I’m thirty-three years late to the party but I’ve stumbled across Walter Mosley and met Easy Rawlins and now I have a strong noir series to come back to.

‘Devil In A Blue Dress’ has a classic noir setting that had previously only been populated in my imagination by white tough-guy gumshoes from Chanler or Hammet: Los Angeles in the late 1940s, Walter Mosley re-draw that landscape for me by letting me see it through Easy Rawlins’ eyes.

Easy Rawlins is a black veteran, originally from New Orleans, who we meet at the point when the life that he’s created for himself in LA, working in an aircraft factory, owning his own small house, hanging out in an illegal drinking where he listens to jazz and relaxes in his own sub-culture, has just been blown apart. He’s lost his job and he may lose his house if he doesn’t quickly make some money. Then temptation walks through the door. Here’s the opening paragraphs:

I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar. It’s not just that he was white but he wore an off-white linen suit and shirt with a Panama straw hat and bone shoes over flashing white silk socks. His skin was smooth and pale with just a few freckles. One lick of strawberry-blond hair escaped the band of his hat. He stopped in the doorway, filling it with his large frame, and surveyed the room with pale eyes; not a color I’d ever seen in a man’s eyes. When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly because I was used to white people by 1948.

I had spent five years with white men, and women, from Africa to Italy, through Paris, and into the Fatherland itself. I ate with them and slept with them, and I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know that they were just as afraid to die as I was.

I slipped straight into this story, even though the whole world was alien to me. Easy Rawlins is a wonderful narrator. I loved his comments on life and his reflections on his own actions. The world he lives in is vividly described and felt real to me.

This is a story that Rawlins is telling as he looks back on his own youth, to the man he was in 1948, living in an LA that has already changed. This allows him to reflect on how things used to be. Here’s an example that shows both the times and the mind of the man:

That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.

At one point in the story, the cops pick up Easy, beat him up and throw him in a cell overnight with no explanation. His reaction wasn’t the patient assurance of the invulnerable, wise-cracking white guy gumshoe. It was that of a black man surviving another instance of being powerless. Here’s how he describes his time in the cell:

All I did was sit in darkness, trying to become the darkness. I was awake but my thinking was like a dream. I dreamed in my wakefulness that I could become the darkness and slip out between the eroded cracks of that cell. If I was nighttime nobody could find me; no one would even know I was missing. I saw faces in the darkness; beautiful women and feasts of ham and pie. It’s only now that I realize how lonely and hungry I was then. 

The plot has the typical Noir mix of sleaze and violence except, this isn’t a tough PI navigating the demimonde like a predator on the hunt. This violence and sleaze is happening in the world Easy Rawlins lives in and it’s being done to him and to the people around him for reasons he doesn’t understand and by people he is meeting for the first time. For the first half of the book, all Easy can do is stumble through as best he can.

The point when Easy stops bouncing around in the dark like a ball bearing in a pinball machine and starts independently to gather the information he needs to protect himself is beautifully captured. I could feel the man’s life transforming as he became both more himself and someone much tougher and harder-edged than he’d wanted to think of himself as being.

I like the plot, which caught me by surprise but what set ‘Devil In A Blue Dress‘ apart was getting to spend time in Easy Rawlln’s head. I’ll be back for more.

‘Devil In Blue Dress’ was Walter Mosley’s debut novel and is the first book in a fifteen-book series, the most recent of which was published in 2021.

In 1995, ‘Devil In A Blue Dress‘ was made into a movie starring Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle and Jennifer Beals. Here’s the trailer: