35 Years of Devil in a Blue Dress
04 Wednesday Jun 2025
DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS
Devil in a Blue Dress is celebrating its 35th anniversary. Walter Mosley’s bestseller broke new ground and was snapped up by Hollywood. It opened up whole new possibilities for Black writers.
But do either book or movie stand up to the test of time?
Gift
As it happens, a good friend and colleague recently gave me both the book and the Blu-ray disk. A thoughtful and generous gift.
I’d not read the book, but had seen the film when it came out and vaguely remembered liking it. It would be good to compare the two and see if my feelings might have changed.
Though my friend added, “If you don’t love Mouse’s entry in the movie, then we have little to discuss. Ever.”
High stakes!
Devil in Blue Dress
Devil in a Blue Dress was Walter Mosley’s first novel and introduces “Easy” Rawlins, African-American labourer turned detective, who would go on to star in a long series of successful noirs set from the 1940s to the 1960s.
In doing so, he allowed Mosley to open up areas of Black life in LA that hadn’t been explored with such honesty in fiction before.
Out of work, because he wouldn’t accept his white employer asking him to stay extra hours for no extra pay, Easy accepts a job from Albright, a dubious but well-connected white man, to look for a young white woman. Only (of course) it’s never as simple as that.
Soon people start turning up dead, Easy is an easy suspect for murder by the police, and now he has to prove his innocence.
He is helped by Mouse, who he knew in his hometown of Houston. But Mouse is trigger-happy and violent – only too keen to kill people himself. Easy is getting himself deeper and deeper in trouble.
Style and approach
I love the style and approach of both novel and film. Let’s start with the book.
Mosley first wrote about Rawlins in a novella called Gone Fishin’. However publishers didn’t believe there was a market for stories about Black men. Turning it into a crime novel did the trick.
It works. I thought the opening was great and I really enjoyed reading it. For much of the first half I thought it was brilliant. I admire the way Mosley has forged a whole new subgenre. I love the integration of the plot with the subculture of black LA. He’s making some important social statements, but doing it without forcing them down our throats.
Personal
Mosley’s depiction of racial injustice in the book is angry and very personal. It lifts the book out of its genre and gives it a social punch all of its own.
Then in the second half (very roughly) I found myself less involved. I was still enjoying it, but for some sections something wasn’t quite engaging me.
Looking back I feel that there were possibly three reasons. Don’t get me wrong, these are not massive failures, but they are possible reasons why I wasn’t quite as strongly moved as I thought I was going to be:
Issues
Although Easy is active throughout the story, most of his actions are reactions. I never feel that he gets the story by the throat in the way that (say) Jake Gittes does in Chinatown (my closest comparison for the moment).
I feel deeply involved with Gittes’ character and his situation in the way that I never quite do with Easy. It doesn’t help that other people are constantly walking in and solving Easy’s immediate problem – Mouse in particular.
Mosley does well to avoid Easy being passive, but too much is done for him by others for me to be grabbed by it.
Past and present
Continuing with the comparison, while Gittes has a past, I feel he’s grappling with the present. He’s developing. Mosley gives us tons of emotional character development for Easy, but most of it seems to be historical – his memories of killings, the war, etc. They somehow don’t quite feel as if they are challenging him in the present of the novel.
Easy’s only hope of redemption seems to reside entirely in owning his own home. But he already owns it. And we don’t feel a strong enough threat of him losing it. So there’s no real character movement here.
I’m not saying there’s none – Easy gets stronger and more willing to push back – but for me not quite enough.
The devil in a blue dress
Second, there were too many characters. As a result, I never felt there was a strong relationship to hook into. The strongest relationship was with Mouse. But that’s not a particularly positive one. And again for half the book it’s in the past.
Then there’s the femme fatale herself. The devil in the blue dress. But she wasn’t given enough time to develop properly.
Character after character appears and moves the plot along, but never stays long enough for the relationship to develop fully.
Relationships
I feel that relationships are the heart of a good story – Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity; Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard; Sam Spade, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Gutman and Cairo in The Maltese Falcon.
I think Mosley is aiming for Albright and his henchmen to have the same heft as Gutman and Cairo, but as soon as they begin to make an impact, we move on to others. There’s Mouse. Then a knife-wielding gangster Frank Green, a barman Joppy, someone called Dupree… the names begin to blur even now.
So, nothing to stop me enjoying the read tremendously, but not quite the punch I was expecting from the great opening.
So, what about the film?
As the movie started, I thought, Wow! This was going to be even better than the book.
Franklin’s done a great job of a difficult adaptation. It was fascinating to see how he solved some tricky expositional problems with flair. It looked and sounded great and zipped along.
Then it dipped.
I feel for the same reasons as the novel. And the ending was not as strong as the book. They dropped the last few scenes which added an extra twist and bite to the novel. Losing these left the ending of the movie a bit, well, meh!
Classic noir is tragic. It’s our modern equivalent of the Elizabethan tragedy. We do need that sense that Easy thinks he has no hope – then life raises a glimmer of hope – only to dash it at the end.
The book gives you a bit of that darkness. Though Easy survives (not much of a spoiler as he goes on for a whole series afterwards) you feel that he’s even more embittered by the world he lives in. The film ends on an upbeat – and that’s a different genre.
Mouse’s entrance
Oh, and Mouse’s entrance in the movie? The reaction to which my friendship depends?
It was good. But I saw it with the book fresh in my mind. So I was aware that a lot of the Mouse backstory that we got from the book had been squashed into a very brief flashback at the start. Likely that a movie audience might forget it.
Indeed, I was watching with my wife, who said, “Who’s that?” I had to explain that he had been referred to earlier. Would I have remembered without having read the book? It’s too late to know.
So, to sum up – I’m delighted to have read and watched both book and film. There was much I loved about the writing and directing. I think they are good. Even excellent at times. Well worth checking out, if you haven’t read/seen them before. Or even if you have. I wish they had been even better.
And my friend and I are still on speaking terms.
Read more
Devil in a Blue Dress (30th Anniversary Edition)
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