Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)
by Walter Mosley
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Book Summary Information
Author: Walter MosleyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-09-17
ISBN: 0743451791
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Book Reviews of Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)
Book Review: How Easy got going
Summary: 5 Stars
I'd been advised by another Amazon reviewer to read the Easy Rawlins series, so here I am at the beginning. And now I have that happy glow you get when you discover a very fine writer, and you know there's lots of good reading ahead.
Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins doesn't like to kill people, but he learned how to do it in the War. He also got used to being around white people. This story opens in 1948.
Easy doesn't know he's destined to become a private investigator. His first case is thrust on him by a scary white man with dead eyes who pays him to find a beautiful young white woman named Daphne Monet. Daphne likes jazz and the company of black people. The white man who wants her found can't go where she goes.
A lot of people die while Easy figures out what's going on. He himself narrowly avoids shooting anyone - or getting killed himself. He has a friend called Mouse who watches his back, which helps. But even Easy has to step softly around Mouse, who carries several guns and has a very short fuse.
There are two unforgettable lovemaking scenes in this book, funny and poignant rather than salacious. And there are many scenes of wonderful dialog between touchy males who just barely avoid going into attack mode. The quality of Mosley's prose is indescribably delicious, even when all hell is breaking loose.
Summary of Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)
Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. 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 Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs....Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins has few illusions about the world--at least not about the world of a young black veteran in the late 1940s in Southern California. His stint in the Army didn't do anything to dissuade him from his belief that justice doesn't come cheap, especially for men like him. "I thought there might be some justice for a black man if he had money to grease it," Easy says. Fired from his job on the line at an aircraft plant, he's in danger of losing his home, symbol of his tenuous hold on middle class status. That's a good enough reason to accept a white man's offer to pay him for finding a beautiful, mysterious Frenchwoman named Daphne Monet, last seen in the company of a well-known gangster. Easy's search takes the reader to an L.A. few writers have shown us before--the mean streets of South Central, the after-hours joints in dirty basement clubs, the cheap hotels and furnished rooms, the places people go when they don't want to be found. Evocative of a past time, and told in a style that's reminiscent of Hammet and Chandler, yet uniquely his own, Mosley's depiction of an inherently decent man in a violent world of intrigue and corruption rang up big sales when it was published in 1990 (although the movie version, with Denzel Washington as Easy, never found the audience it deserved). The minor characters are deftly and brilliantly developed, especially Mouse, who saves Easy's life even as he draws him deeper into the mystery of Daphne Monet. Like many of Mosley's characters, Mouse makes a return appearance in the succeeding Easy Rawlins mysteries, such as A Red Death, Black Betty, and White Butterfly, every one of which is as good as Devil in a Blue Dress, his first. --Jane Adams
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