Devil in a Blue Dress (30th Anniversary Edition): An Easy Rawlins Novel (1) (Easy Rawlins Mystery)

There. Is a reason that every time some one publishes a new book by Walter Moseley, they do it on the condition that he writes another Easy Rawlings mystery . Because he writes real Noir . To me Noir is the one time where white literature relates to the black experience . Cops oppress you instead of protecting and serving. Woman exploit you and monsters are your only friend . This is a description of devil in a blue dress , an explanation of noir set in a black community and why i love Walter Moseley. Mouse is that monster .

this is where it began for walter mosley and for ezekiel rawlin’s, a fired factory worker in los angeles, hired by a man dressed from head to toe in white to locate a woman and do no more than tell him where she is. by the end of the novel easy rawlin’s discovers he has a talent for being a sleuth and the series is launched.after a second reading, separated by several years, blue dress still doesn’t grab me. the appeal for me these days is in the maturity of rawlin’s. after years of cases, each one adding more murders to a steady accumulation of dead bodies, the war veteran infantryman’s familiarity with death on the streets and racial harassment, has hardened him to an inevitability of a way of life in which he must act in order to survive and maintain his sliver share of the american dream he has built while keeping those close to him safe.walter mosley’s name as author of the easy rawlins' series has established him high in the ranks of detective mystery fiction in the tradition of hammett, spillane and chandler.

Great story. A real window in on another world. The book is engaging, and the author employs language a bit differently than usual, which I enjoyed.

“Devil in a Blue Dress” is a mystery novel, the first published novel of Walter Mosley, it was published in the early 1990s and set in Los Angeles in 1948, it is very well written as literature. It is a very good mystery that kept me guessing. I very much liked this novel and plan to keep reading this series.The protagonist is “Easy” Rawlins. Easy is a veteran of World War II. He seems a decent sort of fellow who has retained his humanity despite combat and also facing discrimination as an African American. The author made me like Easy. He also made me like another character who I feel I should not name in order to avoid spoiling the reading experience.As may be expected in the 1940s, race was an issue and Easy Rawlins faces the issue. This is only a part of a larger story. However it does make me cringe. No matter how much I like the novel, I was uncomfortable at times with the discrimination described. However the more I study African American history and culture the more I have come to realize this is part of the reality of American Life and Culture.Mister Mosley wrote this novel in an erudite fashion with a touch of American Noir from that period. There is a trace of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler in his writing style. I love that kind of writing as long as I don’t overdo it for my own sake, one such novel every two months or so…I have been reading numerous mystery novels by diverse authors. I have been searching for an author to augment my current favorite modern American mystery writer, Sue Grafton. While I continue to study other authors and other mystery writers, Walter Mosley now occupies this niche for me. Thank you for taking the time to read this review.

I had not read anything by Mr Mosley before Devil in a Blue Dress with the exception of a few pages in a paperback I picked up briefly on a visit to a doctors office. I immediately became a fan however when I saw him interviewed for three hours on C-Span, a show called In Depth that can be seen on YouTube by the way. His answers to questions and further statements about his work and life in general and writing were so straight forward, sensible and logical that I was drawn to his work whether I agreed with his opinions or not. I am white, although I am familiar with the terrain Mr Moseley covers as I grew up in the fifties in Brooklyn in the Bedford Stuyvesant section and went to school with and had many friends and acquaintances who were black. I worked in several stores there as well that had black clientele. Devil in a Blue Dress is a great read because the characters are well drawn, the scenes are believable and of course Easy is a true hero, a good man and a long suffering man who has been through the wringer and is being put through one in the book. Easy is also likable, sensible, moral, suffering and noble. He's also righteous and a bad dude when he has to be or is driven to be. I say its a terrible book because Mr Moseley has shown us quite graphically, the depths of degradation that humans are capable of, through Mouse and Daphne and Allbright and Terran as well as the cops. Depths that perhaps the black man and woman have been driven to in some way by whites although as is shown you don't have to be black to do evil deeds. I put down the book a couple of times because these degrading scenes are terrible to behold however true of life they may be. Someone said in another review that the plot was faulty, perhaps a bit unclear. I disagree, Moseley's characters in this work, and the predicaments they find themselves in, are bigger than the plot, transcend plot in a way because they are more important than plot. In Devil in a Blue Dress Moseley's LA is as weighty as Chinatown in the Jack Nicholson film or The Naked City in the TV show of that name: indeed we hear that there are 8 million stories in The Naked City as there are undoubtedly in Moseley's LA. There are hundreds, thousands of plots in these places and all of them spell random death and and perverse behavior. I don't give five stars to anything on principal, not many can be Dante or Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, but Devil in a Blue Dress to me is a solid four.

