Devil in a Blue Dress (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

A$100 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

Signed

MOSLEY, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2017. Octavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 219 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity and edition card. Originally published New York: W. W. Norton Company, 1990. Walter Mosley (b. 1952) grew up in the Watts and South Central neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, the son of a Black father from Louisiana and a Jewish mother from Brooklyn — a combination of inheritances that gave him, as he has said, early and precise knowledge of the way in which American society was organised around race. He worked in computer programming and pottery before turning to fiction in his mid-thirties. Devil in a Blue Dress , published in 1990, was his first novel, and it announced one of the most consequential new voices in American crime fiction: a writer who took the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel and used them to illuminate the African American experience of Los Angeles with a specificity and moral authority that no previous writer had achieved in that form. He was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2016, their highest honour. The novel is set in Watts in 1948. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is a Black war veteran who has just lost his job at a defence plant and is facing the prospect of losing his house.

• Binding: Hardcover

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