Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) – Walter Mosley

The trail after Chester Himes leads off in two different directions:

READ ON Walter Mosley, James Sallis, Richard Wright

One of those directions – the Richard Wright direction, which happens to be backwards on my trail – follows the path of the protest novel, namely If He Hollers Let Him Go. The other path is that of Himes' Coffin and Grave Digger crime stories and continues through Walter Mosley.

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Walter Mosley is best known for his Easy Rawlins crime novels (though he has gained a bit of notoriety recently for a foray into erotica). And indeed, that is the extent of Cult Fiction's recommendation:

MUST READ All the Easy Rawlins novels

Well, while I might read all of the Easy Rawlins novels one day, just one for the time being should be enough. The first in the series is Devil in a Blue Dress.

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Devil in a Blue Dress is a hardboiled crime novel in the fashion of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammet. And it hits all the buttons. The plot is based around a search for a femme fatale; a more clichéd plot you couldn't imagine. The book also features a client with a hidden objective, imminent violence, friends that turn out to be enemies, dangerous allies, a wealthy magnate in love with a woman below his station and an awful lot of action at nighttime, with a plot that hurtles along. As a hardboiled crime story it sticks to formula almost fanatically. The one notable distinction it has over the vast majority of other hardboiled novels is that the protagonist, Ezekial "Easy" Rawlins, is a struggling black man from Watts, LA.

And it really is quite a clever twist. With a black hero, the detective novel genre makes so much more sense. It is part of the cliché that the supporting characters look down on and try to bully the detective; an essential part of the plot is that the antagonists underestimate the detective. When this is done to Philip Marlowe, the supporting characters are acting out their arrogance. However, when Easy is treated as if he doesn't count, the characters are merely acting out the racism of the times (Devil in a Blue Dress is set in '40s USA). What the novel does then is claim hardboiled detective fiction as a black genre.