Comparing the intersections of Race and Gender in American society depicted in Walter Mosley’s ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (1990) and ‘In the Cut’ (1995) by Susanna Moore.
My final Undergraduate essay, from an English Lit module entitled 'American Sounds and the City'. It recieved a First, not sure if it fully deserves it but fuck it, both really good books.
REFERENCING SYSTEM = A strange version of Harvard specific to my old uni.
In his afterword of Walter Mosley’s 1990 novel ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’, crime writer Val McDermid asserts ‘at its best, the crime novel shines an unforgiving light on the society it grows out of’ (Mosley, et al, 2020:221). The United States, with its tumultuous beginnings in Colonialism and a more recent history intertwined with the Transatlantic Slave Trade, followed by Segregation, all shaped by Patriarchy, has resulted in a uniquely complex society, particularly for ethnic, religious and female minorities. To ‘shine an unforgiving light’ on the US is to expose the nasties still hiding beneath the Star Spangled Banner. That contemporary “freedoms” of minorities within America are little more than slightly looser shackles is an argument that has haunted the country since the end of the Second World War. For Mosley’s African-American protagonist, Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins, segregation in 1948 Los Angeles undermines both his existential nature, derived from his World War II military service, and his aspirations to ascend a fractured and openly dismissive social ladder. After receiving racial abuse and subsequent unemployment, Easy, ‘a man of property’ desperate to ‘leave his wild days behind’ (Mosley, 1990) accepts the job of finding an elusive white girl for financial reward, and is propelled not only into the criminal underworld beneath the city’s glamorous veneer, but also the totality of ‘white-only’ late 1940s America. Parallel in sex and race to Easy is Frannie Avery of Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel ‘In the Cut'. As a single, young, white female living alone in 1990s New York, Frannie’s autonomy is depicted as constantly under threat in the notorious city, ‘Nowhere is there a sense of peace.’ (Moore, 1995:5). After becoming embroiled in a brutal homicide case, her intellectual curiosity and predilection for sex leads to a passionate relationship with an investigating police officer, of whom Frannie becomes increasingly suspicious. Both become ‘hard-boiled’ detectives against their wills, yet their ambiguous moralities allow them to traverse the dark urban settings that work against them. While Mosley’s novel emphasises the rigidity of racial identity under systematic racism, Moore tackles the power structures of gender, violence, and sexual autonomy to study their effects on ‘liberated’ women. This essay seeks to compare these two ‘noir’ detective-adjacent narratives and how the intersectionalities of their characters keep them threatened, eroticised, and perpetually surveilled under the American flag.
“I was surprised to see a white man in Joppy’s bar” (Mosley, 1990:9), Walter Mosley opens his novel by not only subtly highlighting the pervasiveness of de jure segregation in 1940s America but also signaling Easy’s established understanding of his ‘half-role’ within society. The presence of white individuals, even in a casual setting, is unusual and, as Srzmańko (2018) notes, ‘mostly spells terror.’ This man, Dewitt Albright, white in attire, pale skin and eyes, sparks off a ‘thrill of fear’ (Mosley, 1990:9) that comes to define Easy during the novel’s course. Confronted with the impending reality of losing his home, Easy reluctantly accepts Albright's investigative employment, ‘whose work carries him between classes and across racial lines’ (Partington, 2025) after being laid off by his Italian ex-boss, Benny Giacomo, who despite appearing “darker than many mulattos I’d known” (Mosley, 1990:71) fires Easy to assert his social dominance. Hayes (2024) comments, ‘Giacomo’s own whiteness being constantly in flux fuels his need to exercise perceived racial superiority over people of color’. This fluid notion of ‘whiteness’ is seemingly reserved for European descendants, particularly those in positions of power, and reflects the systemic inequalities that control their society, whilst exposing the fragility of racial identities in segregated America. In Albright and his ex-’slaver’ (Mosley:1990:127), Giacomo, Easy finds two forms of racism: one who ‘relinquishes’ him due to hatred and one who exploits him for his ability to go where the white man cannot, due to not being of the "right persuasion" (Mosley, 1990:26). Albright's hostility escalates throughout the novel via blackmail, breaking into Easy’s home and the repeated use of the ‘N-word’ until finally revealing himself as much a despot as Easy’s former employer, "you take my money, you belong to me, that’s capitalism", (Moore,1990: 109). By employing Easy, pulling him away from his close-knit southern black migrant community, "Where are you from Easy?... Houston” (Mosley, 1990:10), Albright both assists in, and exploits, Easy’s ambitions of upward social mobility, as illustrated by the decision, ‘to milk those white people for all the money they would let go of'“ (Mosley,1990:127). Albright and Easy’s unequal dynamic forces Easy into reclaiming a sense of self, framing his reluctant mission as "...maybe I could buy my own life back" (Mosley, 1990:127) and thus positing an escape route from the white world. ‘Easy’s disapproving reflections on the reality he confronts and determination to accomplish his goals reveal how he opposes those traditional views and barriers…’ (Reyes-Torres: 35), by gaining economic self-sufficiency from white society via landlordism, Easy subverts the typically grey morality of the ‘hard-boiled’ detective, motivated by materialism only as a pathway towards individualism.
