Abstract :
African American authors of detective fiction helped develop a new generation of the American detective novel, called the hard-boiled detective novel. While writers of the classical detective novel concentrated on solving the crimes and finding the criminal at the end of the novel, the writers of the new generation of detective fiction, mainly Black American authors, effected a significant change in this genre. They started using it to serve their ethnic social groups by highlighting the social problems that face them in America and presenting their viewpoints. This paper is an attempt at analyzing Walter Mosley s Devil in a Blue Dress as an example of American Hard-Boiled detective fiction. The theme, setting, and characters, in this novel, are typical and representative of their counterparts in other American hard-boiled detective novels by Black American authors. In its implications for the history and development of American detective fiction in general, this novel forms a kind of microcosm of the macrocosm of American hard-boiled detective fiction. These implications are explored in this paper in the light of Soitos tropes of black detective fiction. These tropes provide significant help in defining and explaining race conflict in American society between the blacks and the whites. When applied to the hard-boiled novel in question, these tropes help us see how the black characters in the novel, the detective persona included, are aware of being the Other, how they are affected by this awareness, and how the race conflict that results from this awareness leads to Crime.
