Devil in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley at the at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival.

Devil in a Blue Dress is a 1990 hardboiled mystery novel by Walter Mosley. The text centers on the main character, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, and his transformation from a day laborer into a detective. The story begins with Easy out-of-work and unable to pay his mortgage. He is sitting in a bar run by Joppy, a friend from Texas, when a man named DeWitt Albright walks into the bar and offers him a job finding a young woman named Daphne Monet. Monet, a young white woman, is rumored to be hanging out in bars frequented mostly by African Americans and Albright needs Easy, who has many connections to the African American community and the Watts neighborhood of LA, to find her.

At the first bar he goes to Easy meets two old friends, Coretta and Dupree from Texas, among many other people that he knew from his former life in the South. He goes home with them and has sex with Coretta and then leaves her in the early morning only to be accosted by the LAPD shortly thereafter and imprisoned without explanation. It later comes to light that he is a suspect in Coretta's murder although he is innocent. Even after he is released he is repeatedly threatened by the police, and impeded in his investigation by white people in general.

When he finally does find Monet she reveals that she has stolen a large amount of money from a man named Todd Carter, who is a local wealthy businessman. All along Albright has been playing Easy for a fool, making him think that he was on a missing person case when, in reality, Monet has been trying to escape with Carter's money. Albright wants it for himself but cannot move around freely in Watts due to his heightened visibility as a white man. Eventually, Easy leads Albright to Monet even though he is trying to protect her by hiding her at a local motel that is run by one of his long time friends. Albright knocks Easy out, kidnaps Monet, and flees the scene.

With the help of his friend Mouse (who shows up mid-way through the story, due to a half-hearted invitation from Easy and domestic strife back home in Texas) he finds Monet with Albright and Joppy. They rescue her, kill Joppy and Albright, and then Mouse reveals the major twist of the story, which is that Monet is actually Ruby, an African American woman passing as white and the sister of a local gangster named Green. Mouse blackmails Ruby, takes the money and gives half to Easy, despite his protest. Daphne/Ruby leaves shortly thereafter and Easy has to clean up the mess with the police and Todd Carter, who had initially hired Albright to find her and not his money, although Albright planned on stealing the money when he found Monet/Ruby.

Easy approaches Carter for the second time in the novel (the first was when Albright refused to give him any information about the case) and requests his help with the police. He insinuates that he will leak the information about the case unless he is protected from the law. At the novel's conclusion, Easy is safe, Daphne/Ruby is gone, Albright and Joppy are dead, and Mouse is on his way back to his wife in Texas. This concludes the first book in the ten-book Easy Rawlins series which concluded in 2009.^[1]

The novel is an important contribution to African American and ethnic detective fiction in that it focuses on a Black protagonist who falls into the role of detective but, by the series end, has made this profession and the identity that often comes along with it his own. A few things of note in the text include Easy's use of African American English, and the emergence of "the Voice," an inner voice which advises Easy during particularly stressful or dangerous situations.^[2] Literary scholars of ethnic detective fiction have explored these qualities of the text in conjunction with genre study approaches and gender identity^[3] approaches.

The book was adapted into a 1995 film of the same name, which starred Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins, and also featured Jennifer Beals, Tom Sizemore, Maury Chaykin, and Don Cheadle as the unhinged "Mouse."

References

1. ^ CNN.com
2. ^ Lal.sagepub.com
3. ^ JSTOR.org