I was drawn to this novel by the fact that George P. Pelicanos is one of the key writers on HBO’s brilliant ‘The Wire’.
The drama of this fine novel unfolds slowly; you have to wait until past the novel’s half way point to reach the “senseless death on a sunny afternoon” referred to in back cover blurb.
As in ‘The Wire’ , the tendency is away from Hollywood style sensationalism and towards an exploration of all the intricacies that lie behind real life dramas. After the killing itself our patience is rewarded with the following purple passage:
“Because of the numbing consistency of the murder rate, and because lower-class black life held little value in the media’s eyes, the violent deaths of young black men and women in the district of Columbia had not been deemed particularly newsworthy for the past fifteen years. ……………..Suburban liberals plastered Free Tibet stickers on the bumpers of their cars, seemingly unconcerned that just a few short miles from the White House, American children were enslaved in nightmare neighborhoods, living amid gunfire and drugs and attending dilapidated schools. The nation was outraged at high school shootings in white neighborhoods, but young black men and women were murdered without fanfare in the nation’s capital every single day”
This kind of explicit commentary is not particularly representative of the novel as a whole but sums up the underlying philosophy behind it. There’s a rage but also a compassion for the criminals as well as for the victims of crime. It’s a world where the ‘good guys’ (private investigators Derek Strange and Terry Quinn) struggle under the weight of the moral dilemmas they are faced with. Pelicanos makes no bones about the fact that the drug culture and criminal world offers a fatal attraction for those from impoverished backgrounds. He points no finger of blame at those who adopt this path. He suggests that only the qualities of strength of character and sheer bloody mindedness are likely to turn things around.
Pelicanos is never glib or simplistic – he gives an uncompromising depiction of a fucked up urban landscape with the barest semblance of order and structure. He gives an unflinching insight into the warts and all reality of the modern world but still manages to leave the reader with a glimmer of optimism.
