This month features Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress. |
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Sometimes you just have to rave.
I don't know when I last found myself in complete agreement with a quote on the back of a novel, but here's what The Guardian critic said: 'When I had finished reading A Little Yellow Dog, I went out and got all four of Walter Mosley's previous Easy Rawlins novels and read them straight through...'. I haven't got that far, yet; I've bought three more, and read one (Gone Fishin' - the first in the series).
Walter Mosley was a writer I came across as part of a recent crime fiction binge. I was feeling crap, and wanted something (pun not intended) easy. Easy, but not crap. In the Crime in Mind bookshop I asked for a recommendation, and they suggested The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke. It did the job, barely. In Murder Inc I randomly picked up Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers. Again, it was passable. (Although if the place names had been Stockport instead of Stockholm, Macclesfield instead of Malmo, it would all have seemed pretty dull.) Devil in a Blue Dress, however, had me from hello, and so I might as well quote the opening paragraph in full:
'I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar. It's not just that he was white but he wore an off-white linen suit and shirt with a Panama straw hat and bone shoes over flashing white silk socks. His skin was smooth and pale with just a few freckles. One lick of strawberry-blond hair escaped the band of this hat. He stopped in the doorway, filling it with his large frame, and surveyed the room with pale eyes; not a colour I'd ever seen in a man's eyes. When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly because I was used to white people by 1948.'
Walter Mosley, as this demonstrates, writes a beautifully controlled and detailed prose: 'bone shoes' - 'flashing white silk socks' - and 'pale' as a colour. It's almost dandyish, but only almost. It works with a fantastic efficiency, and is startling quite as often as it is smooth.
Easy Rawlins, who is the narrator of the series, has a very tender way of describing an incredibly violent world - underworld. Devil in a Blue Dress, without wishing to give away too much, tells the story of how Easy comes to be a private detective. It's set in post-war L.A.; Easy has fought his way across Europe, first in segregated regiments, then in mixed. His relationship with the white society in America that he has returned to is knife-edge: one side is exploitation, the other indifference, and the edge itself is quick, brutal death.
The writer Mosley most reminds me of is James M. Cain. Devil in a Blue Dress has a similar plot complexity to Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice. But Mosley's characters are nowhere near as venal as Cain's - his world is definitely one capable of redemption. Apart from Easy himself, the most important recurring character in the series - and, to be honest, its star - is Easy's best friend/worst enemy Raymond Alexander, more commonly known as Mouse. He is likeable, ruthless, disgusting and tender. His truly murderous energy crackles up off the page like static electricity, lifting the hairs on your neck.
Although he wrote it first of all, Gone Fishin' was published after Devil in a Blue Dress, and so stands as a prequel. I'd still recommend you begin where I did, with Devil. If you get started soon enough, you can race me through the rest of Mosley's books.
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