Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

Although this book was well written and very evocative of the era and place, I just couldn't get into it. I found the people were violent and alcoholic and even Easy Rawlins, who has some misgivings about the violence others commit, wasn't very likeable. The situation portrayed in the book reminded

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me a lot of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux mysteries, which I love, but Easy Rawlins is no Dave Robicheaux. I know this series has garnered praise but I don't think I will be reading any more.

The story is that Easy, who has just been fired from his job in an aeronautics factory, is hired by a man to find a beautiful young white woman. He manages to track her down as living with a black gangster and he reports that to the man who hired him. That should have been the end of story but then a couple of people who were peripherally involved are murdered and Easy decides he has to delve deeper. That's basically the story except that more people are killed before the end. Easy isn't the killer but he knows who is and he hides their identity. After I was done I felt like I would need a long hot bath.

Maybe the next person who reads this will like it better.

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Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

[Devil in a Blue Dress] is an Easy Rawlins murder 'n' mayhem novel by Walter Mosley. First published in 1990, the story is set in Los Angeles in 1948. Rawlins is young, single, a WWII vet, and a homeowner. After losing his job, Easy is anxious for any paying

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work, because he's got to pay his mortgage each month. An acquaintance who runs a speakeasy catering to blacks connects him with a pushy, vaguely threatening white man named DeWitt Albright. He is looking for an attractive young woman named Daphne Monet. Just tell me where she is, he says.

Easy's queries around the black neighborhoods and bars trigger mayhem galore. Folks are murdered, the police detain and mug Easy, and a variety of menacing figures abduct him from the street and appear in his house. They ALL are interested Miss Monet. Easy is uneasy, very uneasy. He's not even sure if he can trust any of his friends. Moreover, he learns that the girl is concealing $30,000. Hmmmm. Then she calls him.

The danger spikes when Easy's pal Mouse, a remorseless killer, shows up from Texas. More and more shifty characters charge in, wanting the girl, wanting the money. Quickly, the body count too spikes. Does it all work out? Of course it does.

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Debut novel by Walter Mosley. It's uneven (the plot is too convoluted) but I loved the atmosphere of the novel. It's almost like Raymond Chandler moved his action into black LA community. I am definitely going to read other his books.

Devil in a Blue Dress is Walter Mosley's first book and kicks off the Easy Rawlins series. Easy Rawlins is a black war WWII vet prone to flashbacks. In the beginning Devil in a Blue Dress he is fired from his defense plant job and doesn't know how he's going to pay the mortgage next month. By the

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second chapter Easy has been hired to locate a missing girlfriend, a devil in a blue dress as they say. Throughout the next 200 pages Easy faces his share of violence, sex, racism and mystery but in the end, discovers a new found career - private investigations.

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This detective novel is not for the faint of heart. Murders, incest, pedophilia, racism and police brutality all find their way into the life of Easy Rawlins after he’s let go from his job at Champion Aircraft. Easy is a veteran of World War II living in Los Angeles in 1948. He’s got a mortgage

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to pay on a house he loves with no new source of income in sight. An acquaintance of a friend asks him to locate a specific pretty young woman who was proving difficult to find.

While parts of Easy’s world are violent, Mosley doesn’t shove that violence into the reader’s face. Easy knows the status quo - he’s seen and heard a lot things even if he hasn’t experienced them firsthand - and this lets him wiggle off the hook when necessary or look the other way until something can be done about the injustice.

The writing is tight. Characters that seem like they’re only there for color reappear when least expected. No holes are left when the reader discovers who did what. Cultural and character back story are given without reading like information dumps. This won’t be the last work of Mosley’s I’ll read. I only regret it took me this long to get around to it.

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I like the atmosphere of this story; a good read.

Easy Rawlins, looking to become a respectable property owner, gets sucked into the underbelly of Los Angeles - a world of corruption and of people doing what they have to do to get by in a routinely segregated society. Clever, dense plotting and a vivid sense of place and time. Without having seen

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the movie adaptation, this was a very cinematic book, vivid with smell, touch and the soundtrack of the blues.

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"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"

This is a fantastic piece of noir, written in the modern day but set in the noir heyday of the late 40s it combines pitch perfect noirish tropes with extra frisson gained from modern

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sensibilities. This is a dark, violent and sexy tale, oh nothing gratuitous but nothing is hidden away either, no flirty subtext here.There's extra edginess from having a black protagonist in the 40s, the stakes seem much higher, racism is endemic and there's no such thing as a good cop. Mosley's writing is superb, I was right there in the 1940s rooting for Easy to get the bad guys, save himself from the cops and pay off his mortgage (Oh the contrast of this banality and crooks, speakeasy's and femme fatales is just delicious).

Ok I adore a good noir (they are so rare) so I may be a tad gushing but this is must for crime fans, in fact its well worth anyone's time, this is a great showcase for the genre.

