SOURCE: Wesley, Marilyn C. “Power and Knowledge in Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress.” African American Review 35, no. 1 (spring 2001): 103-16.

[In the following essay, Wesley examines how Mosley both utilizes and expands upon the tradition of the hard-boiled detective genre in Devil in a Blue Dress.]

“One should try to locate power at the extreme points of its exercise,” according to Michel Foucault, “where it is always less legal in character,” where it is “completely invested in its real and effective practices” (“Two Lectures” 97). Novels of detection, which investigate extreme instances of extra-legal violence, may, therefore, be understood as pertinent inquiries into the practical operation of power. And crime fiction, contemporary critics argue, is a particularly apt medium for the negotiation of racial inequities.¹ Walter Mosley's adaptation of the hard-boiled genre in Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the first volume in his Easy Rawlins mystery series, stages an examination of the new possibilities for black empowerment in the aftermath of the Second World War.²

Originating in the 1920s, the American hard-boiled detective story is similar to its classic British counterpart in organization, but dissimilar in content. It begins with the introduction of the detective, then sets him into action in pursuit of a mystery which turns into a crime, trails him through a convoluted investigation, and concludes with the solution of the crime. The differences derive from setting—the corrupt underworld of the modern city instead of the potentially pastoral British country house. In place of imposing rational discovery, the hard-boiled hero experiences bewildering initiation into the violence just under an urbane surface. Unlike the cool and remote classic detective, the hard-boiled variant is understandably human in his confusions and disappointments, and he substitutes simple toughness and temerity for esoteric methods of logical reasoning in order to fashion an ad hoc morality out of the lost ethics of an impure world. The system of justice he encounters is damaged but not beyond repair. And it is his job somehow to mend it.³

The essence of both the classic and hard-boiled detective story is the pursuit of knowledge, and the source of that knowledge is the violence that threatens civil order. The difference between the white hard-boiled detective and Mosley's black detective is to be found in the ends which that knowledge serves. Despite his cynicism, a character like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe is a servant of the dominant system of law and order. But Mosley's Easy Rawlins needs to learn how the operation of that system in the post-war era affects the power of the black man to survive and prosper. This lesson takes shape through a series of mentors who teach him about the levels and types of violent power, and finally leads him to the enigmatic woman whose mystery abrogates the conventional categories of his experience. His process of detection does not result in a unitary moral code; instead, the acts of violence he encounters call for a confusing variety of ethical responses. Through the adventures and the ambivalence of the black detective, Devil in a Blue Dress and subsequent works in the Rawlins series enact a Foucauldian structure which teaches that power, like law, is not an order to be retrieved but the contingent result of specific circumstances that black men may understand through violence and adapt to their own needs for respect and freedom.

If, as the saying goes, “Knowledge is power,” it makes sense that the race and class in charge have sought to curtail its access. The restriction of black knowledge is historically evident, from laws against teaching slaves to read to contemporary inequities in support for education in predominantly black neighborhoods. The violation of this restriction is certainly one of the major appeals of the black detective novel. The classic detective, like Sherlock Holmes, an agent of the aristocracy, puts his highly specialized knowledge to use solving lurid crimes in a manner that protects the dominant class from the threat of or responsibility for violence. By defining criminal activity as deviation, his solutions demarcate knowledge as separate from violent power. But the later hard-boiled detective, like Philip Marlowe, seeks rather than possesses knowledge, which emerges from his informed participation in the violence that surrounds him. It is this characteristic connection between knowledge and power mediated by the narrative of detection that makes it so useful in the serious attempt to define these prerogatives for black manhood and which revises the meaning and source of black knowledge in Devil in a Blue Dress.

In his seminal 1845 autobiography, Frederick Douglass recounted several key means of reclaiming the manhood denied by the institution of slavery: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall now see how a slave was made a man” (294). The ability to earn a wage and the participation in a supportive fraternal community are significant elements in this reversal, but even more important are Douglass's achievement of literacy and the physical defense of his own rights in a fight with an overseer.⁴ This conjunction of knowledge and force comes to fruition for Douglass in his career as an abolitionist spokesman. In Fighting for Life, Walter J. Ong traces the historical roots of “the alliance between masculinity” and a combative academic style (140) in a rhetorical practice of education based on the exclusionary exercise of masculine competition: “What was taught … was to take a stand in favor of a thesis or to attack a thesis that someone else defended.” Students “learned subjects largely by fighting over them” (122-23). Douglass, who was deeply influenced by his early discovery of the ideational confrontations structuring the debate about slavery in The Columbian Orator, excelled in an age when public information, like education itself, was delivered in the form of verbal combat. For him the acquisition of knowledge and the assertion of masculine force were conjoined parts of the same racial struggle.⁵

As an influential writer and speaker, Douglass demonstrated power previously restricted by literacy laws largely to whites. This violation of the racial prohibition of knowledge and physical aggression are presented in Douglass's Narrative as linked declarations of full humanity. Yet, paradoxically, the greater educational opportunity for blacks during ensuing decades separated these two prerogatives. In contrast to Douglass's militant assertions, Booker T. Washington connected institutional learning at Tuskegee Institute with patterns of accommodation: “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly …” (37).⁶

Influential later works from different political perspectives continued to assert the divergence of knowledge and power. Although Richard Wright, unlike Washington, presented aggression as resistance to accommodation in Native Son (1940), in the autobiographical Black Boy (1945) he proposed black literacy as an alternative to violence. In his 1964 Autobiography, Malcolm X portrayed the continuing schism between knowledge and power in his perceptions of the differences between blacks in two different Boston neighborhoods in the 1940s:

What I thought I was seeing there in Roxbury were high-class, educated, important Negroes, living well, working in big jobs and positions. Their quiet homes sat back in their mowed yards. These Negroes walked along the sidewalks looking haughty and dignified. …

(48)

I spent the first month in town with my mouth hanging open. The sharp-dressed young “cats” who hung on the corners and in the poolrooms, bars and restaurants, and who obviously didn't work anywhere completely entranced me.

(51)

The most important difference between the classes of “the Hill” and the ghetto is symbolized in Malcolm X's account by a Roxbury teenager named Laura, “a high school junior, an honor student” who “really liked school. She said she wanted to go on to college. She was keen for algebra, and she planned to major in science” (71). Although her attraction to the hip style of Malcolm's world eventually leads to Laura's degradation, initially she makes him feel “let down, thinking of how I had turned away from the books I used to like when I was back in Michigan” (72). For Malcolm the energetic black lower-class cultural style he is so attracted to leads him into a life of frenetic violence that excludes the pursuit of education, which he associates with an enervated black middle class. In prison, however, he pursues an ambitious program of self-education, and in his later role as a race leader is able to combine the knowledge he had previously associated with the black middle classes with the force he connected to lower-class experience in the rhetorical stance of the Black Muslim movement.

As this brief analysis indicates, the terms knowledge and power, central to the detective genre, are, within the context of black culture, historically determined, racially loaded, and gender-inflected. Accordingly, the meditation on these issues in Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress is from the outset historicized and politicized.⁷ “I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar,” the book commences. “When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly because I was used to white people by 1948” (1). This sentence suggests that former patterns of black capitulation to white authority were in the process of change in the period just after the Second World War. Thus, before the detective conundrum is even introduced, its purpose is established: the detective's discovery of the implications of an emergent black empowerment. Easy Rawlins's qualifications for the career of detection that begins in this work include a high school education; his ability to speak “proper English,” combined with the savvy to “express [himself] in the natural ‘uneducated’ dialect of [his] upbringing” (10) when the occasion calls for it; and his experience as a black soldier in World War II—abilities suggesting the juncture of knowledge and power which the plot unfolds.

The historical placement of the novel speaks to the complex inscription of power and knowledge around politically altered issues of black manhood during the post-war years. This change is signified by the occupational dilemma of the protagonist. In 1948, prior to his enlistment in the detective plot, Easy has been employed at Champion, a Santa Monica factory that assembles airplanes, but he had been fired as a result of white antagonism. When faced with the choice between capitulation to his boss and pride in himself during his attempt to recover his job, Easy chose the latter: “‘That's Mr. Rawlins,’ I said as I rose to meet him. ‘You don't have to give me my job back but you have to treat me with respect’” (66).

Easy's situation rewrites Chester Himes's If He Hollers (1945), in which self-respect is not an alternative for protagonist Bob Jones, who loses his job at Atlas, a Los Angeles shipyard, in 1941. Bob's impulse to preserve his pride involves him in an inescapable cycle of personal anxiety and possible violence. Although Jones reports that he had experienced racism prior to 1941, he had not comprehended it as a terrifying, endemic condition until the internment of the Japanese in California: “It was taking up a man by the roots and locking him up without a chance. … It was thinking about if they ever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones' darker son, that started me to get scared” (3). The alternative to this fear is expressed in his imagined aggression toward its racial source during a brawl with a redneck co-worker: “I wanted to kill him so he'd know he didn't have a chance. I wanted him to feel scared and powerless and unprotected as I felt every goddamned morning I woke up …” (35).

