'Devil in a Blue Dress' was written and directed by Carl Franklin, whose ' One False Move' remains one of the great recent crime movies.

She wants help, in a way, but she doesn't want involvement, and as Easy finds his way further into the case, it begins to take on overtones of ' Chinatown,' a pre-war Los Angeles noir in which the past has unexpected relationships to the present, and the most unexpected people have connections you'd never dream of. Then Daphne Monet ( Jennifer Beals) walks into his life, dressed to kill, as the dames always were in the 1940s. Too comfortable: 'You only been in my house five minutes, and you already done shot someone,' Easy says, in the Texas accent he brought West with him. Mouse is at least comfortable with firearms. He enlists Mouse ( Don Cheadle), an old friend from Houston, to help him out. He meets Coretta James ( Lisa Nicole Carson), an alleged friend of hers, and has a quick, intense romance with her, before she is found dead. The movie is constructed to follow him on a journey into noir, as he picks up the trail of Daphne Monet. He has a nice little two-bedroom bungalow with a lawn to mow, and the whole world of DeWitts and Daphnes is alien to him. He doesn't come equipped with an office with his name on the door and a bottle in the bottom desk drawer.

As a private eye, Rawlins is made, not born. More than by anyone else, this world was created by Raymond Chandler, whose novels have just been enshrined in the Library of America, right alongside Henry James and Abraham Lincoln.īut Easy Rawlins, who lives in the 1940s, is a modern fictional creation, born in the recent novels of Walter Mosley. The private eye is the natural inhabitant of these mean streets - standing outside the worlds of law and crime, paid by the hour, his moral code his own business. These are names from the noir universe, from the hard-boiled books and films of the 1940s that created a world that existed more on the screen than in the streets - a world of shady deals and moral compromise, blackmail, revenge and secrets from the past. Just the names alone let you know where you stand with 'Devil in a Blue Dress.' Easy Rawlins.

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley