Background of the Study
Walter Mosley is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America. He is the author of more than sixty critically acclaimed books that cover a wide range of ideas, genres, and forms including fiction (literary, mystery, and science fiction), political monographs, writing guides including Elements of Fiction, a memoir in paintings, and a young adult novel called 47. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages,
Walter Mosley was born on this date in 1952. He is a Black novelist best known for his crime fiction.
Mosley grew up in the Watts and Pico-Fairfield districts of Los Angeles, the only child of a mixed-race marriage. His father was a Black man from the Deep South, and his mother was a white Jewish woman whose parents immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe. Mosley’s racial and ethnic heritage provided him with a multifaceted understanding of prejudice and the importance of cultural tradition. He attended Goddard College, graduated from Johnson State College in Vermont in 1977, and became a computer programmer.
In 1982, he moved to New York City with his future wife, Joy Kellman, a white-Jewish woman. They were married five years later, in 1987. During this time, Mosley rekindled his love of reading and writing, which reached a peak when he read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. He stopped working to attend the City College of New York and devoted his life to being an author.
.
Mosley won numerous awards, including the Anisfield Wolf Award, an honor given to works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America. He was a finalist for the NAACP Award in Fiction and won the 1996 Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Literary Award for RL’s Dream. He was an O. Henry Award winner in 1996 (for a Socrates Fortlow story). In 2005, the Sundance Institute gave him a “Risktaker Award” for his creative and activist efforts. In 2006, he was the first recipient of the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award for his young adult novel.
Mosley holds an honorary doctorate from City College of New York, is on the Board of Trustees for Goddard College, and has served on the National Book Awards’ board of directors.
Significance of the Study:
Devil in a Blue Dress
Easy Rawlins is a veteran of WWII, recently fired as a mechanic, and sort of stumbles into doing a job for a white man, DeWitt Albright, on the advise of a former boxer bartender, Joppy, to help pay the mortgage on his home. That’s the thing: Easy’s really proud of his little home. But that home becomes the scene of much violence that unfurls from this “job.” Seriously, three different people accost Easy at his home in one way or another, including the corrupt and racist police. What’s so interesting about the danger Easy faces from Albright, along with Frank Green, a knife-wielding Black gangster, Mouse, his best friend who is a sociopath, a child-molesting would-be mayor, and as it turns out, Joppy, is that the police are always going to be the real threat. Because they can arrest Easy, for whatever. They can accost him. They can threaten and beat him. And it doesn’t matter because he’s Black and they’re the police with all the power. The real power.
The “job” is to find the “devil in the blue dress,” Daphne, a white girl (who turns out to be light-skinned Black and the half-sister of Frank), who a rich white businessman is looking for because he loves her (and also, she and Frank absconded with $30,000, which in 2024 would be more than half a million dollars!). That takes Easy through all these aforementioned other devils, where he gets walloped and interrogated and has to bargain Mouse down from killing everyone. Joppy made a bit of a fool of Easy, and was the one killing everyone on behalf of Albright who “contracted” Easy for the job in the first place.
Naturally, it wouldn’t be a hardboiled book if Easy didn’t get some loving in with a couple women, including Daphne herself, who leaves because she doesn’t want Easy to fall for someone who doesn’t exist, aka this persona she’s crafted separate from her real identity.
Mosley’s violent, sensual, and fast-paced quasi-detective story (I only qualify detective because this is the origin story of how Rawlins becomes a detective) is a fun romp through the mean streets of 1940s LA, and he intersperses the action and crackling dialogue with introspective commentary about race, crime, and class, the most poignant of course being that if a Black man is killed, it’s relegated to the last pages of the newspapers, if reported at all, but if a white man is killed, that’s a crime.
Easy Rawlins is a veteran of WWII, recently fired as a mechanic, and sort of stumbles into doing a job for a white man, DeWitt Albright, on the advise of a former boxer bartender, Joppy, to help pay the mortgage on his home. That’s the thing: Easy’s really proud of his little home. But that home becomes the scene of much violence that unfurls from this “job.” Seriously, three different people accost Easy at his home in one way or another, including the corrupt and racist police. What’s so interesting about the danger Easy faces from Albright, along with Frank Green, a knife-wielding Black gangster, Mouse, his best friend who is a sociopath, a child-molesting would-be mayor, and as it turns out, Joppy, is that the police are always going to be the real threat. Because they can arrest Easy, for whatever. They can accost him. They can threaten and beat him. And it doesn’t matter because he’s Black and they’re the police with all the power. The real power.
