of those criteria in solid fashion.
More than that, though, this is simply a good, fun read .

The setting is Los Angeles in the 1940s, probably the most fruitful noir time and place there is. During those boom years of post-war expansion, a man could make a good living and even buy a place of his own.

That's all that Easy Rawlins wants. When he's laid-off, though, he can't make his mortgage. He's going to lose his house and he'd rather do almost anything than that. He finds, though, that he has to do more than he bargained for.

When a mysterious white man offers him $100 to find a missing white woman, it seems simple enough. Nothing, of course, is ever as it seems. Rawlins quickly finds himself in trouble and there is no easy way out. It takes a hardness that he tries to hide for him to come out alive.

For a first novel, this book is very solid with a lot of personality. Mosley captures a people and culture that we don't get to read much about. Easy is a good, fresh character; one of the best new entries to the mystery scene in a while.

This book is recommended to everyone who enjoys a good hard-boiled mystery, especially fans of Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, and Ross Macdonald

Unemployed and days away from losing his hard won house, Easy Rawlins takes a job he knows better than to get involved with. It sounds easy enough, look around some local black nightspots for a girl on the lam. Rawlins knows, though, that more is going on than he's being told. Shortly after asking his first questions in his investigation, Rawlins is dragged in by the police - turns out some of his recent contacts have been murdered. Rawlins has few friends and his wits to help him find the woman, get paid, avoid being charged with murder and, perhaps most difficult, stay alive.

In Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley creates an attractive protagonist and effectively evokes a time and place (albeit one that likely never existed). In so doing he provides a scene in which the reader very much wants to be involved - gritty, smart, sexual. The narrative, however, goes little beyond evoking a background. We learn very little about Easy Rawlins and his associates. Indeed, we learn very little about the story we are told. The narrative could be effectively summarized in a few short pages and the material surrounding the plot oftentimes does nothing more than fill the space. Interesting? Yes. Satisfying? Unfortunately not.