Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins, the favorite fictional detective of President Bill Clinton, is not your typical “private eye”.

Rawlins, the hero of four popular mystery novels by Walter Mosley, drifts through nightclubs and pool halls, strikes up casual romances, and is best friends with a psychopath named Mouse. Also, Rawlins is perhaps the first black detective since Chester Himes wrote about ‘Coffin’ Ed Johnson and ‘Gravedigger’ Jones in the 1950s and 1960s.

Now, in a new movie that quickly became a hit after its opening earlier this this month, Rawlins might be more popular than ever.

The film, ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’, (produced by TriStar) is a successful adaptation of Mosley’s first novel. Denzel Washington plays Rawlins, an unemployed worker who stumbles into detective work while simply trying to make a living in 1948 Los Angeles.

Society at that time was part of a segregated America – so racially divided that when a white woman engaged to a prominent politician disappears in a black part of town, police and private investigators alike turn to Rawlins to find her.

The result is a ‘film noir’ that sticks tightly to the genre’s conventions: beautiful and dangerous women; people who continually disappear and then turn up; a trail of deaths that seemingly have no connection.

The difference – and the key ingredient to the popularity of the Rawlins mysteries – is that this film noir places its accent on blackness. Not just the setting, but also much of the heart of ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ involves the problems of black identity in a segregated United States.

Rawlins, in this era, must be deferential to whites even as he glides through black Los Angeles as the typically slick ‘shamus’. In one harrowing sequence, the detective’s vulnerability is vividly displayed when two white police officers detain him, and proceed to beat him with impunity in a quiet cell.

Washington, the hottest black star in Hollywood today, vividly portrays the chameleonic changes Rawlins must undergo simply to survive in the radically different black and white worlds he must encounter.

Director, Carl Franklin, also shows a gift for displaying the complexities of the black experience. With his shrewd eye for racial history, Franklin – who adapted the screenplay from Mosley’s novel – conjures up a vision of black Los Angeles that is both a coherent, enchanting community and a neglected, crime- ridden ghetto.

That world contains more camarederie and friendship than is normally depicted in any modern U.S. action film. Yet at the same time, it is a world in which a racist investigator (played by Tom Sizemore) can easily dominate Rawlins’s life, simply by being white. (MORE)

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