Mosley's implied citation of Himes, reiterated in his choice of the black detective genre dominated by Himes,⁸ introduces the change in the status afforded by black participation in World War II. As Easy's experience exemplifies, some black soldiers, despite segregation, participated in active combat, and in 1948 President Truman integrated the armed services. This change affords Easy new access to what he calls “the kind of freedom death-dealing brings” (98). Significantly, If He Hollers ends with Bob's conscription, whereas Devil in a Blue Dress starts after Easy's military service. For Bob, violence, his own or that of a bigoted community, is a constant threat; for Easy violence becomes his “Yale College,” in Melville's phrase. The enigma in Mosley's work addresses not the tenuous survival of blanket exclusion, the problem for Himes, but the search for the terms of the new option of limited inclusion, the possibility of black male “respect” and “freedom” brought about by black participation in the war. Rawlins's conventional search for a missing woman in the plot is an innovative thematic attempt to explore the conditions and constraints of new historical opportunity. It is this theme which fuels the detective's rather extraordinary pursuit of knowledge and structures the novel around his encounters with a series of black and white mentors who teach him the political implications of violent practice.

One important motive for Easy's participation in the detective adventure proposed by the white lawyer Dewitt Albright is the acquisition of knowledge,⁹ as this explanation by Joppy Shag, his black sponsor in the enterprise, indicates: “‘Don't get me wrong, Ease. Dewitt is a tough man, and he runs in bad company. But you still might could get that mortgage payment an' you might even learn sumpin’ from ‘im’” (8; my emphasis). During much of the novel, Easy's dogged pursuit of such learning is developed through the detection plot—his attempt to uncover the where-about of Daphne Monet—but frequently his curiosity seems to exceed the riddle of the story.

For example, when he is being brutally questioned by the police, and he understands that racism makes truth irrelevant in their treatment of him, Easy still insists throughout the interview on his right to understanding. Even as he is being released, he demands, “‘I wanna know what's goin' on’” (75). And during his interview with the powerful figure behind the investigation, he presses for full disclosure: “‘What I need is for you to help me understand what's happening’” (116). In the violent world Easy has entered, knowledge has utility value as both a means of self-protection and as saleable information, yet Easy's quest for information contradicts the first option in his encounter with the police and replaces the second in his interview with his employer.

This pattern of excessive knowledge is conflated in Easy's observations before one of the climactic episodes of the novel:

It was a simple ranch-style house, not large. There were no outside lights on, except on the front porch, so I couldn't make out the color. I wanted to know what color the house was. I wanted to know what made jets fly and how long sharks lived. There was a lot I wanted to know before I died.

(196)

The quotation structures a characteristic shift from pragmatic description of the style and size of the house, which could aid the detective in his dangerous investigation of it, to aesthetic curiosity about its color, to philosophical inquiry about the nature of reality as an ultimate goal evident in his final comment: “There was a lot I wanted to know before I died.”

Easy's education is, however, focused on one key issue: the meaning of violence. It is, after all, the violence of war that introduced new access to power, but Easy, despite his ironic nickname, understands the connection between violence and power as a difficult concept. His instruction begins when Albright and Easy share “plain old man-talk” (22) about the experience of war. Albright differentiates between the two of them on the basis of their tolerance of slaughter: “‘You lived with it because you knew it was the war that forced you to do it. … But the only thing that you have to remember … is that some of us can kill with no more trouble than drinking a glass of bourbon’” (23). In contrast to the amoral threat implied by Albright, his second white mentor, Mr. Carter, surprises Easy by casually revealing the weaknesses everyone else hides: “I could tell he didn't have the fear or contempt that most people had when they dealt with me.” This unique reaction, Easy concludes, is the result of an unconscious racism supported by enormous wealth: “Todd Carter was so rich that he didn't have to think of me in human terms. He could tell me anything” (119).

In Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, Rollo May describes the manifestations of power in terms of its types and levels. He restricts the category of violent aggression to the desperate means employed by those who do not have access to more effective power. But Mosley's fiction epitomizes a more subtle reading of the degrees and kinds of violence itself. As Easy learns in Devil in a Blue Dress, the white wealthy classes employ two types of violence. Albright's direct threat of disinterested destruction is related to May's designation of “manipulative” power as the direct control of one person by another. Mr. Carter operates through what May designates “exploitative” power, the total control over others that “presupposes” without having to reveal “violence or threat of violence” toward victims who are allowed “no choice or spontaneity” (104-05). Carter's wealth underwrites power so vast that it may imply rather than invoke its underlying source.

Weaker men may employ what May defines as “competitive” power, “the power against another” which is characterized by one person “going up,” not so much because of what he is or does, “but because his opponent goes down” (107). Competitive violence is exhibited by Joppy, a former boxer who represents raw, mindless force: “His big draw was the violence he brought to the ring” (7). Although he is ostensibly Easy's friend, Joppy is revealed as a murderer who crudely and directly pursues only his own self-aggrandizement. Mouse, Easy's best friend and protector, epitomizes a skillful violence aroused when loyalties or interests are threatened. At its most altruistic, this kind of violence is related to May's positive category, “nutrient” power, because it may use aggression for rather than against another, but Mouse's aggression is also brutally self-serving. Mouse's complicated violence represents a potential the detective, himself “a trained killer,” both accepts and wishes to reject.

The types of violence practiced by Joppy and Mouse suggest the restriction of black power to defensive reaction in a white world of superior control. Easy's war experience has, however, introduced him to another kind of violence, the opportunity to demonstrate male competence through a unified struggle against a common enemy. But although Easy joined the military expecting to share in the American pride advertised “in the papers and the newsreels” (97), he quickly discovered the reality of a segregated army:

I was in a black division but all the officers were white. I was trained how to kill men but white men weren't anxious to see a gun in my hands. They didn't want to see me spill white blood. They said we didn't have the discipline or the minds for a war effort, but they were really scared we'd get the kind of freedom that death-dealing brings.

(98)

Disturbed by white imputations of stupidity and cowardice during his racial restriction to a desk job at the rear, Easy eventually volunteered for the invasion of Normandy and later the Battle of the Bulge. And while there was constant racial hostility in the ranks, there was also the possibility of establishing mutual “respect.” “I never minded that those white boys hated me,” he explains, “but if they didn't respect me I was ready to fight” (98).

Easy experience 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 right-wing” 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).

Mouse's murder of Joppy serves as a central instance of moral incertitude. As Easy observes it, Mouse's violence solicits a disturbing combination of both rejection and acceptance:

He turned casually to his right and shot Joppy in the groin. Joppy's eyes opened wide and he started crying like a seal. He rocked back and forth trying to grab the wound but the wires held him to the chair. After a few seconds Mouse leveled the pistol and shot him in the head. One moment Joppy had two bulging eyes, then his left eye was just a bloody, ragged hole. The force of the second shot threw him to the floor; spasms went through his legs and feet for minutes afterward. I felt cold then Joppy had been my friend but I'd seen too many men die and I cared for Coretta, too.

(201)

In his rhetorical study of fictional violence, Deadly Musings, Michael Kowalewski notes in analyzing a selection from Moby-Dick the “terrifying contrast between intimacy and brutality” which inscribes both a sense of the “unexpected delicacy of life that can be so easily broken” and authorial “uneasiness” about the content of his own description (12). Similarly, in this passage the “casual” control of the killer provides an emotional contrast to the graphic brutality emphasized by the animal comparison and the horrifying physical details. Mouse's actions, meant to scare Daphne into giving him the money she has stolen, are calculatedly vicious and morally inexcusable, an implication reinforced by the revelation a short time later of the gratuitous murder of Frank Green. Yet despite his own “uneasy” ambivalence, indicated by images of his uncomfortable physical response in both passages, Easy comes to terms with Mouse's crimes. “It was murder and I had to swallow it,” he reflects, upon learning about the second death (205). The fulsome intensity of the description of Joppy's murder is charged with its narrator's resistance to his own moral capitulation, and the rhetorical contrasts in the depiction of Joppy's death emphasize Easy's characteristic vacillation about the ethical implications of violence. One source of this uncertainty may reside in the intimate location of Joppy's first wound, which is not only shocking but symbolically significant: Violence, it appears, is a vital determinant of the loss or maintenance of manhood.

As Easy's series of mentors and doubles suggest, violence is ambiguously connected with broader issues of the achievement of black manhood. In the Easy Rawlins series, Odell Jones, Easy's most important mentor, enacts a nonviolent means to the agency and esteem necessary to black masculine identity. A churchgoer, a homeowner who works as a janitor and takes pleasure in the black culture of John's Bar, and a sometime father to Easy, he is a source of knowledge about the black community. And when, in a subsequent novel, Easy misuses this information during an investigation that results in the death of Odell's pastor, the older man abandons his young friend despite the fact that, in the Houston neighborhood they both emigrated from, Odell had taken the orphaned Ezekiel Rawlins into his home and cared for him as a son. Odell's ideal of principled security influences Easy's deep attachment to his house:

I loved going home. Maybe it was that I was raised in a sharecropper's farm or that I never owned anything until I bought that house, but I loved my little home. There was an apple tree and an avocado in the front yard, surrounded by thick St. Augustine grass. At the side of the house I had a pomegranate tree that bore more than thirty fruit every season and a banana tree that never produced a thing.

(11)

The house, like other aspects of the novel, operates paradoxically, as at once an idyllic retreat from modern urban violence and as the motive for Easy's participation in it. He accepts the detective assignment as a means of paying the mortgage after losing his factory job. Mosley does not treat middle-class values with the contempt of Malcolm X; instead, they embody a desire for “respect” and “freedom” that must be defended, even with violence.¹⁰

CRIMINAL DISCOURSE

Of Easy's violent recurrent nightmares about Mouse, perhaps the most telling is one in which Mouse tries to draw him away from “the largest fire fight” in history by insisting that “‘there ain't no reason t'die in no white man's war,’” a charge Easy counters by declaring, “‘But I'm fighting for freedom’” (193). Black manhood in this novel is an effect of “respect” and “freedom” worth fighting for. But although Easy's concept of respect emerges from participation in military violence, freedom is developed through the practice of detection.

The possibility of freedom emerges through Easy's detective experience as (1) economic independence, (2) personal autonomy, and (3) the abrogation of restrictive categories of self-definition. Half of Daphne's stolen money gives Easy financial security: “I had two years worth of salary buried in the back yard,” he explains, “and I was free” (212). The actual work of detecting—which in this novel moves beyond the interpretation of situations to the manipulation of circumstances to produce predictable objectives—results in a new capacity for control. “I had a feeling of great joy as I walked away from Ricardo's,” Easy remarks. “I don't know how to say it exactly. It was as if for the first time in my life I was doing something on my own terms. Nobody was telling me what to do. I was acting on my own” (124).

Perhaps the most important concept of freedom taught through the process of detection in Devil in a Blue Dress is deconstructive. Easy's experience with Daphne Monet, the enigmatic woman at the center of the plot, annuls the categories through which his world is organized. Although she presents herself as a white woman in a black world, she is finally revealed as both white and black. In the love scene between Daphne and Easy, she begins by bathing him so gently he recalls “his mother's death back when I was only eight” (180), yet she talks more obscenely than the coarsest of men. Daphne functions at once as a mother and a lover, and her actions suggest the stereotypically masculine as well as the feminine. Although she lures Easy by promising to “‘tell you everything you need to know’” (171), he never manages “to know [her] at all personally” (180), and when Easy tries to read her for clues as to the mystery of her racial identity, he is thwarted: “I looked at her to see the truth. But it wasn't there” (200). “Daphne was like a chameleon lizard,” Easy concludes. “She changed for her man. If he was a mild white man who was afraid to complain to the waiter, she'd pull his head to her bosom and pat him. If he was a poor black man who had soaked up pain and rage for a lifetime she washed his wounds with a rough rag and licked his blood till it staunched” (183).

Daphne is the very figure of enigma. Her white self, Daphne Monet, is an invented persona which imagines a father who made love to her out of an appreciation of her essential nature, but this belief is contradicted by the incestuous violation she actually experienced as Ruby Green, a little girl of mixed blood. In this doubled character, Mosley reworks the recurrent motif of the “tragic mulatto” through the hard-boiled convention of the ambiguous woman. From nineteenth-century slave narratives through the modern novel, the white features of a black female character have guaranteed her abuse at the hands of white men and often provoked her isolation from the black community, a situation that frequently resulted in insanity. She therefore traditionally elicits, according to Valerie Babb, sympathy for “lack of racial identification” (33).¹¹ Daphne, however, although disturbed, is clearly not a figure of pathos. Instead of testifying to the necessity of maintaining the purity of the races, she suggests the power released through violations of the various social and sexual taboos she represents. In addition to confusing racial certainties, the heterosexual relationship between Daphne and Easy is shadowed by the homosexuality inherent in her masculine characteristics and the oedipal violation suggested by her maternal behavior. What Easy searches for—and finds in Daphne—is the transgression of the status quo. His identity as both a black and as a man are open to modification: She “was like a door that had been closed all my life; a door that all of a sudden flung wide and let me in” (182).

