Devil in a Blue Dress -- Walter Mosley

There are a lot of popular authors I’ve never gotten around to reading, and until now Walter Mosley was one of them. But I just read DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, the first novel in Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, and liked it quite a bit.

The plot, with its missing girl, corrupt politicians, brutal cops, dangerous gangsters, and bodies dropping like flies, is pure hardboiled private eye stuff, going all the way back to BLACK MASK in the Twenties. Easy even gets hit over the head and knocked out a time or two, a classic ingredient of private eye fiction. The late Forties setting appeals to me, too. Contemporary PI novels are fine, but having grown up reading the stuff that was actually written in the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, that era really resonates for me. Of course, Mosley’s Los Angeles isn’t exactly the same as, say, Raymond Chandler’s . . . but they overlap in places.

The only elements of, shall we say, post-Parker PI fiction are the psychotic sidekick and the more graphic sex scenes, but Mosley doesn’t let them overwhelm the other stuff, at least in this book. I think the plot all ties together okay, but I’m not sure; it’s awfully complicated. But Chandler didn’t know who murdered the chauffeur, either. I enjoyed DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS enough that I’ll definitely read the next book in the series and see how it goes.