Interpretation, hard-boiled fiction, Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, trickster, feminist literary discourse

Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) revises the traditional hard-boiled genre according to a societal system based on racial inequity in the United States. African American hard-boiled authors present African American communities amid a continuous sociocultural and political divide underscored by systemic racism perpetuated by institutional powers. Resulting in Du Boisian double consciousness and internalization, the narrative comments on these internal and external behavioral factors as it follows Daphne Monet, a passing femme fatale. This chapter casts Daphne in the role of a woman trickster, a rare sight in patriarchal mythologies, and comments on the African American hard-boiled decision of writing back to African folklore and African American ancestral heritage dating back to times of enslavement of African peoples in the Americas. The essay implements Umberto Eco’s theory of interpretation to emphasize various roles of and the relationship between the sender and receiver of a literary text and discusses the woman trickster’s adapted qualities to fit the twentieth-century hard-boiled narrative.