Devil in a Blue Dress Easy Rawlins Morals

My case study of 20th century detective fiction continues with Devil in a Blue Dress, the debut of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, World War II veteran and homeowner in South Central Los Angeles who often gets more trouble than he bargained for taking jobs to help bad people recover coveted items. Walter Mosley has published sixteen Easy Rawlins mysteries to date and in some ways, L.A. no longer seems like the pressure cooker it was when this novel arrived in 1990. In other ways, the city remains the sa My case study of 20th century detective fiction continues with Devil in a Blue Dress, the debut of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, World War II veteran and homeowner in South Central Los Angeles who often gets more trouble than he bargained for taking jobs to help bad people recover coveted items. Walter Mosley has published sixteen Easy Rawlins mysteries to date and in some ways, L.A. no longer seems like the pressure cooker it was when this novel arrived in 1990. In other ways, the city remains the same. Easy's voice and the world building here are more than enough for me to recommend it, but I came away unsatisfied with the story and how passively it developed.

Set in June 1948, the novel opens with Easy wetting his whistle at Joppy's bar in Watts, having been laid off from his job as an aircraft assemblyman. A native of Fifth Ward in Houston, Easy chose to prove his manhood in the army, fighting in North Africa, Italy, and finally, the Battle of the Bulge under General Patton. Like a lot of black folk after the war, Easy migrated to L.A. for jobs in the aircraft industry and made enough to buy his first home, which is he home proud of. A white man walks into the bar and Joppy, a former heavyweight boxer who is both familiar and nervous around the man, calls Easy over to introduce them.

DeWitt Albright reveals that he used to be a lawyer in Georgia and now specializes in "favors" for friends, or friends of friends. Joppy later reassures Easy that while Mr. Albright is a tough man who runs in rough company, he's no gangster, just a man looking for a girl. Driving downtown that evening to Albright's office, Easy is given a photograph of a pretty young white woman Albright tells him is named Daphne Monet. She frequents hangouts in Watts and Albright needs a man who might seem to belong in those hangouts to get a line on where she is. He says Daphne was last seen at an illegal club Easy knows offers him a hundred dollars in advance. Easy goes to work.

John's place was a speakeasy before they repealed Prohibition. But by 1948 we had legitimate bars all over L.A. John liked the speakeasy business though, and he had been in so much trouble with the law that City Hall wouldn't have given him a license to drive, much less to sell liquor. So John kept paying off the police and running an illegal nightclub through the back door of a little market at the corner of Central Avenue and Eighty-ninth Place. You could walk into that store any evening up until three in the morning to find Hattie Parsons sitting behind the candy counter. They didn't have many groceries, and no fresh produce or dairy goods, but she'd sell you what was there and if you knew the right words, or were a regular, then she'd let you in the club through the back door. But if you thought that you should be able to get in on account of your name, or your clothes or maybe your bankbook, well, Hattie kept a straight razor in her apron pocket and her nephew, Junior Fornay, sat right behind the door.

Easy asks Junior if he's seen a white girl named Delia or Dahlia. He gets the sense that Junior is lying to him, but working the room, can't get anyone to say they've seen the white woman he's looking for. He has drinks with a co-worker named Dupree and his girl friend, a skinny but charisma pulsing dame named Coretta. Helping her drag Dupree home, Easy gets familiar with Coretta in the living room, where she reveals she knows who Daphne's boyfriend is, a liquor truck hijacker named Frank Green. Easy returns home and finds a letter transcribed by his childhood friend from Fifth Ward, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. Easy finds himself drawn to his closet, either to pack or to hide.

I ran away from Mouse and Texas to go to the army and then later to L.A. I hated myself. I signed up to fight in the way to prove to myself that I was a man. Before we launched the attack on D-Day I was frightened but I fought. I fought despite the fear. The first time I fought a German hand-t0-hand I screamed for help the whole time I was killing him. His dead eyes stared at me a full five minutes before I let go of his throat.

The only time in my life I had ever been completely free from fear was when I ran with Mouse. He was so confident that there was no room for fear. Mouse was barely five-foot-six but he'd go up against a man Dupree's size and you know I'd bet on the Mouse to walk away from it. He could put a knife in a man's stomach and ten minutes later sit down to a plate of spaghetti.

I didn't want to write Mouse and I didn't want to let it lie. In my mind he had such power that I felt I had to do whatever he wanted. But I had dreams that didn't have me running in the streets anymore; I was a man of property and I wanted to leave my wild days behind.

Who Daphne Monet is, how Easy finds her and the "whats-it" that warrants the obsession of so many men starting with Mr. Albright largely becomes second, third and fourth fiddle to what really makes Devil In a Blue Dress jam and that's Walter Mosley taking us through the streets of South Central in 1948. While Easy is arrested and interrogated by police, discovers a corpse, gets shot at by gangsters and is summoned before the city's powerful, Mosley's detective story tells it all from the point-of-view of a black man. Details and texture that a Raymond Chandler or a Dashiell Hammett never had access to jumps off the page. Characters are well drawn. Prose is often magnificent.

Talking with Mr. Todd Carter was a strange experience. I mean, there I was, a Negro in a rich white man's office, talking to him like we were best friends--even closer. I could tell that he didn't have the fear or contempt that most white people showed when they dealt with me.

It was a strange experience but I had seen it before. Mr. Todd Carter was so rich that he didn't even consider me in human terms. He could tell me anything. I could have been a prized dog that he knelt to and hugged when he felt low.

It was the worst kind of racism. The fact that he didn't even recognize our difference showed that he didn't care one damn about me. But I didn't have the time to worry about it. I just watched him move his lips about lost love until, finally, I began to see him as some strange being. Like a baby who grows to man-size and terrorizes his poor parents with his strength and stupidity.

The Easy Rawlins mysteries have one of the best, or worst, examples of deus ex machina that I've ever come across: Mouse shows up in the nick of time to bail Easy out of trouble. Mosley's private detective gets hurt, but we sense that no injury will come to him as long as his gangster friend is close by. Things just seem to happen to Easy, most without him even present, so corpses and money and the why of it all don't seem to matter much. The world visualized here is so well described I could taste it, but the lack of a compelling narrative doomed a high-quality 1995 film starring Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle (as Mouse, in his breakout role) and Jennifer Beals.

Word count: 85,820 words

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Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37100.Devil_in_a_Blue_Dress

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