Walter Mosley, Devil In a Blue Dress
Walter Mosley’s debut novel contains multiple dense allusions to prior genre fiction, particularly Dashiell Hammet’s legendary Maltese Falcon. Like Sam Spade, Easy Rawlins gets roped into a case he needs, but doesn’t necessarily want. He must work with a woman who lies as quickly as breathing, and a man who kills because he sees no reason why he shouldn’t. But Rawlins has the added complication of being Black in the years after World War II.
Newly laid off, Rawlins accepts a private investigation job for which he’s not particularly qualified, and also unlicensed, because his house payment is coming due. Like thousands of Black veterans, Rawlins served with distinction during the war, and grew accustomed to being treated with respect. He wasn’t prepared for renewed discrimination. He certainly wasn’t ready for California racism, which he thought he’d escaped when he left his crime-ridden Houston childhood. Apparently bigots are bigots everywhere.
Turns out his target, Daphne Monet, doesn’t want found. When Rawlins tries directly asking the right people whether they’ve seen her, good friends suddenly turn evasive. For a White woman in segregated California, she certainly seems to have plenty of Black allies. But to Rawlins’ shock, the people he questions start turning up dead. The police believe he’s the last one to see them alive. Rawlins faces interrogation at the blunt end of a fist.
To make matters worse, Rawlins’ White employer turns out to be a psychopath. DeWitt Albright keeps a long-bore pistol inside his slick suit, and points it at whoever earns his displeasure. Of all the White people Rawlins works with, Albright might be the least racist, since skin color doesn’t bother him when killing time rolls around. Rawlins must work quick-time to avoid Albright’s wrath, which isn’t easy once Albright decides Rawlins is already dealing dirty.
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| Walter Mosley |
Trapped between a working-class Black community closing ranks against him, and a White city demanding results at any cost, Rawlins teaches himself detective work on-the-job. He discovers how to ask questions which don’t directly bear on Daphne Monet, but which cause others to reveal truths about themselves. He uses his employer’s advance to buy drinks for working-class people desperate to make their days go away; in return they oblige him with sudden welters of information.
The longer his investigation continues, the more Rawlins despises his community. Like him, many Los Angeles Black people moved west, thinking they’d escape poverty and bigotry wherever they fled (a remarkable number apparently grew up with him in Houston). But they moved in such numbers that Los Angeles didn’t expect them, or the cultural change they hastened; racism followed them west, and with it, a closed, guarded attitude about intruders asking questions. Even Black intruders.
Rawlins proves resistant to one tool that might loosen tongues: he won’t exercise violence against fellow Blacks. He fled Houston trying to escape the pain poor blacks push on one another. To his horror, his childhood friend Mouse follows him to California; only Mouse has a pistol as big as DeWitt Albright’s. Rawlins finds himself caught between two killers he has to appease, even though he knows either one will destroy him if they choose.
Mosley uses the tropes of crime drama with comfortable panache; mystery fans will recognize the tropes he uses, like the jaded antihero, the femme fatale, and the truth worse than ignorance. But he repurposes these tropes to tell a story about people born down, and kept down by a system that judges them from birth. Easy Rawlins didn’t earn cynicism, he had cynicism thrust upon him. And he’s ready to thrust it back on us.
On a related topic:
Small Town Murder in Black and White
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