Devil in a Blue Dress

⚖The case for it

Easy Rawlins has lost his defence-plant job and is short on the mortgage when a white man in a linen suit offers him money to find a woman, which is how a man becomes a detective without ever deciding to. Mosley writes 1948 Watts as a place rather than a backdrop, with “world building so well described I could taste it.” Easy’s diction shifts depending on who he is talking to, and readers say “the dialogue crackles” hardest when he is across a table from a white man. The prose is “soulful and effortless.” Under three hundred pages, finished in a night.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The back half piles up bodies and motives faster than it explains them, and “the plot itself became messy and convoluted” is the common report. Things happen to Easy rather than Easy driving them, so one critic finds “a bit too much stasis for me” where an investigation should be. The women, including the one he is hired to find, are written to be looked at rather than known, and one scene draws the flat verdict “horrid sex scene.” The central reveal underwhelms after all that. “Couldn’t understand the hype around it.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings