Devil in a Blue Dress is noir as social commentary. Walter Mosley’s 1990 novel centers on Easy Rawlins, a Black self-taught World War II veteran and homeowner whose work carries him between classes and across racial lines. His search for information about a missing woman, Daphne Monet, takes him through Los Angeles’s dissimilar and largely segregated neighborhoods, revealing power differentials in postwar California and the invisibility of non-white lives.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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In Mosley’s work, tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction exist to be turned upside down—they’re made deeper by the author’s understanding of history and racial tension. Mosley works within the confines of genre while simultaneously revealing how its depictions of L.A. traditionally ignore Black experiences. While Easy searches for Daphne, he employs a sophisticated understanding of the psychology of suspects and witnesses. But it’s clear from Mosley’s work that Easy is attuned to the subtleties of the human condition because as a Black man and former soldier in the late 1940s, he has to be.
Likewise, Easy must operate around the law. The police arrest and harass him, and he says to himself, “It’s hard acting innocent when you are but the cops know that you aren’t. They figure that you did something because that’s just the way cops think.” He may be released, but he never escapes suspicion.
Devil in a Blue Dress is a page-turner and a stellar first novel in a series, but it also cracks open the myths of L.A.•
Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is a regular contributor to Alta Journal and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, where she serves as fiction chair. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Elk Grove, California.
