Having finished Walter Mosley's DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, I
thought I'd better
make a few comments before the rest of you move on, leaving
me eating dust.
I enjoyed the book a lot, although there were a few
weaknesses, imho.
Nonetheless I was left feeling that I wanted to read more
Mosley.
Early on there were two things that struck me. Easy is
ruminating on the
differences between Houston and L.A. Easy's black community
in Houston had
time to sit on the porch and greet people as they walked by.
In L.A.
everyone is busy making money and had no time to barbecue.
After Easy meets
DeWitt Albright, he becomes uneasy (no pun intended). E is
not accustomed to
going into the white community except for his job at the
aircraft company.
There's the scene where Easy is going to DeWitt Albright's
house: "I wanted
to know what color the house was. I wanted to know what made
jets fly and
how long sharks lived. There was a lot I wanted to know
before I died." Good
stuff!
I was reminded of my own experience in going into the black
community in the
mid-60s. Rumor was that there was terrific southern cooking
at a place
called Mack's Island Cafe in the "Central Area," the 60s
euphemism for the
black community. I was working at Seattle Central Community
College at the
time and we had many black students and several black
teachers. So I felt
fairly comfortable with black people. I called the cafe and
asked if they
would welcome some white folks. They were most welcoming and
my wife and I
and another couple went for supper one evening. We were
treated like royalty
and the food was incredibly good. The folks seated around us
were pleasant
to us. As we left to go to our cars some other black people
saw us and
rather loudly wanted to know "Who said those white folks
could come down
here?" Well, here we go, I thought. Just then a black
foursome came out of
the cafe and headed off any trouble. "You boys just get on
out of here." So
I could feel just a little bit of what Easy must have felt a
lot. Things
have changed a lot since the 60s. There's a place in Tacoma
owned by some
black folks that we frequent that often has as many white
people as there
are blacks. Every time I'm there I ask the owner when she's
going to open a
place in Seattle.
Mosley is good at leaving us hanging for unusual lengths of
time. Early on
Coretta is killed and Easy is hauled in by the police and
grilled. Then it's
a long time before we hear anything about Coretta, except
that somewhere
late in the book Easy says that he now knows who killed
Coretta. How he
figured it out, I'll be darned if I know. I don't remember
any clues
pointing that way. Howard Green is another one. Brother to
Frank Green, the
provider of liquor, he's the driver for the perverted
ex-mayoral candidate,
Matthew Teran. He's last heard of around p.26 and not again
until p. 145. I
had to go back and skim through the book to remember who he
was. He probably
deserved it, though. He walked out on Billy Holiday. Now who
would walk out
on Lady Day?
I have a little trouble with Easy being saved by Mouse, not
once, but twice.
I recently had the same problem with Robert O. Greer's novel
about the black
bail bondsman and bounty hunter in Denver. Twice his
protagonist is saved
from incredible situations by someone else. Does anyone else
have this
problem? Or is it just me? The second time Mouse saved Easy I
was wroth,
wanting to know how the heck Mouse knew where Easy even was.
But within a
few pages he told me how it was that he knew and my blood
pressure subsided.
I'm still not certain how Easy figures out the involvement of
Junior Fornay
and Joppy.
Mouse is truly an amoral character. He shows no hesitancy is
shooting
people, once in the leg to let the victim know what's
happening and then for
real. And Easy's comment about the murder victims is telling:
"the paper
hardly ever reported a Negro murder. And when they did it was
way in the
back pages." This certainly doesn't seem to be the way it is
any longer.
This was a good choice for reading and I'm probably the last
mystery reader
in the world who had not read Mosley. I enjoyed it.
I have to tell you. You folks have mentioned so many writers
new to me that
it may be a long while before I get back to Mosley. But
that's all right.
Keep 'em coming.
Cheers, Frank
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