SOURCE: "Crime Rave," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXXV, No. 38, September 18, 1990, p. 74.

In the following review, Eckhoff notes that Devil in a Blue Dress suffers from some of the common weaknesses of the detective genre, faults she finds "troubling, but forgivably so."

Though there are still reasons to tear into one, your classic '40s crime novel is the downtown store for social retrograde and overwrought tough talk. Raymond Chandler could turn a standard-issue B-girl into "a blonde that could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window," but she was still one-dimensional, a decoy. "High yellows" and Asians who slipped in and out of the shadows more often than not simply gave the big guys something to shoot at.

In Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley takes you places in 1948 L.A. where Raymond Chandler would never get past the bouncer: illegal black clubs...