SOURCE: "Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins: The Detective and Afro-American Fiction," in The Kenyon Review, Vol. 14, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 173-83.

In the following essay, Mason examines Devil in a Blue Dress in relation to the theories of the novel developed by George Lukác and M. M. Bakhtin.

I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar. It's not just that he was white but he wore an off-white linen suit and shirt with a Panama straw hat and bone shoes over flashing white silk socks. His skin was smooth and pale with just a few freckles. One lick of strawberry-blond hair escaped the band of his hat. He stopped in the doorway, filling it with his large frame, and surveyed the room with pale eyes; not a color I'd ever seen in a man's eyes. When he looked at me I felt a thrill of...