48 pages • 1 hour read
Walter MosleyDevil In A Blue Dress
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Easy returns home and reads his mail, including a letter from Mouse. In the letter, Mouse writes that he wants to visit Easy in LA, since his wife threw him out. After reading the letter, Easy has a sudden urge to hide or leave town.
Easy reveals more of his personal history with Mouse. As young men, he and Mouse were best friends. One day, Easy drove Mouse to the town where Mouse’s stepfather lived. There, Mouse met up with another friend, Clifton, before confronting his stepfather, Daddy Reese, to demand his inheritance before his upcoming marriage. When Reese refused and shot Clifton, killing him, Mouse killed Reese and took $1,000. On the drive home, he gave $300 to Easy, who later regretted taking the money. Wanting to get away from Mouse and to prove himself, Easy enlisted in the military and, later, moved to LA.
Easy goes to a liquor store for a drink. He thinks about Sophie Anderson, a woman Mouse mentioned in his letter, who returned to Houston after finding life in LA to be “Too much!” (47). Easy decides not to respond to Mouse’s letter.
Easy receives a phone call from Albright. They plan to meet up near a merry-go-round located halfway between them in Santa Monica, then a predominantly white community.
Chapter 8 Summary
Easy arrives as the park is closing. To avoid attracting attention, he stands on an overlook above the beach. He becomes uncomfortable when a young woman leaves her group of friends to talk to him. Moments later, several young men appear and accuse Easy of “trying to pick up” the young woman (56). A few of them pick up sticks. Easy is on the point of fighting or running when Albright appears. Brandishing his pistol, Albright threatens and humiliates the young men, making one of them kneel in front of Easy. They scatter.
Albright and Easy drive to a lookout south of the park. After Albright assures Easy that he means no harm to Daphne, Easy tells him that Daphne was last seen with Frank. He explains Frank’s reputation, and Albright asks whether Frank hesitated for “even a second” when Easy saw him kill a man (62); Easy responds that Frank barely hesitated, if at all. Albright pays Easy another $100 and gives him the card of a business where he promises that Easy can get a job.
As Albright drops Easy off back at the park, he asks why Easy didn’t fight the young men earlier. “I don’t kill children” (62), Easy explains, and Albright laughs.
Chapter 9 Summary
Early the next morning, Easy goes to Champion Aircraft, hoping to get his job back. At the factory, Dupree asks Easy if he knows where Coretta is. He explains that she left the previous morning and never came back; Easy denies that anything unusual happened the night he saw her.
Easy meets with his former boss, Benito “Benny” Giacomo. Easy believes that Benny fired him because he views his Black workers as “lazy children” rather than trusting them. When Easy refuses to apologize for the behavior that led to his firing, Benny sends him away. Easy leaves, happy that he didn’t submit to Benny’s wishes.
Chapter 10 Summary
As Easy arrives home, two policemen emerge from a car across the street and introduce themselves as Miller and Mason. Refusing to answer any questions, they handcuff Easy and take him to a police station, where they verbally and physically assault him while questioning him about his activities the day before. Easy answers honestly and momentarily gets the better of Mason in a fight. Hours later, after sundown, Miller and Mason let Easy go.
Chapter 11 Summary
Easy leaves the station on foot. A few blocks from the station, a man driving a black Cadillac calls out to Easy. Not recognizing the driver, Easy ignores him but relents when the driver hints that his boss knows why Easy was arrested. Getting into the car, Easy recognizes the large man in the back as Matthew Teran, the corrupt politician and Howard Green’s former employer. Easy is disturbed to see that Teran keeps a young boy as a sex slave, hugging him throughout their conversation. Teran asks about Daphne, Coretta, and Howard, but Easy pretends not to know anything and refuses to accept any money.
Teran drops Easy off at John’s place. From Hattie, Easy learns that Coretta was beaten to death “just like Howard Green” (83). Easy asks for and receives a ride home from Odell, who urges Easy to leave town or get some help, perhaps from a local reverend. Easy replies, “Lord ain’t got no succor fo’ this mess. I’m a have to look somewhere else” (84).
Chapter 12 Summary
Easy goes home, has a drink, and falls asleep, dreaming of Coretta. In the middle of the night, he receives a phone call from Junior, who nervously tells him that he saw Daphne with Frank. Easy reprimands Junior for calling him at such an odd time, and the call ends.
After Easy falls back to sleep, he receives another phone call, this one from a woman with a vague French accent who introduces herself as Daphne Monet. She explains that Coretta visited her two days ago and that she paid Coretta to keep her from revealing her location to Easy. She decided to call Easy and ask for help after Frank, whom she describes as a friend rather than a lover, left and didn’t return. Easy reluctantly agrees to help her to keep her from going to the police.
Chapters 7-12 Analysis
In these chapters, LA’s significance as a setting begins to emerge. A native Texan, Easy moved to California to escape his past. Historically, his move would be considered part of the Great Migration that saw millions of African Americans leave the South between 1916 and 1970 in search of better socioeconomic conditions. Easy, for his part, seems particularly keen on escaping his association with Mouse and on making more money than he could in Texas. Though Easy chooses to remain in LA, he sometimes wonders if Sophie was right about the area, suggesting that he falls somewhere between Mouse’s thrill-seeking ambition and Sophie’s appreciation of a gentler lifestyle. More broadly, these chapters present LA as a hotbed of corruption, with police brutality considered commonplace and sexual predators like Matthew Teran vying for positions of power. Easy’s conversation with Odell even implies that LA is beyond the reach of God’s power.
These chapters also delve into Easy and other characters’ attitudes regarding violence. While Easy apparently accepts the occasional necessity of violence, as manifest in his willingness to fight in World War II, he seeks to distance himself from the chaotic, lawless violence practiced by Mouse and Albright, as when Albright confronts the youths at the park. Easy’s insistence that he would never kill children earns only a laugh from Albright, who is unconcerned with morality. In an ironic turn, Albright and Mouse’s tendencies toward violence turn out to be no worse than those of the official police, who treat Easy with particular malevolence because he is Black. Just as they are superficially different in appearance, with Miller being tall and slim and Mason being stout, they work in complementary roles while questioning Easy. In some version of a good-cop-bad-cop routine, Miller calmly asks questions while lightly restraining Mason, whose simmering anger constantly threatens physical violence. Racism informs every facet of their approach, from their interest in the case, which centers on the deaths of white, rather than Black, bodies, to their making unlawful arrests without clearly stating charges and the physical and verbal abuses they shower on Easy during interrogation. They thus represent the historical reality of police brutality against Black people in the United States.
Stylistically, Mosley continues to enrich the narrative with evocative imagery, as when Easy comments, “Central Avenue was like a giant black alley and I felt like a small rat, hugging the corners and looking out for cats” (78). Though he is innocent of any crime, Easy has the feel of someone constantly on the run, perhaps because prejudice follows him everywhere. This emotional quality of danger and suspicion are common features of the noir and hardboiled detective genres, but Mosley creates deeper resonances by combining narrative strategies with the psychological realism of Easy’s specific feelings as a Black man navigating LA’s criminal underworld in 1948.
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