Neck Deep in Troubles: Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress

A veteran of World War II, homeowner, working stiff at the Champion Aircraft plant in Santa Monica, Easy Rawlins had quite the colorful career and interests before he wound up as an unemployed man with mounting bills and dreads in the opening pages of Devil in a Blue Dress.

While he’s looking to make some money, he happens to find himself mixed up with the old, white friend of local bar owner Joppy. DeWitt Albright is on the trail of a white woman who has a penchant for African American distractions, and Easy could make some money if he’d be Albright’s eyes and ears in places where a white man just isn’t allowed. It seems a little shady, but Easy can use the cash, so he takes the job, asks around, and soon enough finds himself up to his neck in troubles.

Few people are who they seem to be. Albright is trouble, Joppy isn’t the friend Easy thinks, Daphne Money is not who she appears to be, the cops are not the bastions of justice, smiling and glad-handing politicians aren’t as friendly as they seem … The only person in LA that Easy can rely on is himself. And when things get too hot, he can always call back to Houston to bring a heap more trouble to LA in the form of Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, a charming, psychopathic, money hungry friend from the past.

But bringing him into play is like inviting a bull to protect your china shop from burglars.

So, Easy finds himself descending into some serious depths of mystery in post WWII Los Angeles, barely in control of a powder keg situation that’s gearing up to explode. And though it’s dangerous, the work is also more than a little intoxicating, since this is but the first of several jobs Easy will take as a detective …

Walter Mosley hit the scene with a big splash when he found a publisher for his first novel. The man has gone on to publish in a variety of genres, including science fiction, literary, and erotic romance, but he’s got a large number of mystery and suspense titles. Here at Considering Stories, we’ve gushed about the many-faceted joys to be found in Fearless Jones and its sequels Fear Itself and Fear of the Dark. The author’s career all started with one slim volume about this man, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, and every few years Mosley returns to tell another of that protagonist’s adventures. In 2021, the fifteenth novel in the series, Blood Grove, hit shelves. I suspect there were be more.

The prose is easy on the eyes, galloping along at a fair clip. This is not the sanded sentence fragments of late Ellroy or prime Vachss. There’s character to the first person narration and no fear of the telling touches and details. Mosley’s craft is surprisingly good for a first novel. The prose is damned near flawless, and the storytelling sensibilities is highly tuned.

The characters are sharply drawn. The violence is sudden and shocking, all the more visceral from the fact that it is understated. The different locations are all given rich textures and characteristics. Watts is quite different than the Santa Monica where Easy gets into trouble with some local white kids who mistake his conversation with a local girl as some kind of pick up. Mosley writes Los Angeles well, and he makes the historical details sing.

One of the lovelier touches of the book is Rawlins’ love for his house. It’s an affection tied to his past, sure, but it’s an ever present reminder of civilized society and peace, two qualities that the noir elements he gets embroiled in will always assault:

I loved going home. Maybe it was that I was raised on a sharecropper’s farm or that I never owned anything until I bought that house, but I loved my little home. There was an apple tree and an avocado in the front yard, surrounded by thick St. Augustine grass. At the side of the house I had a pomegranate tree that bore more than thirty fruit every season and a banana tree that never produced a thing. There were dahlias and wild roses in beds around the fence and African violets that I kept in a big jar on the front porch.

The house itself was small. Just a living room, a bedroom, and a kitchen. The bathroom didn’t even have a shower and the backyard was no larger than a child’s rubber pool. But that house meant more to me than any woman I ever knew. I loved her and I was jealous of her and if the bank sent the county marshal to take her from me I might have come at him with a rifle rather than to give her up.

Devil in a Blue Dress, Location 198

Consider how many words are allotted to that house and the emotions it evokes for our protagonist. It’s not just a house, it’s a person.

The book is also somewhat obsessed with sexual encounters. Easy has relations with two different women in the book, but sex is a subtext that bubbles into the main text quite often. This is noir that’s not afraid of the connections that arise between people, and while some readers might not appreciate the explicitness of the material, it’s never gratuitous. This is a world that is shaped by power, and that power manifests in many ways: money, violence, sex. These are all avenues toward power as well as the fruits of that particular weed. Los Angeles is inextricably tied to these three elements, and noir always involves the explicit exploitation of at least two of them. Mosley manages to make use of all three.

Of course, Mosley is no stranger to the uglier side of history. Just as in the Fearless Jones novels, he shines a light on the racial worldviews. The 1940s pre-dates a lot of equal rights work, so the era is rife with opportunities to show the disparaging gap between Black and white. Mosley has his share of outwardly racist characters, police detectives accustomed to playing “‘cops and nigger'” (Location 900), and situational incidents that tighten the screws. One of more subtle instances involves Easy’s former work at the Champion Airplane plant, specifically the reason he left it. Although there are several face-saving conversations about why Rawlins lost his job, the truth comes out that it was because of his manager Benito’s emotional strain mixed with a double standard for Black workers:

Once Champion designed a new aircraft, either for the air force or for one of the airlines, they had a few teams build them for a while to get out the kinks in construction. Benito’s team would, for instance, put together the left wing and move it on to another group in charge of assembly for the entire aircraft. But instead of assembling the plane, a group of experts would go over our work with a magnifying glass to make sure that the procedures they set up for production were good.

It was an important job and all the men were proud to be on it, but Benito was so high-strung that whenever we had a new project he’d turn sour.

That’s really why he fired me.

I was coming off a hard shift, we had two men out with the flu, and I was tired. Benny wanted us to stay longer just to check out our work but I didn’t want any of it. I was tired and I knew that anything I looked at would have gotten a passing grade, so I said that we should wait until morning. The men listened to me. I wasn’t a team leader but Benny relied on me to set an example for others because I was such a good worker. But that was just a bad day. I needed sleep to do the job right and Benny didn’t trust me enough to hear that.

He told me that I had to work hard if I wanted to get the promotion we’d talked about; a promotion that would put me just a grade below Dupree.

I told him that I worked hard every day.

A job in a factory is an awful lot like working on a plantation in the South. The bosses see all the workers like they’re children, and everyone knows how lazy children are. So Benny thought he’d teach me a little something about responsibility because he was the boss and I was the child. The white workers didn’t have a problem with that kind of treatment because they didn’t come from a place where men were always called boys.

The white worker would have just said, “Sure, Benny, you called it right, but damn if I can see straight right now.” And Benny would have understood that. He would have laughed and realized how pushy he was being and offered to take Mr. Davenport, or whoever, out to drink a beer. But the Negro workers didn’t drink with Benny. We didn’t go to the same bars, we didn’t wink at the same girls.

What I should have done, if I wanted my job, was to stay, like he asked, and then come back early the next day to recheck the work. If I had told Benny I couldn’t see straight he would have told me to buy glasses.

Devil in a Blue Dress, Location 806

Devil in a Blue Dress is a terrific novel, a beautifully crafted narrative sliced from an ugly period in history with a believable hero as its protagonist. It is a first novel, and yet it has a careful control of its craft, some terrific asides, and a propulsive plot, as well as colorfully drawn characters.

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Devil in a Blue Dress is available in eBook, paperback, and audiobook editions.

Next week, we will take a look at John D. MacDonald’s suspense classic Cape Fear as well as the Robert Mitchum/Gregory Peck film that came from it. The book is available in eBook, paperback, and audiobook editions. The film is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD.

WORKS CITED

Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. W.W. Norton. New York: 1990.

“Neck Deep in Troubles: Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress” is copyright © 2022 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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