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...