Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) by Walter Mosley

I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar…When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly because I was used to white people by 1948.

I had spent five years with white men, and women, from Africa to Italy, through Paris, and into the Fatherland itself. I ate with them and slept with them, and I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know that they were just as afraid to die as I was.

These are the first words from our narrator Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, recently fired from his job at Champion Aircraft for standing up for himself. The white man is DeWitt Albright and Joppy, the bartender recommends that he hire Easy to do a job for him. To find a woman called Daphne Monet turns out to be quite simple but then people start being killed and while Easy’s natural reaction would be to run, he is determined to stay and fight for the life that he has built up, in particular his mortgaged house, which is why he took the job in the first place. 

He is spurred on by “the voice” which he describes as:

It only comes to me at the worse times, when everything seems so bad that I want to take my car and drive it into a wall. Then this voice comes to me and gives me the best advice I ever get. The voice is hard. It never cares if I’m scared or in danger. It just looks at all the facts and tells me what I need to do.

Easy starts to find that he enjoys the work of a private investigator because

It was as if for the first time I was doing something on my own terms. Nobody was telling me what to do. I was acting on my own.

Everything works out for Easy in the end, but in a racist society, not without a cost.

My ongoing series of review on the 100 Greatest Literary Detectives has shown that the PI sub-genre is not for me, but if it is your thing, then the Easy Rawlins books will show it you in a different light.