★★★☆☆ How Easy Rawlins got started

Devil in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley

Devil in a Blue Dress is the first book in Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins series of mysteries. I became interested in Easy Rawlins through the Marvel Netfix series Luke Cage. The directors and writers were keen to show us that Luke is no dumb knucklehead, so we are treated to Luke discussing poetry with his mentor Pops, carrying Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man with him, and also reading Mosley's Little Green. So I looked that up, and decided to start the series at the beginning.

As a murder mystery Devil in a Blue Dress is not really very good. Nor, I think, does it try to be. Devil introduces us to Easy Rawlins. It was first published in 1990. I read the 30th anniversary edition, published in 2020 (Duh!), and it begins with an Introduction written by Mosley in 2020. He writes

When I wrote Devil I had a simple thought in mind. I wanted to tell a story about Los Angeles that highlighted black life and the black contribution to culture within a mirror-darkly that partially reflected the American experience within a shadowy landscape of national shame. In Devil I talked about how poor black people migrated from the Deep South to Southern California, of how they flourished and ultimately failed; only to rise again, flourish again, fail again but in the end, pressing the envelope of that contest forward each and every time.
...
This was always my notion of Easy Rawlins and the people that populate his neighborhood. He and his friends face every morning having to scramble up the slippery slope that is America, that is business as usual, that is an unequal sense of innocence and guilt, that recognizes and prejudges race, gender, and class before wondering about the who, what, and why of the crime committed.

The story takes place in the late 1940s. Easy is not yet a Private Eye when it begins. He has just been laid off from his job building airplanes and is hard up. He takes a dodgy job looking for a young woman. It turns out, of course, that those who want her found do not necessarily have her best interests in mind.

Devil was, I believe, Mosley's debut novel, and it feels like it. It was a fairly stellar debut, of course, but in absolute terms it is not a terrible well-constructed novel. There's just too much going on: too many characters, too many locations, too much event. It held my interest, but I was lost much of the time. I intend to continue the series, in the hope that Mosley becomes a better writer or I a better Mosley reader with experience.

Devil in a Blue Dress on Amazon

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