This transforms them into a statement powerful enough to keep Easy in LA to solve his troubles. He finely chops up the prose to isolate these two sentences. Mosley makes it a paragraph all on its own.

My beautiful home.” This sentence would be lame if it sat inside a whole paragraph. When Easy’s friend Odell tells him he should get out of town, Easy’s response is “I looked at my house. Until I read Devil in a Blue Dress, I didn’t think paragraph breaks could be used to create so much meaning. Devil in a Blue Dress has a mastery of prose that his predecessors didn’t. Easy isn’t a detective in the novel’s beginning but Mosley writes like the men who invented the hardboiled detective.īut Mosley’s also an improvement. In the USA before Dr King has come, Easy has “spent five years with white men, and women, from Africa to Italy, through Paris, and into the Fatherland itself.” “I ate with them and slept with them,” Easy will tell you, “and I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know that they were just as afraid to die as I.” I didn’t know there was anyone who could fire off words like these on this side of the 1950s. His hero, Easy Rawlins, is as tough as any of them. He offers everything there is to love in the classic hardboiled stories of Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, and Mike Hammer.

Mosley’s novel is a tale of a “black” man in Chandler’s LA. I’m a lover of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, and when I read Mosley’s debut, I was walking down those same gritty streets that I love but with a guide who knew tricks the old masters didn’t.

I have read Devil in a Blue Dress which is his very first novel. I haven’t read Walter Mosley’s latest novel, Everyman a King.

Devil in a blue dress book review