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I’d never read a Walter Mosley book before, but this won’t be my last. Mosley’s Easy Rawlins inhabits a world I’ll never know – black Los Angeles, 1948. Rawlins might have gotten along OK with Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer -- this is tough, gritty territory, and Mosley’s dialogue and

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plotting are exceptionally fine. The story is convoluted enough to do Raymond Chandler proud, and the dialogue seems earthy and authentic. I understand now why Mosley has such an enthusiastic following.

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Mosley is notably in the hard-boiled detective tradition. His "Easy" Rawlins is a war veteran in 1948 Los Angeles, and there's plenty of dark, gritty atmosphere, beautiful women of doubtful virtue, corrupt cops and danger down every corner and a strong first person voice. Mosley can boast a smooth

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prose style with deft and evocative imagery.

Oh, and his protagonist is a bigot who says he hates white people, who calls his boss at the factory "a slaver" and who when he gets a chain letter "supposed that it was a white gang preying on the superstition of Southern Negroes." It could be argued Rawlins' racism is understandable--just about every white person in this story slips the N-word into their encounters with Rawlins--particularly the police detectives that pay him a visit. And yes, this is set in 1948 after all. But the relentlessly negative depiction of Whites wore on me so that about a third way through I'd had more than enough of Rawlins and I very much doubt I'll read another novel by Mosley.

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Easy Rawlins is an out of work guy who gets caught in a web of deceit and murder when he agrees to find a girl of dubious charecter. When he is harnessed by the police for suspected murder he decides to get to bottom of the matter with the help of his gangster friend.

The book gives us the plight

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of the black community in the fifties in Los Angeles. The author has captured the dialect beautifully and the book is fast paced.

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Amazing! This novel is about Easy Rawlings, a black former GI in 1948 L.A. who gets drawn into looking for a girl. The plot reminded me of Dashell Hammett, but the characters were purely Mosley's.

PLOT OR PREMISE:
Easy Rawlins lives in L.A., 1948. He's a black war veteran who just lost his job for mouthing off to the boss. Then a man comes along with an easy proposition: find a girl who was hanging out with the blacks at the jazz bars. While Easy needs the money to keep the little house he

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bought, he wants to know why the guy wants the girl found. Then he finds out others are looking too. Bodies pile up, having been worked over first, and the girl turns out to be connected to politics. While Easy finds the girl, it comes along with a lot of trouble from crooks, politicos, and cops who think he's good for one of the murders.
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WHAT I LIKED:
The story moves, the characters are interesting, and the descriptions of the settings are well-written enough to give the reader the feel of each place in the story.
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WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
The characters may be interesting but are not well-developed. This story definitely has the feel of the pulp mystery fiction of the 50s and 60s, with lots of action, but no depth to the main characters. I never particularly cared about Easy, although I like the parameters of the character.
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BOTTOM-LINE:
Smooth as silk
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DISCLOSURE:
I received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I am not personal friends with the author, nor do I follow him on social media.

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Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, a black WWII vet who has relocated from Houston to L.A., finds himself without a job; but with a mortgage to pay. Enter DeWitt Albright, a white man of suspect ethics who offers Easy a paying job: to locate Daphne Monet, a white woman who is known to frequent black jazz

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clubs; but who has disappeared with $30,000 in cash. The story is embroidered with black history, post war US history and, issues regarding race and prejudice. The writing is descriptive and nearly pedantic; but overall the plot is solid if without any real surprises.

Michael Boatman, noted TV actor (Pvt. Samuel Becket in "China Beach" and Carter Haywood on "Spin City" to name but two memorable roles) is the narrator of Devil in a Blue Dress. He does a good job of drawing up distinctive voices for the differing characters, both male and female and, using parenthetical interpretation to denote interior thought (versus spoken lines.) Overall, however, the narration lacks liveliness and shape. The narrator's evenness in tone and pace regardless of the scene renders the whole of the story neutered of tension or excitement.

Meh.


Redacted from the original blog review at dog eared copy, Devil in a Blue Dress; 03/29/2012

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Near-Chandler with more social consciousness. Mystery terrifically convoluted.

I believe Walter Mosley got quite a bit of buzz when he first published Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. I seem to recall that I began to read it at the time, but for some reason didn't get very far. Perhaps I just wasn't into noir fiction back then. A couple of years ago we listened to White

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Butterfly, another in the series, and enjoyed it very much. So when I saw this on Audible I couldn't resist giving it another try.

The narration, by Michael Boatman, adds immeasurably to my enjoyment. Boatman sounds just as I would imagine Easy does (the story is told in first person) and the voices he does for the other characters, including the women, are believable as well. Mosley himself has an excellent ear for dialect and dialog, and the combination of author and narration takes the listener to a completely different place -- in this case, Watts, Los Angeles, 1948.

Devil in a Blue Dress explains how Easy Rawlins went from working in an aircraft factory to being a private investigator. Easy is a black World War II veteran, originally from Houston, who has ended up in Watts and has bought a small house. He is so thrilled to own his own home that he even enjoys receiving junk mail, so when he loses his aircraft factory job because of a disagreement with the white foreman, his main concern is how to make his next mortgage payment. When his bartender friend introduces him to a mysterious white man who offers him $100 to search for a missing young woman, Easy takes on the job, despite some misgivings which turn out to be well-founded.

