My friend suggested I read Walter Mosley’s Devil In A Blue Dress because my detective is a reluctant one, drawn into a web of intrigue. So, he’s not like your classic PI who has a system and a method. You expect a guy like that, a PI, to immediately stick his nose everywhere. But a reluctant detective needs to be converted to the cause: he has to have a series of turning points.
Devil In A Blue Dress, I read it all day: eating breakfast, lunch and dinner with the book in front of me. That’s the best kind of read.
Easy Rawlins is a negro ex-soldier, living in the semi-segregated world of fifties Los Angeles. His stomping grounds are the Crenshaw district—South Central where many years later the Watt’s riots will occur. He has just been fired. He has a mortgage to pay. He can go where no white man can. He is the perfect person for the job–and the novel, which illuminates a by-gone period in African American history.
Devil in a Blue Dress Book Cover
His turning points come when he realizes that he must fight back and get as much money as he can from the white men who are using him as a pawn in their dangerous game. It comes in the form of a voice that actually talks to him—a voice he always listens to. This voice came to him during the Great War, when he had to kill so many white men. It’s a voice that intrudes in the narrative. In art fiction, it would be considered crude. But it teaches an important lesson: there must be a motivation that directs the hero to act, moving him from submissive piece of flotsam floating in the ocean of life to great white shark.
I took a lot from Walter Mosley and I’m grateful for my friend who suggested I study this masterpiece debut novel. Mosley is a genius writer—such a sense of voice, cadence and rhythm. I loved the way he describes a Los Angeles that only a native can know. I wonder if a voice ever came into his head and said: “Walt, you’re gonna write a novel so stunning that people are going to take their meals with your book parked in front of their pieholes.”