a book
Devil in a Blue Dress
Walter Mosley · 2002 · 263 pages
Devil in a Blue Dress, a defining novel in Walter Mosley’s bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series, was adapted into a TriStar Pictures film starring Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins and Don Cheadle as Mouse.
Set in the late 1940s, in the African-American community of Watts, Los Angeles, Devil in a Blue Dress follows Easy Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Monet, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.
Set in the late 1940s, in the African-American community of Watts, Los Angeles, Devil in a Blue Dress follows Easy Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Monet, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.
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Sa Cosby
“The book that made me want to be a writer was—again, too young, shouldn’t have been reading it—Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley. I read it and it made me realize, up until then I had been a fan of all kinds of mystery, horror, and sci-fi, and they were all white writers. You know: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, and all of that. And Ellery Queen (I love Ellery Queen). But reading Devil in a Blue Dress, it was the first book that I read that I realized that, you know what? I can tell a story about people who look like me. It may not be as good as Mr. Mosley’s book, but he showed me a pathway, showed me how to do it. I think my early work was a pastiche of Walter Mosley’s. His work showed me there was a way to do it, a way to talk about it, and you could get published, and that’s what made me want to get really serious about writing.”↗