Although the plot is fascinatingly full of incident, the characterizations and setting are equally strong. Easy is a complicated man with simple desires which the world seems eager to thwart. The setting of LA in the 40s, legally integrated but still full of racism, adds to the tension of the story. Very highly recommended.

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It's 1948 in Los Angeles, and WWII vet Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is just trying to live a quiet life in the tiny house he's proud to be able to afford. Except he may not be able to afford it much longer, having recently been fired from his aircraft factory job. So when he's offered a couple of

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mortgage payments worth of cash to do a job for a friend's gangster buddy, he takes it. The task seems simple: go into a few bars and clubs of the kind where the white gangster would stick out too much, ask around about a certain woman the gangster is trying to find, and report back. Of course, it turns out to be nowhere near as simple as it sounds, and by the end there are quite a few dead bodies piling up.

The plot starts out slow and eventually gets convoluted enough that I probably should have had more sleep before reading it. It's not bad, but not by itself incredibly compelling. The novel has a lot of other things going for it, though: It's very smoothly written, in a simple style that hints at a lot going on underneath the surface. Easy himself also has a lot going on underneath the surface, and I found him increasingly interesting as the story went on. There's a good noir-ish atmosphere and it does a deft and effective job of conveying the desperation -- sometimes quiet, sometimes violent -- of being a black man in that particular time and place. (It occurs to me, somewhat shamefully, that I'm not sure I've read much of anything set in this particular time period that wasn't mostly about white people. The world Easy lives in is thus largely unfamiliar to me, and it really shouldn't be.)

This is the first in a series, and I'd say it's one I'm reasonably likely to continue with at some point. Although that brings me to one annoying feature of the edition of the book I have: It also includes a short story about Easy, which is fine, except that it's set decades later and included before the novel, rather than after it. Meaning that the a new reader like me gets a look at these characters' futures before even being properly introduced to them, which really does not seem to be doing it the right way around. Worse, the story ends with the instruction to "Read Six Easy Pieces for the conclusion." I mean... what? Did they give us an incomplete story?! As far as I can tell from using the "look inside" feature at Amazon, I think it probably is the entire story, and it does at least get as far as telling us whodunnit, even if it ends pretty abruptly afterward. Whether the piece is actually lacking its conclusion or not, though, this is just a crass and offensive bit of marketing. An excerpt from another book included in the back, clearly presented as a teaser is one thing, but this? Come on!

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Interesting step back in time with this mystery. Easy Rawlins is a black male in LA in the late 1940's. Recently fired from his job and in need of some quick cash to pay his $64 mortgage. He finds himself mixed up with a "fixer" of problems searching for a missing white woman in the black clubs.

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What ensues are a lot of bodies, twists and turns.

Entertaining but didn't knock my socks off. Wouldn't be opposed to listening to/reading another if it came along but probably won't go out of my way.

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Pretty good read! Easy Rawlins gets in a heap of trouble when he decides to look for a gal in the hard town of L.A.. He's a well written character, as are all of the supporting cast in this story, Mouse being one of my favorites. In the end, the title of the book lives up to the dame! It sho' ain't

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easy bein' Easy...

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Good setting and characterisation but too linear a plot

Devil in the Blue Dress is the first book in the Easy Rawlins series by Walter Mosley. In Los Angeles of the late 1940s, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a black war veteran, has just been fired from his job at a defense plant. He is in need of money to pay his mortgage (home ownership is essential to

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Easy’s identity). Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Monet, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs. Easy is not a professional detective, but he is smart, knows how to tape into his community and has the mental toughness to deal not only with the complex situation he finds himself drawn into , also the racism and violence of the times (though reading this I found that similar themes of police’s treatment of minorities continue today.) We meet a cast of characters, including an incredible violent friend of Easy’s from his childhood, Mouse. Surprisingly, I found this character rather appealing in a weird way—he is violent, but seems to have a sense of loyalty to his friends, particularly Easy. The style of this novel reminded me of the Phillip Marlowe books by Raymond Chandler—moody, convoluted, violent, and edgy; but unlike the PIs of your Easy changes as the novel moves forward. He starts out as a kind of desperate, fearful black man living in a racist white world. By the end of the novel, he has a sense of himself and his skill, he is confident and sees a path for himself where he can retain his dignity and self-worth. 4 out of 5 stars.

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I grew to really like the character of Easy. His growth and development throughout the story was the most appealing aspect of the book for me.

It is not really my cup of tea. I grew totally impatient with Daphne and wanted the book over half way through (and it is not a long book)

An incredible book. Mosley manages to channel Raymond Chandler while still retaining his own voice and dealing with some very different issues in a much more straightforward way.

GREAT. This is the first Easy Rawlins mystery and I have come late to the party. I am completely hooked. Wonderful dialogue. Plot moves fast. You want to read this in one sitting.