The “job” is to find the “devil in the blue dress,” Daphne, a white girl (who turns out to be light-skinned Black and the half-sister of Frank), who a rich white businessman is looking for because he loves her (and also, she and Frank absconded with $30,000, which in 2024 would be more than half a million dollars!). That takes Easy through all these aforementioned other devils, where he gets walloped and interrogated and has to bargain Mouse down from killing everyone. Joppy made a bit of a fool of Easy, and was the one killing everyone on behalf of Albright who “contracted” Easy for the job in the first place.
Naturally, it wouldn’t be a hardboiled book if Easy didn’t get some loving in with a couple women, including Daphne herself, who leaves because she doesn’t want Easy to fall for someone who doesn’t exist, aka this persona she’s crafted separate from her real identity.
Mosley’s violent, sensual, and fast-paced quasi-detective story (I only qualify detective because this is the origin story of how Rawlins becomes a detective) is a fun romp through the mean streets of 1940s LA, and he intersperses the action and crackling dialogue with introspective commentary about race, crime, and class, the most poignant of course being that if a Black man is killed, it’s relegated to the last pages of the newspapers, if reported at all, but if a white man is killed, that’s a crime.
Overview of the Study:
Dark Searching and Discovery
In Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, just laid-off from his job, receives a surprising proposition. A man named DeWitt Albright wants him to find a woman known as Daphne Monet, a woman who frequents African American jazz clubs. Desperate for money, Easy, an African American World War II veteran, warily accepts the job, unknowingly stepping into a complex web of political intrigue and personal secrets.
Easy begins his search in the jazz clubs of Los Angeles, where he discovers that Daphne, a white woman with a preference for black culture, isn’t merely a missing person. She holds the key to a dangerous political mystery. Pursued by relentless corrupt cops, gangsters, and politicos, Easy quickly finds himself deeply entrenched in a world darker than he could have ever imagined.
A Walk through the Underworld
As Easy digs deeper, he uncovers Daphne’s connection to Todd Carter, a wealthy mayoral candidate, and her involvement in embezzlement activities. She has stolen a large sum of money that belongs to Carter’s campaign funds and vanished into thin air. Carter and his team are eager to retrieve the money and hush up the scandal without attracting the attention of law enforcement.
And then murders begin happening. Strangely, they are all linked to Easy who is increasingly finding it difficult to prove his innocence. As he wrestles with moral dilemmas, Easy also comes face to face with the racial inequalities prevalent in post-World War II Los Angeles, painting a vivid picture of the socio-political atmosphere of 1940s America.
Unraveling Truths and Redemption
The narrative takes a sharp turn when Daphne Monet is finally revealed to be Ruby Hanks, a mixed-race woman passing for white. She is also the sister of Frank Green, a dangerous man embroiled in the same murky political conspiracies as her. Cornered and determined, Easy takes matters into his own hands, intending to resolve the situation by himself.
With a raw and keen understanding of human nature and desperate survival instincts, Easy outsmarts his predators, secures the missing money, and unearths the shocking truth about Daphne/Ruby and Frank Green. He cleverly manipulates the situation to his advantage, ensuring his safety and setting himself up for a future as an independent and savvy business owner.
A Hard-Boiled Tale to Remember
In conclusion, Devil in a Blue Dress is an engaging hard-boiled mystery that explores racism, political corruption, and identity. Mosley’s story is gripping, gritty and, at the same time, a deep observation of racial and social dynamics in post-war Los Angeles.
The book showcases the transformation of an ordinary man thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Easy Rawlins, personifying the tough, street-smart detective, bridges the divide between the lawful and the lawless, surviving a dangerous labyrinth of lies and death to finally reclaim his life.
