Devil in a Blue Dress
Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress is a classic noir detective story set in 1940s LA (the height of the genre)...but there's a twist: the amateur detective is a black man. You might not have ever thought about the fact that detective stories of this type tend to have few characters of colour, if any, and they certainly don't tend to fill the role of detective. For the classic novels, which were actually written in the '40s, this is not surprising as racism was still quite strong in America (and other places) at that time. This is a really smart move on Mosley's part because it works well with certain elements of the genre, while creating a poignant commentary on both the genre and the era when things don't match, and even when they do. Easy Rawlins, our detective, like so many of the others is a World War II veteran struggling to find work. This is a common theme in works of fiction written after each of the World Wars because women were having to fill jo