Power and Knowledge in Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2001 by Marilyn C. Wesley

Easy experiences the male contest as an occasion for the assertion of respect, but Easy's tale problematizes violence. Although during the war Easy "killed [his] share" of white people (94), he tries to reject aggression. He remains deeply agitated by a murder he once witnessed by Mouse, his childhood buddy. In fact, during the course of his investigations in this novel Easy, although frequently beaten, does not strike back. Instead, it is Mouse who takes bloody vengeance on Easy's enemies. The opposing moral positions enacted by Easy and Mouse, his alter ego, signify the novel's deep ambivalence about the expedient of black masculine violence.

The doubling around the practice of violence is also a feature of the related theme of knowledge about violence. During times of intense danger, Easy is visited by the counsel of "the voice," a vernacular source of wisdom which seems to originate in the black communal instinct for masculine survival. During his first battle, the untried soldier threatened by a sniper hears a voice tell him to" 'get off yo' butt and kill that motherfucker....Even if he lets yo' live you be scared the rest of your life'" (98). Sometimes, however, the voice cautions wisdom instead of violence:" 'Bide yo' time, Easy. Don't do nuthin' that you don't have to do. Just bide yo' time and take advantage whenever you can'" (97). "When the voice speaks. I listen," Easy explains. "He just tells me how it is if I want to survive. Survive like a man" (99).

Unlike Devil in a Blue Dress, white hard-boiled detective fiction characteristically presents clear meanings of violence. For example, in the climactic scene of The Big Sleep, Carmen Sternwood lures Marlowe into a place that suggests the industrial destruction of an American Eden. When she begins to hiss as she tries to shoot him, violence is personified as a deceptively tempting but deeply corrupt practice Marlowe tries to avoid. On the other hand, a tough guy like Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer uses violence crudely and often, to demonstrate his virility and to advance, according to John G. Cawelti, a "primitive rightwing" attack "against some of the central principles of American democracy" (183).

But the murders in Devil in a Blue Dress fit into neither Chandler's characteristic pattern of condemnation nor Spillane's of approbation. After Easy has slept with his friend's girl to extract some crucial information, she is killed by Joppy. Certainly, Coretta's death provides the plot with an innocent victim to motivate the detective's quest, but thematically it also repudiates Easy's irresponsible sexuality, a central attribute of Spillane's hard-boiled character, as a source of authentic male power. Daphne Monet's off-stage murder of a white purveyor of little boys to homosexual clients, although it establishes her guilt in the solution of the mystery, does not symbolize the corruption that Marlowe's encounter with Carmen, who deteriorates from a beautiful girl into a drooling epileptic, evinces. "'I pulled the trigger, he died,'" Daphne explains. "'But he killed himself really'" (202).