Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Book 1) - Walter Mosley

Written by Walter Mosley
Read by George C. Simms
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Audio Renaissance 2002, Macmillan Audio
Running Time: 5 Hrs. 58 Min

Devil in a Blue Dress, a defining novel in Walter Mosley’s best-selling Easy Rawlins mystery series, was adapted into a TriStar Pictures film starring Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins and Don Cheadle as Mouse.

This jaunty crime novel, set in L.A. in 1948, introduces Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a recently laid-off mechanic who is young, black and–but for the need to meet the mortgage on his new house–a most reluctant sleuth. Easy hails originally from the tough Fifth Ward in Houston; he served his country, landing on the Normandy Beach. He knows racism firsthand and seeing too many white men in one day unnerves him.

Easy is drinking in a friend’s bar, wondering how he’ll meet his mortgage, when a businessman, Dewitt Albright 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. She also has $30,000 of someone else’s money.

Easy becomes entangled in a chain of events that takes him to bar after bar to meet a range of characters, most of whom are seeking their own advantages in the pursuit of Daphne. With bodies piling up, there is no turning back for Easy, as he is dogged by brutish white cops and a few “brothers” none too friendly.

The language is hard-boiled (“Somewhere between the foo young and the check I decided to cut my losses”) and the portrait of black city life gritty and real.

A reviewer thought that the first-person narrative, which hurtles along with improbable transitions and sketchy psychological portraits, leaves the reader winded rather than exhilarated at the book’s predictable conclusion

Originally from CD, each disk begins and ends with good jazz.