It was only a matter of time before someone put Walter Mosley on screen. His picturesque, gritty crime fictions look to be tailor-made for film, offering all sorts of possibilities for set-dressers and costumiers alike. Thus his 1990 debut was quickly sold to Jonathan (The Silence of the Lambs) Demme. Five years on the finished product arrives, now executively produced by Demme, with both script and directorial duties handed to actor-turned-director Carl Franklin, the debutante behind 1991's brilliant interracial noir One False Move. In his more than capable hands Mosley's dark, convoluted thriller has excitingly made the transition to film with almost all of its contradictions and subtexts intact.

It's Los Angeles, 1948. Easy Rawlins (Denzil Washington) is a black war veteran fired from his job with an aircraft manufacturer. Easy is self-sufficient, a man who has tried to make something of himself in this racially-charged atmosphere. He needs a job.

Drinking in a bar one day he's offered one by the mysterious DeWitt Albright -- find the beautiful Daphne Monet, girlfriend of an erstwhile challenger for Mayoral office, and a white woman with a taste for "jazz, pig's feet and dark meat". He scents a $100 is never as easily earned as it looks but needs Albright's cash. All too soon Easy Rawlins finds himself knee-deep in blackmail and murder, with himself as suspect.

Devil is Easy Rawlins' birth as a series P.I. On its surface Mosley's novel is classic hard-boiled stuff, all Hammett and Cain and Chandler, women poured into tight dresses and men in serious hats. But all this is built on the shifting sands of post-war race relations. Blacks, for all they are tolerated in the West Coast sunshine, are still very much an underclass. Easy is unusual, he owns property, he has a mortgage, but as still very much a black householder is fair game for the vicious, racist cops all too ready to pin a murder on a guilty-looking (i.e. black) man.

Washington may not be the obvious candidate for Easy, but slips into the part like it was written for him. He hasn't done much better work. (He apparently canvassed for the part as a Mosley fan.) Even so, he's the body around which Mosley's more exotic characters get to orbit: Jennifer Beals is perfect for Daphne, key to the novel's central conundrum, and Maury Chaykin's corpulent pederast, though seldom seen, lingers on the mind. But the film is stolen by Don Cheadle's Mouse, all laughing, gold-capped teeth, a hair-trigger psychopath from Easy's past reluctantly called in when things get heavy; and Tom Sizemore (excellent in Mann's Heat) as the almost equally unpredictable Albright.

Demme's regular cinematographer Tak Fujimoto handles the camera duties with characteristic skill; Franklin's film is seldom lush, more often coarse, bleached in the powerful Los Angeles sun. And Elmer Bernstein contributes a typically sharp, clean score, augmented with a well chosen string of jazz and Blues (Monk, Ellington, Witherspoon, et al).

Franklin is about eliciting a credible atmosphere, and at its best his film recalls nothing so much as the sexual/political intricacies of Polanski's masterpiece, Chinatown. Thankfully, like the novel, the social commentary is not bolted-on but allowed to grow organically from the material at hand. The point, then, is subtly but forcefully made in a film that finally puts the black in film noir. If there's a series in here, there'll be little cause for complaint.