ABSTRACT
Walter Mosley’s debut novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), borrows the topoi of traditional hard-boiled fiction and reformulates them through African American culture and values. Mosley’s central character, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, is an African American World War II veteran reluctantly drawn into the gumshoe business and repeatedly sucked into a maelstrom of murders, politics, and scandals always related to issues of race. Set in a 1948 Los Angeles steeped in racism, the novel features African American characters’ responses to their hostile environment. While the virtuous Easy Rawlins uses his wits and sangfroid to subvert the city’s power structure, develop his detective skills, and foster his aspirations toward an uneventful middle-class existence, his homicidal childhood friend Raymond “Mouse” Alexander is more confrontational and expresses his alienation with a devastating do-or-die approach to a system he deems unjust and racist. Strikingly, Mouse’s self-justification for his violence echoes that of DeWitt Albright, the dangerous white gangster who hires Easy to track the whereabouts of Daphne Monet. Although Mouse sees the world in black and white and Albright in terms of rich and poor, they both resort to a discourse of oppression to vindicate their criminal activities and present their thirst for wealth and power as a natural outcome of the free-market economy and the corrupt society that spawned them.
