Devil in a Blue Dress

1. Devil in a Blue Dress By, Walter Mosley

2. About the Author Walter Mosley • Born January 12, 1952 in Los Angeles. • His mother was Jewish and immigrated from Russia. His father was an African American from Louisiana. • His parents tried to marry in 1951 and though the union was legal, no one would give them a marriage license. • Growing up Mosley was an only child and credits his writing imagination to “an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies.” • Mosley attended a private African-American elementary school, Victory Baptist day school. The school strongly valued education on black history. • Mosley attended Goddard College, a liberal arts college in Plainfield, Vermont but dropped out and later earned a political science degree at Johnson State College.

3. Walter Mosley’s Career • Mosley started writing at age 34 and is still writing to this day. • He often publishes 2 books a year and his work has been translated into 21 different languages. • He has 11 books in the Easy Rawlins series, 3 in the Fearless Jones series, 4 in the Leonid McGill series, 5 science fiction novels, 3 Socrates Fortlow books, 1 young adult novel, 6 other novels, 2 erotica, 5 non-fiction books, and 1 graphic novel. • 1 movie and 2 TV series have come from his works. • Mosley has received multiple honors including; The Anisfield Wolf Award (for works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America), finalist for the NAACP Award in Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Literary Award, O. Henry Award, “Risktaker Award” from the Sundance Institute, Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award, and an honorary doctorate from the City College of New York. • Mosley is the past president of the Mystery Writers of America, a member of the executive board of the PEN American Center as well as the National Book Foundation. And he also serves on PEN's Open Book Committee, a group working to increase the presence of African Americans and others in the publishing community.

4. About the Detective Easy Rawlins • Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. • Easy is a very proud man, he is passionate and very determined. And throughout the novel you see it develop even more in him. • Easy is frequently affected by racism and often finds himself fighting stereotypes and fighting for respect.

5. 1948 Los Angeles • Known as “L.A.’s most dangerous year” • Mounting tensions in the public and the media due to crimes like The Black Dahlia, which occurred just a year earlier. • Las Angeles was expanding really fast. The sign “Hollywoodland” was actually a housing development marketing campaign. • D.W. Griffith (Birth of a Nation) died that year, assuring that racism was on the minds of the public.

6. Summary • Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. A WWII veteran who has recently lost his job at an airplane factory. The book opens with him scanning the classified ads in the paper, looking for a job that will help him pay his mortgage to keep his house. • Easy is introduced to DeWitt Albright by a mutual friend, Joppy. DeWitt offers Easy some money to find a missing woman, Daphne Monet, a white woman. Easy takes the job and learns that Daphne has been seen in a bar frequented mostly by black people. • Easy goes to the bar and talks to the doorman, Junior. Junior tells him that a mutual acquaintance of theirs was murdered for working for a man named Matthew Teran. Easy spends the evening asking if anyone has seen a white woman in the bar recently. He meets up with his friends, Dupree and Coretta, whom he spends the evening with drinking. Later, after taking Dupree home because he’s too drunk to get there on his own, Coretta tells Easy that she knows Daphne and that they’re friends. • The next morning Easy comes back home to find a letter from his old friend, Mouse, who writes telling him that he wants to move to Las Angeles. Easy doesn’t necessarily like this prospect, because he is haunted by the fact that he helped cover up a couple of murders that Mouse committed.

7. Summary • After coming home from a meeting with his old boss, Easy is met by two policemen who are waiting for him. They arrest him and exercise police brutality, accusing him of murdering Coretta, whom he had spent the evening with. Unable to pin anything on him, they let him go. As he walks home from the station, he is picked up in a car by Matthew Teran, a former mayoral candidate and employer of Easy’s murdered acquaintance. Teran is in a car with a Mexican, child sex-slave and tells Easy that he too is looking for Daphne. He tells Easy to keep him apprised of his search. • Later that night, Junior calls Easy and tells him that he had seen Daphne with a gangster, Frank Green, at the bar a week ago. And not too long afterwards, Easy gets a call from Daphne herself. • Easy and Daphne meet and it turns out that she wants a ride to visit a man named Richard. When they get there they discover that Richard was murdered and in her anger, Daphne drives off in Richard’s car. Easy recognizes Richard as a drunk that hung outside the bar on the night he went searching for Daphne. On Richard’s floor, Easy notices a cigarette butt of a brand that Junior smokes often.

