skygiants

You know, I don't actually know why I'm so fond of noir. I mean, the tropes that classically characterize the genre are a dark-end-of-grayscale atmosphere, femmes fatales, and One Guy, On His Own, Against An Inherently Corrupt World. And none of these are things that particularly speak to me as story tropes - I love ensembles! and strong women who are not punished or counted as evil for being strong! and while I do love grayscale in my fiction it is not usually the 'EVERYONE IS CORRUPT' kind, and I am actually quite fond of a happy ending where appropriate! - but when you put them all together somehow it makes magic. I really do love noir books and films; there is something about an atmospherically well-done and impossibly convoluted noir plot that leaves me enthralled. It's something about the style in the films, and the first-person narration in the books, and knowing the tropes and seeing how any one work decides to use them, but more than that I couldn't tell you. ~~And only shati will understand why this icon goes with this post.~~

Anyway, Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress is a very well-done noir set in 1940's LA, with added interest both because the default race and culture for the protagonists is not white, with all that that implies about the hostile world that noir requires be arrayed against the protagonist, and because it is a noir private eye's origin story, which is something I have not seen before! The plot is of course impossibly complex (I really can't remember why half the people died or why), the femme fatale is very much a femme fatale but interestingly complex in her own right and - despite the title - not judged as Inherently Evil, and the most interesting relationship in the book is undoubtedly between Easy Rawlins, our hero who is just trying to get by while causing and taking minimal damage, and his sort-of-friend/ally/counterpoint Mouse, a cheerfully cold-blooded killer who genuinely does not understand why Easy would feel at all guilty about any of the things Mouse has done. I'll probably be reading the next one the series next time I feel the urge to be plunged into a gritty world of 1940s cynicism and crime!

(And that reminds me that I really do need to get The Big Sleep out of the library one of these days. Bogey and Bacall and a plot so convoluted that even the author didn't know who killed the chauffeur!)