Rating: 
Summary: Somewhat overwritten, but I've seen much worse.
Review: Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (Pocket, 1990)Walter Mosley's first novel featuring detective Easy Rawlins is a good one; the characters are well-drawn, the plot is solid, the pace fast. This is good beach reading; quick, easy, digestible. Mosley's style grates on the nerves now and again, especially when the exclamation points rear their ugly heads in inappropriate places, but that's ultimately forgivable in the greater scheme of things. Worth a look for mystery fans who haven't yet been introduced to Mosley. ***
Rating: 
Summary: An 'Easy' Life
Review: What could possibly be so difficult in the life of a man named Easy? The implication would be nothing at all. But as we quickly find out in Walter Mosley's Devil In A Blue Dress, Ezekiel Rawlins, known as Easy, certainly encounters difficulty after difficulty. Mosley writes a novel centered around the social and political issues of racism in the late 1940's. Easy, a black man in LA, is just trying to make an honest living to keep the one thing that means the most to him, his home. For Easy, being a homeowner is a type of security not found elsewhere within the white American society in which he lives. Once he is laid off, Easy's only concern is getting money for his next mortgage payment. Thus, the white businessman/con-artist Dewitt Albright enters the scene offering Easy some 'easy' money for simply locating a white woman within the black district of LA. Very soon, Easy finds himself embroiled in a complicated investigation involving deception and murder. Yet, it is Ezekiel's nickname that clues the reader into an understanding of how this protagonist negotiates problem after problem thrust upon him in this novel. For very soon, it is evident that Mosley has given his character the fluidity needed within his personality to encounter these obstacles. Easy is the type of man who takes each day as it comes, an ability certainly developed from his experiences in the war. In this way, Easy insures his survival as he moves with grace and flexibility toward the end of his first case as detective. For shortly after resolving and un-entangling himself from this murder mystery, Easy decides to become a Private Investigator, a space that allows for his freedom to move within the socially restrictive society in which he lives.
Rating: 
Summary: Lot of fuss over nothing
Review: What is the fuss all about.
I picked this up ,read two thirds of it at one sitting.
It ain't much,believe me. Chandler won't be losing any long sleep over this.
It's a nice attempt at the genre but its all too bland vanilla. The plot is nowhere near as tangled as Chandlers but that just adds to the perception that its ordinary and dull.
He should have written this for the exercise it gave him and then binned it
The writing is OK , raises itself from time to time, but there is no edge, no madness, no surprise.
You just know there is a body in the house before they enter the house - its too predictable.
Rating:
Summary: Don't be fooled, this novel is not that great
Review: While most of the preceding critics of Mosley's mystery rave about this and that, my opinion on the literary merit rates about average. While it is an entertaining mystery to most, the underlying themes and syntax are suitable merely for the high school freshman. The main character, Easy Rawlins, virtuously overcomes the social injustices of racial prejudice blacks faced at the time while also noting similar bigotry against the WWII Jews. The mystery holds suspense but the plot line overall is not fully satisfying. Overall I was bored reading it, and the class discussions I participated in (I am a student at UCR) were less than lively. The part about this book that I hated most is that it portrays the white man in disgusting fashion. All the white characters Easy Rawlins meets are somehow seriously flawed. They are either homosexual, racist gangsters, filthy-rich love-crazed maniacs, teenage bigots, liquour store black market operators, etc. There is not a decent white man among them, and Easy's attitude of self-restraint, although admirable, further paints a dirty picture of the white man. Why can't there be at least one white man that has any admirable characteristics? It makes it seem like Mosely targeted a black audience rather than trying to appeal to all demographics.
Rating:
Summary: Don't be fooled, this novel is not that great
Review: While most of the preceding critics of Mosley's mystery rave about this and that, my opinion on the literary merit rates about average. While it is an entertaining mystery to most, the underlying themes and syntax are suitable merely for the high school freshman. The main character, Easy Rawlins, virtuously overcomes the social injustices of racial prejudice blacks faced at the time while also noting similar bigotry against the WWII Jews. The mystery holds suspense but the plot line overall is not fully satisfying. Overall I was bored reading it, and the class discussions I participated in (I am a student at UCR) were less than lively. The part about this book that I hated most is that it portrays the white man in disgusting fashion. All the white characters Easy Rawlins meets are somehow seriously flawed. They are either homosexual, racist gangsters, filthy-rich love-crazed maniacs, teenage bigots, liquour store black market operators, etc. There is not a decent white man among them, and Easy's attitude of self-restraint, although admirable, further paints a dirty picture of the white man. Why can't there be at least one white man that has any admirable characteristics? It makes it seem like Mosely targeted a black audience rather than trying to appeal to all demographics.
Rating:
Summary: An Unforgettable Debut
Review: With the debut of self-styled sleuth Easy Rawlins in Devil in A Blue Dress, Walter Mosley has fashioned a determined survivor. Easy's life is anything but, as each hazy post -World War 2 L.A. day brings a new wave of brutal physical and psychological challenges the likes of which are seldom approached on the other side of the tracks in Raymond Chandler's universe. Fired from his defense plant job and struggling to make the mortgage payments on his beloved, modest house, Easy soon finds himself in the employ of a mysterious fellow bar patron who wants him to find a missing blonde beauty. The subsequent search is an odyssey through both the black world of jazz clubs and bootleggers, and the white world of sterile, corrupt and ominous institutions. At heart the mystery is about race and all the complicated struggles that attend that issue. When justice is at best a sham, Easy and his friends and enemies must navigate in a murky moral realm where loyalty to one's friends and optimism of will are essential to survival. Easy's loyal but vicious friend Mouse, one of Mosley's most colorful characters, sums up the credo of their black world when he says to Easy, " You gotta have somebody at yo' back, man. That's just a lie them white men give bout makin' it on they own. They always got they backs covered." The strength of Devil in A Blue Dress is that it can tackle the knotty issue of race within the format of the fast-paced, entertaining crime fiction genre.
|
