Walter Mosley: Devil In A Blue Dress

Genre Fiction Sightlines

by John Lennard

Walter Mosley, a favourite author of President Bill Clinton, is the most important African-American writer of crime fiction since Chester B. Himes. This Genre Fiction Sightline offers the reader of Mosley's fiction extensive and illuminating notes and annotations, plus an appreciative essay and a bibliography, all designed to enrich the reader's experience of this writer and this novel.

Mosley's 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. Devil in a Blue Dress is the first novel in Mosley's outstanding 'Easy' Rawlins series. The Notes in this book 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's publications include But I 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 two critical collections, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (2007) and Of Sex and Faeries; furthrr Essays in Genre Fiction (2010) - both available in Kindle format and in paperback from Troubador.co.uk.

73 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

John Lennard (born 1964) read English at New College, Oxford, took an MA at Washington University in St Louis, and a DPhil. back at New College. After teaching for the Open University and the University of London, he was Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, from 1991-8, and Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, from 2004-09. He is now an Associate Member and Director of Studies in English at Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and a freelance writer as well as the general editor of Humanities-Ebooks' Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series.

Besides almost all books, he likes cats, cricket, mountains and forests, architecture, punctuation (and its peculiar history), red wine, honky-tonk piano, blues and folk, rugs, knots, jigsaws, crosswords, pottery, Golden Age Dutch fine art, and astronomy.

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