I read Devil in a Blue Dress a few years ago, but it has
always bothered me that Daphne is not a devil, yet she is
demonized by the title. My impression is that Rawlings
started with a song references and went from there. I think I
read somewhere that he only realized the colour angle after
publishing several titles.
As I have mentioned before, I found the plot in this book and
the two others by Mosely that I've read to be full of holes,
though it's been too long for me to provide any examples. In
this book there is a lot of confusion around a couple of
characters named Green. Any colour symbolism in that escapes
me.
Karin
At 10:34 24/07/05 -0400, Jay Gertzman wrote:
>I have just read Mosely's first Easy Rawlings novel,
_Devil in a Blue
>Dress_. I have read that Daphne, the woman referred
to in the title, is
>associated with various colors, not only blue but
green, brown, white,
>etc. She is of mixed parentage, and has powers of
universal femininity.
>It is puzzling to think about her as either a devil
or a femme fatale.
>But Mosley makes her a complex and probably
archetypal character,
>although I am not clear on all the implications. I
notice that many of
>the Rawlings novels have one color each in the title.
I wonder if
>Mosely's treatment, not so much of race but of
behavior patterns of
>Americans interacting with race and class, is not an
example of how
>flexible the noir crime novel is (Charyn, Hendricks,
Mailer, Paretsky,
>Burroughs).
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