SOURCE: "New Black Detective and a Familiar Navajo One," in The New York Times, August 15, 1990, p. C12.

Mitgang is an American editor, author, and critic. In the following excerpt, he asserts that Devil in a Blue Dress "marks the debut of a talented author with something vital to say about the distance between the black and white worlds, and with a dramatic way to say it."

In Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress, a suspenseful novel of human detection more than simply a detective novel, the reader knows he's in the hands of an author with a new, original voice when a character is described as being in "the hurting trade." The character, whose specialty is the knife, frequents a pool room where the patrons are all desperate men: "they lived for hurting."

The year is 1948, the town, Los Angeles, before the Freeway: "There was still a...