Who was Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins: The Character
EZEKIEL “EASY” RAWLINS, an unemployed black vet desperate to hang on to his small house, agrees to do a little private snooping for a local gangster, tracking down a woman, and soon discovers that he has a knack for the work. That memorable first appearance, 1990’s Devil in a Blue Dress, with its vivid sense of time and place, drew immediate and widespread praise.
Unlike some larger-than-life P.I.s, Easy is refreshingly human, even in sometimes disappointing ways. He’s a proud man trying to cope with the social injustices of his time, as well as his own personal demons and prejudices; and he doesn’t always do a great job of it. He can be cruel or petty and sometimes cowardly, and too easily led astray by temptations of the flesh. As well, his obsessions with acquiring wealth and privacy sometimes lead him into making poor decisions. Nor is he immune from racism himself. But his faults are tempered by his passion to rise above what has been pegged as his station in life and an innate sense of what’s right and especially what’s wrong.
His first step was to get an education. His second was to acquire property. So far, through the series, he’s managed to do both, but the price Easy has had to pay to hang on to what he’s got seems to be steadily rising. He knows — as a black man living in the last half of the twentieth century in the United States, and from his own experiences — how easiliy it can all be stripped away.
Still, by the second novel, A Red Death (1991), Easy’s obsession with real estate has paid off. He’s started to amass a fair share of property, including a few apartment buildings and a couple of houses. He’s uneasy (sorry) about his wealth, though, and afraid of drawing too much attention to himself, so he pretends to be a janitor, communicating with his tenants through an intermediate. Mind you, it’s the age of paranoia anyway — the Red Scare is in full bloom. And he’s elected himself the adoptive father of Jesus, the abandoned mute child he saved in Devil in a Blue Dress.
By White Butterfly (1992), set in 1956, Easy is still living in Watts, but has acquired a wife, Regina, and a baby daughter, Edna. Yet he can’t quite bring himself to tell Regina about his holdings, hiding his prosperity like a guilty secret — a secret that eventually breaks up the marriage. Regina leaves, taking Edna with her.
In Black Betty (1994), Easy has moved from Watts to West L.A. with his two (yes, he’s picked up another one) adopted children, Jesus and Feather, but trouble — in the form of racism and police harassment — still follows him as he’s hired to track down a woman he once knew.
By 1963, in A Little Yellow Dog (1996), Easy seems to have finally escaped the streets, having landed a job as a custodial supervisor at an all-black school, a safe, respectable job with a pension, and more importantly, a medical plan for Jesus and Feather. Not only is he doing well, but he’s managed to find jobs for both his old friend Mouse, and Mouse’s long-suffering mate, Etta Mae. But somehow, the streets manage, inevitably, to drag him back.
Mosley intends to bring the series right into the present, but he’s also apparently going to drag us along on some interesting detours, along the way. In 1997, he released Gone Fishin’, a prequel of sorts to the series, wherein Easy and Mouse go off on their first adventure. And in 2001, when the Washington Square Press began releasing new editions of the series, each included a bonus short story, which were subsequently collected and published as Six Easy Pieces (2003). The stories fill in many of the gaps between the novels and should really not be ignored by any fan of the series.
Since then, Rawlins has leaped from strength to strength, leapfrogging ahead in time. Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002) takes place in the early days of the civil rights movement, and features the return of Mouse (last seen laying stone cold dead in A Little Yellow Dog), Little Scarlet (2004) has Easy trying to solve a racially charged case in the aftermath of the Watts riots and Cinnamon Kiss (2005) has him working a case against the backdrop of the Summer of Love. And Blonde Faith (2007), purportedly the last book in the series, brought it all home, with Easy apparently heading straight into the black after driving over a cliff.
Or did it?
Six years later, Easy returned in Little Green (2013), which was shortly a year later by Rose Gold.
Being a Black man in 1940s Los Angeles isn’t so easy for Easy, Walter Mosley’s famed character in his hardboiled 1990 book, Devil in a Blue Dress. Hardboiled books are such a blast to read because they pulse with electricity and mood. The dialogue crackles. Particularly of note is how Mosley code-switches, if you will, between how Black characters talk and how white characters talk, and even how Easy talks depending on which race he’s talking to.