The plot reveals Daphne as a murderer, which explains Easy's ultimate rejection of her (“Daphne Monet was death herself. I was glad that she was leaving” [204]) but fails to account for the depth of his conflicting attraction. In the typical noir plot, the detective is drawn to the beautiful temptress whom he finally repudiates as the quintessence of the violent corruption of the world that has shaped her. Easy's ambivalence is, however, related to Daphne's more complex thematic function. As the register of semiotic negation, herself an unclassifiable term, she destabilizes the hierarchical oppositions which both constrain and support Easy as a black man. His love affair with her as a white woman rejects sexually imposed restriction based on an ideology of white superiority, but, at the same time, because this episode invokes the generic convention of the tough-guy hero's sexual potency, it raises questions about an ideology of masculine dominance. Daphne's anarchic potential, her personification of radical freedom, attracts Easy when it threatens white entitlement, but terrifies him when it imperils male privilege.¹²

Unlike the traditional white hard-boiled detective who seeks to rejuvenate a transcendent system, Mosley's black detective must experience the pain and the possibility of the fundamental disorder that produces new social arrangements. This key difference is evident in a comparison between Chandler's and Mosley's treatments of the knighthood motif which is the signature characteristic of Philip Marlowe, the “common man” as “hero,” who treads “mean streets” as “a man of honor” (Chandler, qtd. in Haycraft 237). In the first pages of The Big Sleep, when Marlowe spots the “stained-glass romance” of a knight's ineffectual rescue of a helpless maiden that decorates the Sternwood mansion, he wryly observes “that if I lived in that house I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying” (4). Just as the king is assisted by the medieval knight in Chandler's 1939 novel, Sternwood, the failing and wealthy patriarch, relies on the loyalty and potency of the detective hero. Marlowe's detective code derives from two principles of fealty—loyalty to the client and loyalty to the law—which turn out to be the same thing: perpetuation of the decrepit paternal codes of privilege that it is the duty of the knightly hero to rehabilitate.

In The Pursuit of Crime, Porter argues that the American detective fiction developed in the 1920s merely added the conventions of literary realism and vernacular language to the enduring social ideology of the British pattern: “In representing crime and its punishment … detective novels invariably project the image of a given social order and the implied value system that helps sustain it” without “any recognition that the law itself … is problematic” (121).

Although Easy Rawlins would like to be a conventionally moral man, his recognition of the problematic nature of “law” as it is applied to black citizens separates him from his white counterpart. Marlowe bases his detective code on adherence to a fixed system of justice: “Once outside the law you're all the way outside,” he declares (194). Rawlins questions its existence: “I thought it was wrong for a man to be murdered, and in a more perfect world, I felt the killer should be brought to justice. But I didn't believe there was justice for Negroes” (121).

In the final paragraphs of the novel, Easy submits his own evolving ethics to the wisdom of his moral mentor:

“Odell?”

“Yeah, Easy.”

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

“All you got are your friends, Easy.”

“But then what if you know somebody else who did something wrong but not so bad as the first man, but you turn this other guy in?”

“I guess you figure that other guy got ahold of some bad luck.”

(215)

Thus, the most important father/mentor in the novel rejects the premise of “law” for the practice of loyalty which adjusts to changing circumstances.

In Black Betty (1994), when Easy Rawlins notices that the “suits of armor designed for tiny little men” lining the hallway of a wealthy home contrast with “two larger metal figures; maybe six feet each,” he is informed that, after the plague killed off much of the population of medieval Europe, those remaining could enjoy a better diet. As a result they grew bigger, “and some of the biggest put on armor” (307). The imagery of knighthood here is not a signal of preeminent principles that must be reconstituted. Instead, its artifacts suggest contingent episodes in a history of shifting power relations.

Such a perspective, according to Michel Foucault in summary lectures collected in Power/Knowledge, alters the source of knowledge. Traditional power relations, Foucault theorizes, descend from a system of social authority invested in a sovereign ruler to Enlightenment principles of rights enforced through a structure of laws. But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries another complex of power relations evolved based on the diverse negotiations of everyday life. To discover this kind of power without political center—most apparent where it “surmounts the rules of right” and is sometimes expressed in “violent forms” (96)—is a good definition of the practice of the black detection of Easy Rawlins.

