Devil In A Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

For a long time I stayed away from this book.  When it comes to series I am a completest – it doesn’t feel right to me to read a book out of order in a series and I mistakenly believed this was not the first Easy Rawlins book.  The Lit Flicks challenge made me look up the series and helped me get rid of a book that’s been in my To Be Read pile for years.

This detective novel is not for the faint of heart.  Murders, incest, pedophilia, racism and police brutality all find their way into the life of Easy Rawlins after he’s let go from his job at Champion Aircraft.  Easy is a veteran of World War II living in Los Angeles in 1948.  He’s got a mortgage to pay on a house he loves with no new source of income in sight.  An acquaintance of a friend asks him to locate a specific pretty young woman who was proving difficult to find. 

While parts of Easy’s world are violent, Mosley doesn’t shove that violence into the reader’s face.  Easy knows the status quo – he’s seen and heard a lot things even if he hasn’t experienced them firsthand – and this lets him wiggle off the hook when necessary or look the other way until something can be done about the injustice.

The writing is tight.  Characters that seem like they’re only there for color reappear when least expected.  No holes are left when the reader discovers who did what.  Cultural and character back story are given without reading like information dumps.  This won’t be the last work of Mosley’s I’ll read.  I only regret it took me this long to get around to it.