Hamburg Noir

HISTORY

Devil in a Blue Dress

Book
Devil in a Blue Dress (Walter Mosley, 1990)

Film
Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995)

Half a century after The Big Sleep hit theaters, Walter Mosley wrote a Chandleresque novel set in 1948. Denzel Washington did the rest.

The year it was first published, Walter Mosley’s first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, was listed as one of “The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time” by the Crime Writers Association. This is amazing, especially for an author who began writing at age thirty-four. His first time at bat, the literary offspring of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald hit a grand slam.

Mosley grew up in Watts, the only son of a Jewish mother with Russian roots and an African American father from Louisiana who, after serving in the segregated U.S. Army in World War II, became a supervisory custodian for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Mosley’s parents tried to marry in 1951 but couldn’t find anyone willing to give them a marriage license. Their son was born the following year.

This family history is prominent in Mosley’s novels. Devil in a Blue Dress tells the story of Ezekiel (“Easy”) Rawlins, a black veteran under Patton in Europe, who has just been fired from his job at a defense plant in Los Angeles. (In later books, he becomes a supervisory school custodian as cover for his unreported cash income.) As Easy sits in a butchers’ bar owned by an old friend from Houston, trying to figure out how to hold onto his modest bungalow in Watts, fate walks in the door.

“I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar.” The hardboiled first line of the book sets the stage for everything that follows. “The second thing that surprised me was that he made Joppy nervous. Joppy was a tough ex-heavyweight who was comfortable brawling in the ring or in the street, but he ducked his head and smiled at that white man just like some salesman whose luck had gone bad.” Already, Easy -- and readers -- are on edge, sensing that something is very wrong.

The white man, who is wearing “an off-white linen suit and shirt with a Panama straw hat and bone shoes over flashing white silk socks,” is DeWitt Albright, who claims to be “just another fellow who does favors for friends.” Albright’s lazy Southern drawl and too-attentive pale eyes are not reassuring: “When Joppy moved away from us Mr. Albright turned to look around the room. He did that every few minutes, turning slightly, checking to see if anything had changed.” These types of observations, which pepper the book, tell readers they are holding a classic pulp that could have been serialized in Black Mask magazine. You’re right there, in that dingy bar over a stinking slaughterhouse, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When Albright says, “I need to find somebody and I might need a little help looking,” Easy knows he should walk away. “Albright was a lot like a friend I had back in Texas -- Raymond Alexander was his name but we called him Mouse. Just thinking about Mouse set my teeth on edge.” Easy’s stream of consciousness pegs two major characters as stone killers. But he doesn’t listen to his inner voice because he loves his little house and needs money to make the mortgage payments.

So he pays Albright a visit in “the bowels” of a building “on Alvarado,” which puts it between Silver Lake and Echo Park, two old L.A. neighborhoods that play prominently in the neo-noir film Chinatown. Already, you can see Mosley’s story on the silver screen.

Albright hands Easy a hundred bucks in cash and a photo of “a pretty young white woman” named Daphne Monet, who frequents black jazz clubs in Watts. Or, as Albright puts it: “She likes jazz and pigs’ feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean.” Despite Easy’s disgust with Albright, he agrees, not knowing that his decision will lead to a string of murders that point to City Hall.

Easy starts his investigation in after-hours jazz clubs, where he meets the seductive Coretta James, a friend of Daphne who gives up her location -- for a price. In this fateful night, the bodies begin to pile up, and Easy realizes that nothing is what it appears to be. Before he knows it, he’s caught between the psycho Albright, who credibly threatens his life, and racist LAPD detectives, who want to frame him for two murders. In desperation, he does the unthinkable, calling in his secret weapon, Mouse, the killer from back home.

With the arrival of Mouse, the story gets a lot more complicated -- and a lot simpler. Two prominent businessmen, one a candidate for mayor, are blackmailing each other, a lot of people are getting killed to keep their secrets, and Daphne is caught in the middle. By the time it’s over, Easy figures out what’s at the bottom of the bloodbath: two people in love have been torn apart by their fear of the race line that separates them in mid-century Los Angeles. This theme brings us full circle, back to Mosley’s own family history.

The film adaptation in 1997 is true to the book, making only slight changes, such as turning Carter into a mayoral candidate running against Teran (now Terrel) and turning Terrel into Albright’s evil employer. These details make the complicated plot a bit easier to follow. The cinematography, cars, clothes, and music make you feel like you stepped into Los Angeles right after the war. But what puts the film over the top is the acting.

Four actors in particular make the story come alive. After seeing Denzel Washington play Easy Rawlins, it’s impossible not to see him when you read the book. He doesn’t appear to be acting at all. Instead, he looks and acts like a man fighting to survive in a very dangerous world and still somehow hold onto his decency.

This point is underlined at the end, when Denzel’s Easy sits on his porch, drinking beer with his old church-going friend, Odell:

“Odell?”

“Yeah, Easy.”

“If you know a man is wrong, I mean, if you know he did somethin’ bad but you don’t turn him in to the law because he’s your friend, do you think that’s right?”

“All you got is your friends, Easy.”

The bad man Easy is talking about is Mouse. In the film, he’s played to perfection by Don Cheadle, gold front tooth and all. Cheadle’s Mouse is small in stature, but something about him would make you cross the street without thinking. He wears colorful, flashy suits that hide a ridiculously long revolver and other assorted weapons. He sums up his own character with brutal honesty that sounds like a joke but isn’t: “You just said don't shoot him, right? Well I didn't, I just -- I choked him. Easy, look -- if you ain't want him killed, why'd you leave him with me?”

Then there’s Tom Sizemore playing DeWitt Albright. He’s oversized trailer trash in a linen suit, the kind of guy who casually breaks into Easy’s house with two other thugs and makes a bologna sandwich with a butcher knife less than a minute before thrusting it under Easy’s eye. He’s another guy you definitely don’t want to run into, let alone make eye contact with.

Finally, Lisa Nicole Carson plays Coretta James in two of the steamiest scenes on film. Her endless innuendo and matching body language is reminiscent of classic film noir. The major difference is that you see the partially clothed Denzel and Carson on a couch from the shoulders up. Your imagination does the rest. Carson makes that part easy. Her mischievous eyes, lazy smile, and purred words are priceless. For her, everything is a half joke with only one punch line. She’s not a femme fatale, just a semi-bad girl who’s fun to watch in action.

All said, the book and film are classics that will make you want more. Fortunately, Mosley wrote a total of 15 Easy Rawlins novels, which spread his hardboiled saga over a few decades.

Unfortunately, only one of them was filmed. Which raises the obvious question: What was Hollywood thinking? The studios were sitting on a mountain of books that screamed sequel. And they had two lead actors every reader now sees on the page.

At least the books have gotten the recognition they deserve, so they will be in print for future generations to enjoy.