8. Summary • After driving home, Easy finds DeWitt Albright and his goons in his home. They try intimidating him into telling them where Daphne is. DeWitt gives Easy a tip to visit a man named Carter, who happens to be in love with Daphne. Before he heads over there, Easy sends a message to Mouse to meet him in LA. Carter tells Easy that Daphne ran away because someone was using knowledge about her to blackmail him. She took $30,000 of Carter’s money with her but all he wants is her back. He offers Easy a thousand dollars to find and bring home Daphne. • Easy spends the day looking for Daphne’s gangster, Frank Green by checking all the bars in town. Frank is a bootlegger and while he’s searching, Easy goes to Joppy—his mutual friend with DeWitt—and accuses him of giving Daphne his phone number. • When he returns home, Easy is ambushed by Frank Green who corners him at knifepoint and is about to kill him when Mouse shows up and stops him. Frank runs away and Mouse and Easy agree to help each other get to the bottom of this. On their way out the house the policemen come back and again accuse Easy of murder, this time of Matthew Teran, who has been shot in the heart, because they know about Teran’s meeting with Easy. After fingerprinting him they let him go. • Mouse and Easy go to Junior the doorman’s house and get a confession from him for murdering Richard, and then they go to Dupree’s house who has been accosted by the police because of his connection to Coretta, who was murdered. Mouse and Dupree get drunk and fall asleep and Easy takes one of Mouse’s guns and go off looking for Daphne.

9. Summary • He finds her at her motel and she tells him that Richard sold Teran his sex-slave, and that her lover Carter—who was running for mayor as well—blackmailed Teran with knowledge of the boy to drop out of the race. She also reveals that Joppy, whom she knew and asked for help to keep Howard Green, who tried to blackmail her, and Coretta who knew her whereabouts quiet, had murdered both of them. • When Easy takes Daphne to her friend’s house, he is knocked unconscious and later told that Joppy and DeWitt (who ultimately just wants the $30,000 that Daphne stole) have taken her. • Easy goes to DeWitt’s house and sees them interrogating Daphne. There’s a gun battle and in a lucky stroke, Mouse had put together where Easy was and came to help out. Mouse kills DeWitt and later Joppy who denies it when Mouse reveals that he found Frank Green murdered and accuses him. • On the way home Daphne confesses that she killed Matthew Teran, whom she begged to leave her alone. Teran was blackmailing her through Howard Green because she was half-black/half-white. Before she leaves town, Daphne splits the $30,000 with Mouse and Easy. • Easy meets with Carter one last time, which uses his political influence to exonerate him from the murders he’s accused of. He sends the police on Junior’s trail for the murder of Richard. • At the end of the book, Easy uses his money to become an private investigator and he goes on to have a very successful career.

10. Issues of Racism • Racism is the book’s largest theme. • “The white workers didn’t have a problem with that kind of treatment cause they didn’t come from a place where men were always called ‘boys…’ The Negro workers didn’t drink with Benny. We didn’t go to the same bars, we didn’t wink at the same girls.” (108) • “I’ve got the right to know where you’re taking me.” “You’ve got the right to fall and break your face, nigger. You got a right to die,” he said. Then he hit me in the diaphragm. When I doubled over he slipped the handcuffs on behind my back and together they dragged me to the car. They tossed in the back seat where I lay gagging. “You vomit on my carpet and I’ll feed it to you,” Mason called back. (114) • Because of racism Daphne was unable to stay and be married to the man she loved, mayor candidate Todd Carter. If people found out she had any trace of African American in her it would ruin his campaign.

11. Personal Connection • Walter Mosley’s previous experiences had a lot of impact on this novel and were portrayed through his detective Easy Rawlins. • For example his parents being denied a marriage license mirrors Daphne and Todd Carter’s forbidden relationship. • Walter Mosley’s upbringing in an all black school taught him to embrace and be proud of his race and we see that in Easy Rawlins’ character.