Conversely, Frannie’s role as a teacher, coupled with her obsession with language, leads to her abusing her pastoral and authoritative power over Cornelius, a younger black working-class student supplying entries for Frannie’s dictionary of street slang. Sudjic (2019) asserts that “Language Frannie’s hiding place” but language is also Frannie’s weapon, one she wields against imbalances of class, gender and race that dictate her career as a teacher and her life as a woman, ‘I decided that they would be so sensibly outraged by the beating, murdering and dismembering of women…they might not be able to see the intelligence in the books’ (Moore, 1995:3). Cornelius’ initial scepticism of Frannie ‘people like you think brothers are guinea pigs, the way we talk and shit…’ (Moore, 1995:5) speaks to a wider mistrust of the power she holds over him as an white educated woman. Cornelius’ desire to protect his ‘otherness’ as a lesser-educated and lower-class individual is understandable given the racial biases of the society they inhabit, but his eagerness to learn erodes his boundaries and challenges Frannie’s liberal sensibilities. She begins to racially fetishise him, ‘I wonder if Cornelius has a Jamaican flag on his ass?’ (Moore, 1995:100). Frannie’s eventual succumbing to this attraction, ‘Cornelius was brazen…I was brazen, I turned and kissed him’ (Moore, 1995:162) is not, however, solely her fault. Cornelius’ morose linguistic intrigue, seen in his term paper which fictionalises the events of a murder committed by serial killer John Wayne Gacy, demonstrates his permissiveness to Frannie’s intrigue: ‘You’ve been looking to fuck me up since day one’ (Moore, 1995:164) and is what emotionally and intellectually draws him to Frannie. From the breaching of this teacher-student relationship, Moore not only solidifies Frannie’s moral complexities but states that sex-focused racial hierarchies are inherently based in power, exoticism and taboo intrigue. While Frannie’s educated mind gives her intellectual power that blinds her to power structures, Easy’s ability to see through the social and economic structures that restrain him is from a different sort of education, surviving a war: ‘I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know they were just afraid to die as I was’ (Mosley, 1990:5).
Having established the tentative social positions of each protagonist, Mosley and Moore imbue their narrators with attitudes that both align with and clash with their times. In ‘Devil’, Easy, his pride in being a self-educated veteran from a poor Southern background leads him to make self-interested decisions and sometimes spiteful remarks that mar his morality. Frannie’s morality is marred by the intrinsically exploitative nature of behaviours towards Cornelius, both in the workplace and in the bedroom. Early on in his search for Daphne, Easy calls on word-of-mouth leads from friends at ‘John’s’, a black-only ‘speakeasy’, the quick descent from detective to drunk sees Easy lying about the war, having sex with a friend’s female accomplice as he sleeps in the next room and later lying about it to the man left cucked. This transgression of camaraderie with the initially hesitant woman is achieved by Easy’s assertiveness, ‘Fo’get about him! You got me goin’, Coretta’ (Mosley, 1990:49), and the lie that follows ‘we put you in the bed, then she gave me a drink and I went home’ (Mosley, 1990:70) illustrate Easy’s ability and recurring willingness to deceive friends and withhold truths from his community for his personal gain. Additionally, when Easy encounters Zeppo, a Black-Italian man who suffers from cerebral palsy, his animal-like descriptions of the effects of Zeppo’s unassistable disease ‘holding his hands in front of his face like claws…like a bird in agony’ (Mosley, 1990:137+140) show Easy holding at least some of the prejudices of the time, in this case towards the disabled. Finally, towards the close of the novel, Easy rats out Junior Fornay, a fellow Texan migrant, to the police to save himself from suspicion despite earlier sparing Fornay’s life. Easy asserts this through his philosophy on self-accountability ‘Junior disgusted me…unable to answer for his crimes…could try Junior Fornay against that print’ (Mosley, 1990:172+216). There is no further acknowledgement of this choice, but it shows the lengths Easy is prepared to go, regardless of skin colour or level of acquaintance, if it means no longer being ‘seen exclusively through the prism of racial difference’ (Szrmańko, 2018:261) yet as Mouse, Easy’s long-term friend puts it ‘you be thinking like white men be thinking…thinkin’ that what’s right fo’ them is right fo’ you’ (Mosley, 1990:209). Mouse, an erratic and unrepentant gangster whose dark history with Easy fuels his departure from Texas, provides not only physical safety by saving Easy’s life but a new emotional reality that, despite his ambition, Easy cannot surpass the color line that prevents him from fully entering American society. In short, the events of ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ can be argued to awaken Easy’s ‘double-consciousness’. This term, coined by W.E.B. DuBois, posits that African-American men are ‘born with second-sight in this American world…which yields no true self-consciousness, only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world… this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others in amused contempt and pity. Both an American and a Negro, warring ideals in one dark body’ (Du Bois 1996:164). Easy’s intelligence and sense of superiority, in combination with mounting narrative danger, force him to detach from long-time friends and weave around the edges of his African-American community. In contrast to ‘In the Cut’s heroine, Frannie, her social life is spent talking with her friend Pauline. Over drinks in bars, Frannie admits her preference for submissive younger men, especially those who lost their virginities to older women, and finds that she and Pauline have slept with the same people. Similar circumstances facilitate her illicit liaisons with Molloy. Perhaps it is the boundary of private and public, illustrated by the public house setting itself, that Frannie finds so intoxicating? Transgression and the thrill/fear of being caught transgressing are inextricably intertwined.
