Devil in a Blue Dress is the story of Easy Rawlins, a black day laborer who becomes a hard-boiled private eye. Rawlins becomes tangled up in the web of femme fatale Daphne Monet, a damsel in distress who is in actuality a black woman named Ruby passing for white and working as a thief. The novel deals with gender relations, blackness, racism, and the deconstruction of the archetype of the private eye.