All good

Un titre clin d'œil pour la première aventure de Easy Rawlins, le plus "black" des privés américains !J'ai déjà dit ailleurs (cf. "Little Scarlet") tout le bien que je pense de Walter Mosley, et je ne saurais trop recommander la lecture de ses romans à ceux qui lisent en anglais.Pour la petite histoire, Walter Mosley est un écrivain américain aujourd'hui très connu qui écrit pour l'essentiel des romans policiers, mais il déborde aussi du cadre, à la fois parce qu'il écrit des romans qui ne sont pas des policiers, et plus encore parce qu'il est par son talent un grand écrivain.Parmi ses romans que je connais, "Devil in a blue dress" n'est pas mon préféré , mais c'est néanmoins celui dont la facture de roman policier est la plus aboutie (si je ne me trompe pas, c'est pourtant le premier roman de Mosley et il s'est très bien vendu aux USA au moment de sa sortie).Ici, tous les ingrédients du "polar" sombre, nocturne et enfumé sont réunis. Easy Rawlins, vétéran de 39/45, a délaissé après la guerre son Texas natal pour s'installer à Los Angeles. Dans le milieu de la communauté noire des tripots et des clubs de jazz où il traine, il rencontre un homme blanc qui lui propose une somme d'argent conséquente s'il parvient à localiser une femme du nom de Miss Daphné Monet. Mais le chemin menant à Daphné va s'avérer semé de cadavres et Daphné se révèlera ne pas être celle qu'on croyait... Voilà pour le décor.Ce qui fait l'intérêt de ce roman, c'est d'abord la façon avec laquelle Mosley tient son récit. Sans perdre son lecteur, il échafaude un scénario déroutant, bourré de péripéties et de rebondissements qui ressemble à la course d'Alice derrière le lapin blanc. C'est haletant et ça s'accroche aux mains avec cette force qu'ont les bons polars qu'on ne veut pas lâcher avant d'être parvenu à leur fin. Et puis il y a déjà ce fameux contraste entre l'enchaînement rapide et stressant des événements, le danger omniprésent et le cool qu'affiche "Ease" en toutes circonstances. Toujours dans la m***, où sur le point de l'être, mais toujours confiant et calme, toujours posé et maitrisé... C'est un trait distinctif qui donne beaucoup de caractère au personnage et qui contribue énormément - dans ce roman comme dans les autres - tant à la sympathie du lecteur à son égard qu'à l'équilibre du rythme du récit qu'il contribue à tempérer.Néanmoins, s'il y en avait un, le problème avec "Devil in a blue dress" pourrait - justement ! - d'être un très bon policier, et de ne pas sortir de son cadre. Parfait pour les amateurs du genre (d'où les 4 étoiles), un peu limité pour ceux qui, comme moi, sont plus habitués à la littérature (d'où les 4 étoiles).En conclusion : c'est un super polar, mais je vous recommanderais plutôt "Little Scarlet" pour voir tout le talent de Mosley se déployer et constater combien cet écrivain peut encore mieux que ce très bon polar !

Easy Rawlins is in the Los Angeles of Philip Marlowe, but as a black man he faces a different set of obstacles. Rawlins doesn’t start as a private eye. He’s been laid off from his job at Champion Aircraft and has a mortgage to pay when a bartender friend sets him up with what appears to be a straightforward job - finding a woman called Daphne Monet. It’s highly readable. And it throws up some fascinating reflections on race: it could be read as a black version of a Marlowe adventure. But there’s much more to this multi-layered adventure, and Rawlins is a narrator you’re happy to spend time with. The frustration for me was that the plot becomes a bit too elaborate towards the end. I’d just about wrapped my head round it one minute - and was utterly confused the next … I finished the novel without a clear idea of what had happened. The subplots are the complicating factor, as the central strand of the narrative is clear enough. Forget about the subplots, and it makes more sense… Some of the action is perfunctorily explained, almost in passing, minimising the effect. For that reason, the true rating overall is probably 3.5, though I’d have said 4 until about two-thirds of the way through. But I enjoyed the pacing and the uncluttered prose, and I look forward to reading Easy’s next adventure …

To be honest I just expected a run of the mill investigation type of story & whilst it is in some ways in other ways it offers up a whole lot more & it show you how things used to be between black & white. Some might say nothing’s changed but have a read & make up your own mind.

The Devil in the Blue Dress is a noir tale full of racial and sexual tensions set in the post-war Los Angeles. The strengths of the novel are the characterisation, contextualisation, and sense of place and time. Easy Rawlins is an interesting lead character: a man who wants to pull himself up into the middle class but finds himself scrabbling around in the underworld to keep that dream from slipping by; he's familiar with death from his time fighting across Europe, but he has little appetite for the murderous situation he finds himself in. As such, his moral compass is generally pointed in the right direction, but he's prepared to let it waver, especially as he lives in a community where right and wrong are various shades of grey and he has to negotiate the racist attentions of powerful white men. To complement him, Mosley fills the story with a set of colourful, dangerous characters. The tale is particularly good at portraying the racial geography of the city, its seedy nightlife and petty crime, and dropping in small historical references. The plot was interesting, but felt a little opaque at times given the number of characters and their shifting allegiances, and some elements didn't seem to quite sit right. Nonetheless, it was an entertaining read, told in a style that is all tell and no show, and is full of noirish atmosphere.