Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

I’ve wanted to read this novel for some time. I’m always curious to read Los Angeles authors and novels set in Los Angeles. I loved reading Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels. Mosley’s private detective character Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins was said to continue the style. The book promised to be fun. I looked forward to the pleasure.

I put the book on hold at the library about a month ago and was frustrated that it seemed to be taking forever to come in. A second book I put on hold at the same time Prepare for Saints came in, I checked it out, read it. Still waiting. As I returned Prepare for Saints I ran into a friend who works at the library. We chatted and then I joked, “I have a complaint.” I told him about my long wait. He apologized and explained the problem. Devil in a Blue Dress is actually an extremely popular novel in Los Angeles, for all the same reasons I wanted to read it. In fact it was a designated as a “common-read” for the City of Los Angeles a few years ago. The library owns numerous copies because it’s often assigned to English literature courses, so the library shelves multiple-copy sets of the book in a separate, non-circulating section of the library. Apparently the copy I put on hold is the only copy they keep in the regular fiction department. My friend walked me over to the correct shelf and there were dozens of copies. He pulled one down for me. I canceled my hold request.

Though written in 1990, Devil in a Blue Dress is set in 1948. The lead character, Easy Rawlins, was born in Houston. He served in World War II, first with a desk job in North Africa, and then, not wanting to be called a coward, volunteered for active duty and fought in both D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge as well as being on site during the liberation of the death camps. Post-war he joined the black southern migration and came to Los Angeles. As the novel begins, he’s just lost his job working at an aircraft assembly plant in Santa Monica (I recognized it as McDonnell Douglas, though it’s called Champion in the novel. The factory was still standing when I was a kid in Santa Monica but long gone now). Easy is wondering how he’ll pay the mortgage for his little house in Watts. Walter Mosley himself was born in 1950 and the character seems more based on his father than himself. Born in Los Angeles, Mosley now lives, according to his website, in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

Out of work and needing money, Easy visits a bar in south Los Angeles run by his friend Joppy and shares some of his troubles. Joppy, an ex-boxer, introduces Easy to a man named DeWitt Albright who happens to be at the bar and has a little job for someone. Albright is looking for a white girl named Daphne Monet (misspelled on the back of the paperback I read as Daphne Money). Albright will pay for someone to tell him where he can find the girl. Easy takes the job and gets sucked into a complicated story that eventually leads him to a new career as a private detective.

The edition I read, from 2002 lists six Easy Rawlins novels. Mosley has written ten more since. I told Jim I sure hoped I didn’t like Devil in a Blue Dress too much because sixteen novels was a bigger assignment than I wanted to take on. Mosley has written more than sixty books total with other characters and some non-fiction, too. Fortunately, I didn’t like this one well enough to want any more.

The complicated story that Rawlins gets sucked into is very complicated, and sordid, and violent. There are dozens of named characters. The settings are bars and pool halls and two different whore houses. There are two different sex scenes with Easy and different women. It’s pulp fiction, not literature, the way Raymond Chandler manages to be both. The Los Angeles settings, Laurel Canyon, Santa Monica, downtown, Watts, Compton, are too vague to give that enjoyable sense of familiarity. Though set in 1948, the contemporary tone kept reminding me that it was written in 1990. I counted at least six people murdered. There are also flashbacks to earlier murders. Easy never kills anyone himself in the present story but he has memories of killing Germans in the war. He gets beat up by cops. He has a knife held to his throat that draws blood. At least two characters come off as sociopaths. There’s a subplot of child sex-trafficking. The story unfolds as mysteries often do with information being revealed in dibs and drabs and out of logical order. I started to lose track. And I started not to care.

Eventually the story leads to Daphne Monet being revealed as the ex-girlfriend of Todd Carter, a rich white man with connections to City Hall who wants her back, and the current girlfriend of a black gangster named Frank Green called “Knifehand” (one of the sociopath’s I mentioned). Daphne tells her own story of being sexually abused by her father back in New Orleans. She ends up with a suitcase full of $30,000 of Carter’s money, which ends up split three ways between her, and Easy, and a friend of Easy’s named Raymond Alexander, aka “Mouse” (the other sociopath). Easy uses his share to set himself up in the private detective business and already has two little jobs completed in the novel’s final pages.

As one character says of another in the book, “She came back down to Houston cause she say it’s too much up there in Hollywood. Man, you know I asked her what she mean by too much but she just say, “Too much!” And you know every time I hear that I get a kind of chill like maybe too much is just right for me.” (p. 91).

It’s not a bad book, if you like that sort of thing. For my taste though, it was too much.

To be complete, I should add that this edition of the novel includes an additional Easy Rawlins short story called, “The Crimson Stain”, which I actually liked better than the novel. Not so sordid or violent and Easy is a family man. It takes place several years later. Easy now has a woman, Bonnie, and two children: Feather is eight, Jesus is 17. He’s also working as a school custodian. I have a feeling that Jesus is the little boy who was being sex-trafficked in Devil in a Blue Dress, now being raised by Easy. The story concerns another holdover character, “Mouse” who Easy believes died a year earlier but may have been seen alive up in Richmond, California only a month ago. He starts investigating by looking for a woman named Etheline, who may have been with Mouse. The story starts at a whorehouse where Etheline worked, then leads to a church where both a young deacon and the married pastor were having affairs with Etheline. Etheline is murdered. Easy figures out who does it. But he doesn’t find the confirmation he’s looking for about whether Mouse is dead or alive (I’m guessing Mosley killed off the character in a previous novel and now wants to bring him back). The story ends with the words, “Read Six Easy Pieces for the conclusion”, which is the eighth novel in the Easy Rawlins series, so it’s not actually a stand alone story but a bit of promotion for the (then) next book to come out.