Devil in a Blue Dress (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)
MOSLEY, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2017.
Octavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 219 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity and edition card. Originally published New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Walter Mosley (b. 1952) grew up in the Watts and South Central neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, the son of a Black father from Louisiana and a Jewish mother from Brooklyn — a combination of inheritances that gave him, as he has said, early and precise knowledge of the way in which American society was organised around race. He worked in computer programming and pottery before turning to fiction in his mid-thirties. Devil in a Blue Dress, published in 1990, was his first novel, and it announced one of the most consequential new voices in American crime fiction: a writer who took the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel and used them to illuminate the African American experience of Los Angeles with a specificity and moral authority that no previous writer had achieved in that form. He was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2016, their highest honour.
The novel is set in Watts in 1948. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is a Black war veteran who has just lost his job at a defence plant and is facing the prospect of losing his house. Drinking in a local bar, he is approached by a white man named Dewitt Albright, who offers him money to find a woman — Daphne Monet, a blonde who is known to frequent the jazz clubs and barber shops of the Black neighbourhood. Easy has no connections to the white world that has hired him, and no training as a detective; what he has is a knowledge of his own community so thorough and particular that it amounts to a form of expertise unavailable to any white investigator.
The novel Mosley built from this premise is part detective story, part social history, and part portrait of a community and a city at a specific historical moment — the years immediately after the Second World War, when Black veterans who had fought for their country returned to find it unchanged, and when the first stirrings of what would eventually become the civil rights movement were still years away. The series that followed — fourteen Easy Rawlins novels in total — continued the story through the decades, tracking both Easy's development as an investigator and the transformation of Black Los Angeles from the 1940s to the 1960s. The New York Times described Mosley as a writer with "something vital to say about the distance between the black and white worlds, and with a dramatic way to say it." The 1995 film adaptation starred Denzel Washington. The novel was named one of the 100 best mystery novels of all time by the Mystery Writers of America.
Near fine. A few small marks to gilt fore-edge; otherwise fine throughout.
This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]
Catalogue Number: HH000514
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Devil in a Blue Dress (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)
Devil in a Blue Dress (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)
MOSLEY, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2017.
Octavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 219 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity and edition card. Originally published New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Walter Mosley (b. 1952) grew up in the Watts and South Central neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, the son of a Black father from Louisiana and a Jewish mother from Brooklyn — a combination of inheritances that gave him, as he has said, early and precise knowledge of the way in which American society was organised around race. He worked in computer programming and pottery before turning to fiction in his mid-thirties. Devil in a Blue Dress, published in 1990, was his first novel, and it announced one of the most consequential new voices in American crime fiction: a writer who took the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel and used them to illuminate the African American experience of Los Angeles with a specificity and moral authority that no previous writer had achieved in that form. He was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2016, their highest honour.
The novel is set in Watts in 1948. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is a Black war veteran who has just lost his job at a defence plant and is facing the prospect of losing his house. Drinking in a local bar, he is approached by a white man named Dewitt Albright, who offers him money to find a woman — Daphne Monet, a blonde who is known to frequent the jazz clubs and barber shops of the Black neighbourhood. Easy has no connections to the white world that has hired him, and no training as a detective; what he has is a knowledge of his own community so thorough and particular that it amounts to a form of expertise unavailable to any white investigator.
The novel Mosley built from this premise is part detective story, part social history, and part portrait of a community and a city at a specific historical moment — the years immediately after the Second World War, when Black veterans who had fought for their country returned to find it unchanged, and when the first stirrings of what would eventually become the civil rights movement were still years away. The series that followed — fourteen Easy Rawlins novels in total — continued the story through the decades, tracking both Easy's development as an investigator and the transformation of Black Los Angeles from the 1940s to the 1960s. The New York Times described Mosley as a writer with "something vital to say about the distance between the black and white worlds, and with a dramatic way to say it." The 1995 film adaptation starred Denzel Washington. The novel was named one of the 100 best mystery novels of all time by the Mystery Writers of America.
Near fine. A few small marks to gilt fore-edge; otherwise fine throughout.
This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]
Catalogue Number: HH000514
Original: $52.14
-65%$52.14
$18.25Product Information
Product Information
Shipping & Returns
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Description
MOSLEY, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2017.
Octavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 219 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity and edition card. Originally published New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Walter Mosley (b. 1952) grew up in the Watts and South Central neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, the son of a Black father from Louisiana and a Jewish mother from Brooklyn — a combination of inheritances that gave him, as he has said, early and precise knowledge of the way in which American society was organised around race. He worked in computer programming and pottery before turning to fiction in his mid-thirties. Devil in a Blue Dress, published in 1990, was his first novel, and it announced one of the most consequential new voices in American crime fiction: a writer who took the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel and used them to illuminate the African American experience of Los Angeles with a specificity and moral authority that no previous writer had achieved in that form. He was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2016, their highest honour.
The novel is set in Watts in 1948. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is a Black war veteran who has just lost his job at a defence plant and is facing the prospect of losing his house. Drinking in a local bar, he is approached by a white man named Dewitt Albright, who offers him money to find a woman — Daphne Monet, a blonde who is known to frequent the jazz clubs and barber shops of the Black neighbourhood. Easy has no connections to the white world that has hired him, and no training as a detective; what he has is a knowledge of his own community so thorough and particular that it amounts to a form of expertise unavailable to any white investigator.
The novel Mosley built from this premise is part detective story, part social history, and part portrait of a community and a city at a specific historical moment — the years immediately after the Second World War, when Black veterans who had fought for their country returned to find it unchanged, and when the first stirrings of what would eventually become the civil rights movement were still years away. The series that followed — fourteen Easy Rawlins novels in total — continued the story through the decades, tracking both Easy's development as an investigator and the transformation of Black Los Angeles from the 1940s to the 1960s. The New York Times described Mosley as a writer with "something vital to say about the distance between the black and white worlds, and with a dramatic way to say it." The 1995 film adaptation starred Denzel Washington. The novel was named one of the 100 best mystery novels of all time by the Mystery Writers of America.
Near fine. A few small marks to gilt fore-edge; otherwise fine throughout.
This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]
Catalogue Number: HH000514