Much is learned in Devil in a Blue Dress at institutional locations of the black community which are pointedly extra-legal. The cultural hub, for example, is “John's Place”:

a speakeasy before they repealed prohibition. But by 1948 we had legitimate bars all over L.A. John liked the speakeasy business though, and he had so much trouble with the law that City Hall wouldn't have given him a license to drive, much less to sell liquor. So John kept paying off the police and running an illegal nightclub through the back door of a little market at the corner of Central Avenue and Eighty-ninth Place.

(24)

In Devil in a Blue Dress, Mouse worries about Easy's penchant for the pursuit of knowledge: “‘You learn stuff and you be thinkin' like white men be thinkin'’” (205), but Mouse is wrong.¹³ Easy's practice of detection is in fact a study of modern power where it is most available, in its diverse forms of violent intervention which subvert the white sovereign system that operates through the enforcement of law rather than through the provision of “freedom.” The new form of power defined by Foucault is polymorphously productive: It circulates within the body politic to construct, define, destroy, and alter its own effects. Although the contemplation of local instances of power is the modus operandi of all hard-boiled detectives, the Foucauldian result of Easy's study is the freedom to define, reject, or alter the conditions violence discloses. Like the classic detective novel, Devil in a Blue Dress includes a recitation of the solution, but Easy's public explanation completely redefines actual events to signify a contingent relationship with all established truths. The possibility of such freedom is further supported by discursive effects of the novel: the variety of definitions of power supplied by Easy's series of mentors, the implication of alternatives in the characterological doubling of Daphne and between Easy and Mouse, the deconstructive solution of the central enigma, and the moral ambivalence of the detective hero.

In his epistemological history of crime and punishment, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault charts the transition from the spectacle of criminality represented by the scaffold to the interiorization of social control in the classic detective novel: “The great murders had become the quiet game of the well-behaved” (69). But the energetic revision of the detective genre by Mosley shakes things up. By reintroducing a focus on criminal violence as a source of knowledge, he effectively frames potent questions about the meaning of relations of power affecting African American communities at an historical point of possible change. In addition, he reconnects the black themes of power and knowledge in renovated forms that depart significantly from classic and hard-boiled detective stories and several other ideological narratives, including the anti-detective novel and the folk tradition of the bad black man, as well as the conventions of white hard-boiled detection.

The anti-detective novels of writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon studied by Stefano Tani substitute for the conservative politics of the mystery genre “the decentering and chaotic admission of … non-solution” (40). In place of irresolution, however, the detective works of Mosley seek alternative conclusions. And in contradiction to avant-garde futility, they acknowledge the potency of what Fox Butterfield calls “the black bad man” hero (63). Not “romanticized as noble outlaws,” brutal folk characters like Stagolee and Railroad Bill mirrored the turn-of-the-century frustration of African Americans caught in a system of “disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and lynching” as expressions of anger without hope of social redemption (64). Butterfield argues that this popular figure has inspired the use of aggression to acquire a specious “respect” in place of genuine power, particularly in black urban communities influenced by the heritage of a Southern “code of honor” operating through violence. In stories that acknowledge its influence, Mosley both invokes and demotes this mythic and social pattern. Although Mouse's practice of violence is definitely portrayed in Mosley's works as an important aspect of black masculine identity, the redistribution of detective prerogatives in Devil in a Blue Dress argues not only that knowledge is possible, but that it is a more reliable means to power than is violence. In Mosley's works knowledge consists of the examination of the conditions of power in order to recognize opportunities for authority within the dominant system and to discover sources of potency within the black community. As David Glover and Cora Kaplan define it, the central issue of detection is the recognition of such conditions: “What's at stake in both the old and new hard-boiled is who the people are and what their relation to the public spaces of speech and action may be” (215).

