Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

Devil in a Blue Dress is an excellent hard-boiled mystery. It is also a fascinating examination of race and masculinities in late-1940s Los Angeles. That it manages to do both these things at the same time, seamlessly, is little short of breathtaking.

"Easy" Rawlins had just been fired from his job for not taking on extra hours when he was exhausted, when the local bartender offers him a chance at some easy money - enough for at least one month's payment on his mortgage. So he takes it on, trying to find a vanished blonde for a local bigwig, with a cold-eyed gangster as go-between. Along the way, bodies start to pile up, and Easy gets the feeling that he might be next. So he calls his psychopathic friend Mouse and asks for help - or hindrance, as the case may be. The blonde comes in and out of his life like a breath of perfume.

This is the story of how Easy became a private detective, which he certainly is not at the beginning of the story. He makes missteps, accidental good moves, stays silent, refuses to knuckle under, and at the end, decides this private detective business might just be for him, after all. No boss to answer to, anyway.

Devil in a Blue Dress is acute about racism, and the varieties that Easy runs into along the way, from outright violence to condescension to disbelief that Easy won't do exactly as he's told to the hidden racism of a confiding rich man. The web that this weaves around him is ever present, and yet, through that, Easy defines himself by his own masculinity, by the voice in the back of his head that tells him what he needs to do to both survive and to continue to think of himself as a man. He'll let things slide, but he won't bend his knee, and his negotiation and assessment of different circumstances are fascinating.

Most good noir has something the private dick can't walk away from. In the Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade has to do something about the death of his partner. For Easy, it's his property, the land he owns, and which he will not leave behind. The symbolic importance of property to Easy was both convincing and gripping.

The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe

I have been reading a lot of fantasy recently, and so much of it has just blended together in my mind. There's a fair amount out there that is good, but much of a sameness with everything else. There are relatively few distinctive voices.

So, when this fantasy-crossed-with-noir popped up, I was more than ready to read it. As soon as I started it, I could see the noir edges the author was trying to put on a fantasy tale, with a hard-boiled detective/enforcer/former noble, and the cases he tries to solve, including one little sordid tale of adultery and running away. Bledsoe has a good feel for the sleaziness and corruption that mark the best noir novels.

As it went on, Eddie LaCrosse delved into the main mystery, finding out for his old best friend, now king, whether or not the queen really did murder her child in cold blood on a moonlit night. She looks damned familiar to LaCrosse, though, and he has to find out whether she's a consummate con artist, or if something stranger is going on.

The book got a little further away from noir in the later parts, and more into a fantasy, but the voice stayed distinctive enough that I continued to enjoy it. This is a grimy world, where most people are just trying to stay alive, and small cities are rife with corrupt cops, sleazy businessmen, and stacked blondes.

There are some good female characters too, despite that. They aren't the focus of the story, but they aren't entirely one-dimensional either.

Since it is a fantasy, sometimes the strangest answers can end up being the true ones. The ending isn't quite as convoluted as I thought it might be, but it ties everything up nicely, and it was such a relief to read something that felt different. That may be artificially inflating my impression of the book, but it was a fun read, and very welcome.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

This book took forever to read. This is not a remark on its readability or how much I enjoyed it - stuff just kept getting in the way. Books kept bumping it off the list of three books I was currently reading - once because a book came in from the library that had a long line of holds behind it, so I had to read it quickly, and once because it came around to being my turn to moderate a discussion in a group here on Goodreads, and I felt I should, you know, read the book I was moderating the discussion about.

So, through no fault of its own, Altered Carbon languished in limbo there for a while.

But I'm finally done it, and yeah, that was a damn fine book.

It's science fiction noir, and Morgan has a nice touch of both noir phrasing and overly-complicated noir plotting. I really didn't see the intricacies of the story until they were laid out, but it never worried me. I enjoyed being plunged into the confusing world that Takeshi Kovacs wakes up in, with little more information than he had.

Takeshi Kovacs was arrested in a bust. The sentence? Being put "on stack" - to have his downloaded personality put on hold for a sentence of up to 100 years, while someone else gets to use his body to be "resleeved" - to get back corporeality after dying in an accident, or being released from a sentence of their own. Or just for kicks, for the rich, a spare body to wear to fashionable occasions.

Resleeving is the core of this novel, the ways in which it could be exploited, who might be doing the exploiting, the disorientation of waking up in a body you don't know, the ways you might trip over the body's former occupant.

Kovacs finds himself resleeved on another planet - Earth - his time and body bought and paid for by a local rich man who can't believe he committed suicide, and wants Kovacs to get to the bottom of it. Kovacs follows this trail of bodies, treasured, used, and discarded down dark alleys and into sleazy joints, negotiating his new body as he tries to negotiate an entirely foreign world.

The mystery is quite satisfying. But it is the world Morgan creates here, the ethical, religious, and practical considerations of a world where it is very hard for death to be final, and bodies can be disposable. Life is still valuable, but what carries it around might not be.