Black Detective Fiction Rewriting Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Focusing on Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series has been criticized as following the genre conventions of hard-boiled detective novels indiscriminately. Specifically, his first novel of the series Devil in a Blue Dress has been denounced as a copy of Raymond Chandler’s well-known hard-boiled detective novel, Farewell, My Lovely. Closely examining the parallels between Farewell, My Lovely and Devil in a Blue Dress, this paper intends to verify the validity of these criticisms. This paper acknowledges that Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress shares such features as geographical setting, the narrative of a missing woman, and the structuring of the opening scene with Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. However, Devil in a Blue Dress transforms these elements, foregrounding the issue of race downplayed in Farewell, My Lovely. While the disappearance in Farewell, My Lovely is caused by the desire to climb the social ladder, “passing” is revealed as the reason of disappearance in Devil in a Blue Dress; although both novels are set in the Central Avenue of Los Angeles, Devil in a Blue Dress presents a new and revised racial topography; the opening scene of Farewell, My Lovely is depicted from white man’s point of view, whereas that of Devil in a Blue Dress is described from a black man’s perspective.