SOURCE: "A Black Gumshoe in 1948 L. A.," in Chicago Tribune—Books, July 1, 1990, p. 6.

In the following review, Dretzka praises Mosley's debut novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, and anticipates comparisons of the author's work to other black writers of the detective fiction genre.

A couple of months back, just after books by Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Nancy Pickard hit the nation's bookstores, there was a flurry of articles about a boom in mysteries by American women writers.

The reporters, for Newsweek and other mass-market publications, finally had observed something readers of crime fiction long have taken granted: that our women could kill people off and solve crimes every bit as convincingly as Brits P. D. James, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and such American male counterparts as Tony Hillerman—and that, in fact, they had been doing so for years.

I wonder if a similar kind of...