The looming presence of surveillance culture and the police is common in Detective/Thriller novels but the lived experiences of Easy and Frannie expose how whiteness and patriarchy shape their lives. Beginning with Easy’s unlawful arrest outside his house, he is met with the immediate threat of death ‘I got the right to know where you’re taking me… …you got the right to die N*****’ (Mosley, 1990:75) combined with the most dehumanising word a black person can be called, shows the slaughterhouse this institution is to Easy and to his individualistic philosophy as ‘they [the police] decide is scared’ (Szmañko, 2018). His education, which he knows will help him most in escaping his working-classness, is immediately recognised as useless: ‘it’s hard acting innocent when you are but the cops know that you aren’t’ (Mosley, 1990:76). As such, he allows the police to physically hurt him to comply with their wishes. In another instance of Easy’s subjugation, while awaiting Albright on a pier, he is attacked by a group of white men for no reason other than talking to a white woman who began the conversation with him due to her own social exclusion. While Easy accepts belittlement ‘N***** tryna pickup Barbara’ (Mosley, 1990:60) he remarks ‘I could have killed them all…what did they know about violence?” (Mosley, 1990:60) as he knows any police involvement would make things worse. Frannie, on the other hand, is constantly under the eroticised gaze of not only Cornelius but Detectives Molloy and Rodriguez who only openly flout their racism and sexism with pleasure, one instance being Molloy remarking to Rodriguez ‘I thought you only liked dark meat on Thanksgiving’ (Moore, 1995:51) in reference to a black woman in a bar with Frannie stood in the middle. From fetishisation to sex with injured, even dead women ‘you don’t even need the heartbeat’ (Moore, 1995:51), the policemen proceed to comment on Frannie’s body and demeanour with increasing perversion believing their roles of indisputable power allow them to ‘do anything we want’ (Moore,1995:53) with Rodriguez even assuming Frannie to be ‘one of those feminist broads’ (Moore, 1995:51) in an attempt to intellectually deride her. Yet, when confronted with violence both to herself and in the slaughter of Pauline by the killer, Frannie responds not by retreat but by emotional resilience. As Sudjic (2019) emphasizes, ’putting oneself in harm’s way… is not the same as consenting to be harmed’ and Moore’s protagonist continually exercises that distinction, refusing to let the threat of male violence drive her into docility and asserts her agency through knowledge and wit in a city where fear mingles with desire, police threaten violence against women with a jaded detachment, and yet Frannie insists on remaining close enough to regain what is taken from her and is ultimately destroyed by this voyeurism. In both novels, marginalised bodies are rendered hyper-visible, as direct threats to white womanhood, white male power, as well as their fears and desires.
