John Lennard, Walter Mosley: 'Devil in a Blue Dress'

Walter Mosley, a favourite author of President Bill Clinton, is the most important African-American writer of crime fiction since Chester B. Himes.

His novels chronicling the investigations of Easy Rawlins chart Californian history from 1948, echoing Chandler (and John D. MacDonald) while challenging Ellroy's L.A. Quartet. He has also written other crime and SF novels, Young Adult fiction, a memoir, and activist non-fiction, and is widely involved in cultural and educational projects promoting writing by people of colour.

THE BOOK

Devil in a Blue Dress is the first novel in Mosley's outstanding 'Easy' Rawlins series. The Notes provide an overview of Mosley's career and the series, give historical and literary backgrounds to the novel (including Chandler, Himes, Pinkerton Men and Private Eyes, Hollywood's Gumshoes, and the 'GI Bill'), and consider the film adaptation of Devil. Chapter by chapter Annotations detail allusions, slang, musical references, flora and fauna, and fashion, while disentangling Mosley's real and fictive Los Angeles. The Essay is 'In the Mortgage of his Skin', and uses Walcott's and Lamming's great phrase to ask about Easy's purest passion, the house that is his castle. The Bibliography covers all Mosley's work, with critical material on him and on (African-American) crime writing.

John Lennard

John Lennard is now Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (2002), and the Literature Insights Hamlet (2007). He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Genre Fiction Monographs series, and has written several Sightlines titles, as well as a critical collection, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (2007).