Devil in a Blue Dress

8 Pages 2109 Words

eap suit favored by the typical noir detective, Easy Rawlins mostly wears the casual clothes of a laid-off aircraft worker and a wind- breaker with the company logo on the pocket, over a sleeveless t-shirt with slacks. Just as the cheap suit marks the social distance between the white private eye and his wealthy clientele, Rawlings’ attire signifies his black, working-class status and powerlessness relative to the force’s he’s up against.
Within the context of black culture, the terms knowledge and power are essential in that they are historically determined, racially loaded and gender inflected. According to Michel Foucault, a novel of detection is a particularly apt medium for the negotiation of racial inequalities. “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. A character like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is a servant of the dominant system of law and order, whereas Mosley’s Easy Rawlins needs to learn how the operation of that system in the post-war era affects the black man to survive and prosper. A lesson that is learned through a series of mentors who teach him about the different levels and types of violence.” (Wesley 01) “His pr!
ocess 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 of the black detective, Devil in a Blue Dress enacts a Faucauldian structure which teaches that power, like law, is not an order to be retrieved but the contingent result of specific circum...