Just as the treatment of violence in Devil in a Blue Dress does not endorse the black ideology of futile “respect,” it also rejects a white ideology of violence that defines white dominance. Bethany Ogdon characterizes white hard-boiled fiction as presenting the “urban, multiracial” environment in terms of “demeaning descriptions of other people,” “their perverted psychologies,” their “diseased physiognomies,” and their “destroyed bodies” as “a series of negations” that “construct a mirror against which a hyper-masculine identity appears” (76). This structuring of the white detective's specious stability and masculine identity against the stylistic degradation of the racial other as a source of fantasized male power points up the clear distinction Easy Rawlins represents. Mosley's choice of the so-called “noir” genre is not without irony. The violence Rawlins encounters does not create a racialized other, and his unstable identity is negotiated through violent knowledge in pursuit of contingent power that develops out of economic opportunity and discursive authority. Critic Robert Crooks credits Mosley's challenge to the ideology inscribed in conventional hard-boiled fiction but faults him for failing to represent a leftist solution. But solution of neither the crimes of the narrative nor the problems of society is the real objective in Mosley's crime fiction: Articulating the full, complex power relations which Easy uncovers as issues of white and black violence and enacts through ambivalence is the special accomplishment of the Rawlins series. In Devil in a Blue Dress and the other Easy Rawlins novels, Walter Mosley represents rather than resolves complicated historical issues of the multiracial society Easy uncomfortably inhabits. In this accomplishment, Mosley is addressing an ambiguity about violence Jerry H. Bryant traces in Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel. Black narrative is traditionally unable to univocally endorse the ideology of constructive violence because it must pose the redemptive vision of black male counterviolence against the overwhelming reality of white brutality. Easy, however, detects an alternative understanding of violence as knowledge, a source of contingent rather than ideological black power.

Notes

1. See Stein; Freese; Mason; and Crooks.

2. The series of Easy Rawlins mysteries are generally set in the various decades of his life and incidentally introduce issues of black relations to changing historical contexts. For example, A Red Death places Easy in the 1950s in the context of the FBI's pursuit of communists. A Little Yellow Dog, set in the 1960s, introduces the escalating violence in criminal communities because of more prevalent drug traffic. The series includes Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), A Red Death (1991), White Butterfly (1992), Black Betty (1994), A Little Yellow Dog (1996), and Gone Fishin' (1997), which provides the early background to the otherwise chronological series.

3. See Cawelti chs. 6-7.

4. See Takaki (17-35) for a discussion of Douglass's special relation to issues of violence.

5. I am arguing that Douglass's assumption of the role of educated speaker utilizes one of the modes of power of his historical period. For an alternative reading that sees this fashioning of role as acquiescence to patterns of white masculine identity, see Yarborough.

6. “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities,” Washington preached in his “Atlanta Exposition Address” in 1895 (36).

7. As Mosley stated in an interview, one the most important objectives in the Easy Rawlins mystery series is historical and political recuperation: “The books are really about Black life in Los Angeles” and recreate “historical events which Black people have been edited out of” (“Other Side” 11).

8. Chester Himes's Harlem Crime Stories series, begun in 1965 with Cotton Comes to Harlem, also includes The Heat's On, Run Man Run, All Shot Up, The Big Gold Dream, The Crazy Kill, The Real Cool Killers, A Rage in Harlem, and Blind Man with a Pistol. The humorous cynicism of Himes's detective figures, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, contrasts with Easy Rawlins's more naive pursuit of knowledge.

9. This theme of the pursuit of knowledge is noted by the author as a characteristic preoccupation of his interest in his black male characters: “I especially love black men and the way we deal with life in America, the way that we understand, the way that we pass through things” (Sherman 35).

10. See also Mason's discussion of the house as a symbol of the “extreme fluidity” of Easy's complex negotiations of racialized codes (178-79). Joppy, too, as the proprietor of the butcher's bar where the action begins, is connected to the motif of ownership.

11. Babb identifies the tragic mulatto as a figure of “cross-racial interaction” in works by both black and white authors: William Wells Brown's Clotel; or The President's Daughter, Charles W. Chestnutt's The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories and The Marrow of Tradition, James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (142n13).

12. In Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity, Philip Brian Harper argues that the literary motif of the tragic mulatta reflects the predicament of black masculinity: “The passer returns to ‘the race’; she accedes to proper ‘femininity.’ Yet what the passing narrative seems to rule out of bounds—definitionally unassimilable to socially normative codes—is the very possibility of black masculinity, which is thus the real casualty of this cultural intervention” (126). This tropic negotiation of black manhood (which is also an object of Easy's detection) accounts for Daphne's role in the text, Easy's confusion, and his rejection of her.

13. Although Stein interprets Mouse as representative of a black segregationist position in contrast to Easy, who stands for integration (202), it is, in fact, Mouse who is essentially allied with the white world. His murders of Joppy and Frank remind Easy of the manipulative violence represented by Dewitt Albright.

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