In ‘Gender and Genre: Feminist Rewritings of Detective Fiction’, Cranny-Franis states ’novels featuring a hard-boiled private eye who is female… confront their readers’ expectations of femininity and masculinity, of what a woman can or should do’ (1988), and this describes Frannie well. The question of whether she is responsible for the danger she finds herself in due to her own decisions and behaviours or if that responsibility is an illusion conjured by the biased assumptions of the novel’s readers, is weighed up in Moore’s ultimatum, ‘‘They get you if you’re careful – if you try to protect yourself – and they get you if you’re reckless. Or refuse to take responsibility for their action’’ (Sudjic, 2019). In this instance, ‘they’ suggests that wider society is responsible, a cultural refusal to separate sex from identity and identity from the violence subjected against it. Moore gives Frannie the autonomy to make decisions of her own free will, thus In the Cut explicitly links eroticism and brutality via the reality of life as a woman, giving an emphatic answer to Moore’s central question ‘[how] to represent violence against women and female desire together… without shutting down one’s faculties. How to represent… that sexual desire lives entangled with sexual violence?’ (Angel, 2019). Essentially, ‘In the Cut’, centred on a femme fatale who is seemingly attracted to danger, ultimately presents the stark realities of the misogyny ingrained in American society. Easy confronts a similar statement, made by Daphne Monet at the end of the novel, ‘They don’t have names, they’re just the ones who won’t let us be ourselves.’ (Mosley, 1990:187). Easy’s aspirations of escaping his identity through individuality are not only mocked by his old friend Mouse, ‘That’s just a lie them white men say about making it on their own.’, you need someone at yo back,’ but thrown completely aside when he finds out Daphne is neither white nor named Daphne after sleeping with her. Daphne or Ruby Green ‘passes’ through white society due to her racial ambiguity as a trauma response to sexual abuse at the hands of her father, skewing her perceptions of love in becoming what Easy describes as a ‘Chameleon’. Western (2001) states that Daphne’s separated biraciality: ‘allows Mosley to rework the recurrent motif of the ‘tragic mulatto’ through the hardboiled convention of the femme-fatale’ and Easy’s search for Daphne ends with her unravelling his perceptions of racial identity, idealisations of love and the over-sexualised role of women in his society. Seperately, Mosley and Moore subvert the noir detective and femme-fatale to interrogate societal perceptions of ‘dangerous’ women and men as figures of perceived authority,
To conclude, both protagonists are forced to make use of whatever means are necessary to reclaim their individualities. Easy uses humor, cunning, and his intimate knowledge of Black L.A. to navigate white power. Frannie wields language, writing, and her refusal to apologise for her desires to prevent men from defining her. As Moore herself put it, she intended ‘In the Cut’ to “reclaim” noir, more commonly associated with male writers, for women and female-led stories. Likewise, Mosley reclaims the hard-boiled detective novel for the African American experience, forcing readers to see L.A. through the eyes of people whose perspectives are usually ignored’ (Paterson, 2025). Using noir as a method of social critique: Mosley and Moore demonstrate how race and gender hierarchies structure the lives of their protagonists and shape what freedom and safety can mean for those at the margins, Via the disruption of dominant myths such as the ‘innocent’ hero and the neutral legal system, violence and desire become embroidered in the fabric of the lives of the protagonists, resisting at all costs the surveillance, stereotyping and violence they face for simply being themsleves and must employ their own strategies to survive against the marginalised masculinities and femininities within American culture today.
WORD COUNT EXCLUDING TITLE, NOTE AND BIBLIOGRAPHY: 2976
Alphabetical Bibliography
Angel, K. (2019) ‘Susanna Moore’s “In the Cut.’ The White Review, [Online] [Date Accessed: 4th August 2025] URL: thewhitereview.org/reviews/susanna-moores-cut
DuBois, W.E.B. (1903) ‘The Souls of the Black Folk’, New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Hayes, M (2024) ‘I’m Her and I’m Me: Race, Power, and Sexual Violence in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress’ Concept: Interdisciplinary Journal of Graduate Studies [Online] [Accessed on 5th August 2025] URL: https://concept.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/concept/article/view/2955/2806
Moore, S. (1995), ‘In the Cut’, Weidenfield and Nicolas Essentials, London
Mosley, W + McDermid, V.(1990) ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’, Serpent Tail Classics, London
Partington, Heather Scott, (2025) ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’, Alta Journal, vol. 31, [Online[ [Accessed 3rd August 2025] URL: https://www.altaonline.com/books/fiction/a63906288/devil-blue-dress-walter-mosley-noir/
Szmańko, K. (2018) ‘Oppressive Faces of Whiteness in Walter Mosley’s ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’, Text Matters, vol. 8, no. 8, pp. 258–77, [Online] [Accessed on 20th July 2025] URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328673052_Oppressive_Faces_of_Whiteness_in_Walter_Mosley's_Devil_in_a_Blue_Dress
Sudjic, O. (2019) ‘Sex and Violence: What Has Changed for Women Since In the Cut?’ The Guardian, [Online] [Accessed on 27th July 2025] URL: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/29/in-the-cut-susanna-moore
Reyes-Torres, A.(2011) ‘Easy Rawlins’ Identity: A Unique African American Male Detective’, Impossibilia, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 32–47. [Online] [Date Accessed: 3rd Accessed: 10th Aug 2025] URL: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=3906328
Wesley, Marilyn C. (2001) ‘Power and Knowledge in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress’, AfricanAmerican Review, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 103–16 [Online] [Date Accessed: 6th Aug 2025] URL: https://doi-org.ezp1.villanova.edu/10.2307/2903338.