What It Was - George Pelecanos

In the present day, two middleaged men chew the fat in a Washington bar.  Both are PIs from Pelecanos's earlier fiction - his original character, Nick Stefanos, and the post-Millennium character Derek Strange, this time without his partner Terry Quinn.

They reminisce about their youth, back in the Seventies, and Strange tells the tale of the notorious Red Fury who made a brief, spectacular name for himself in 1972.  The book is really about Red, as Pelecanos makes clear in the Intro - and Red is based on the real-life Cadillac Smith.  Strange is the right character to oversee Red's story because he, like Red, is black.  Red gets his handle from the reddish tinge of his distinctive Afro.

The 1972 Strange, four years out of the MPD and newly set-up as a PI, is drawn into Red's story by virtue of ring he is hired to find.  Pelecanos is really shrewd here, because commonsense tells us PIs are rarely hired to investigate killings.  The Homicide detective is Frank 'Hound Dog' Vaughan, a middleaged cop on the verge of retirement, thus making the circle with 2012 Strange and Stefanos.  Vaughn was Strange's partner back in '68, which again makes their cooperation in '72 sensible.

Vaughn is not the only one on the tail of Red Fury.  Red has caused a New York mobster to lose money and face, which is clearly not acceptable.  Red himself knows his days are limited.  The question is, who is going to get to him first?

Nobody writes dialogue as naturally and convincingly as Pelecanos.  Writing The Wire clearly honed his technique into a minor art form.  The characters, as ever, are compelling and multi-layered.  There is a slight problem structurally - he sets up Strange as the storyteller but immediately switches to third person for the story itself, allowing him to fully develop all his main characters.  He tries to resolve the problem with a jokey and unnecessary Outro, but for me that makes it worse.  What makes the novel sing, though, is the wonderful, encyclopedic period detail.  The beers, the cars, the fashions, the hairdo's and, above all, the music.

I have admitted in other reviews that I am not a big fan of the Derek Strange series.  But What It Was is nevertheless a reading treat.

The Cut - George Pelecanos

As usual, I'm reading the series the wrong way round.  This is the second Spero Lucas novel I've read in the last month or so, but this is his debut.  Luckily, Pelecanos is such a good writer that it makes no difference which way you read them.

Anyway Afghan vet and retriever of lost property Spero is asked by hippie defence lawyer Tom Petersen to find evidence to help the case of an underage driver who has crashed and killed his friend.   Success leads him to the boy's father, another of Petersen's clients, awaiting trial for dealing marijuana.  Here Pelecanos joins his friend and colleague David Simon's crusade to show the stupidity of America's War on Drugs - filling up prisons with nonviolent offenders.

Anyway, someone is stealing the dealer's deliveries and he asks Spero to recover the goods for his customary forty percent cut.  From this point on the ripples of the conspiracy spread wider and wider and the violence ratchets remorselessly up.

The Derek Strange series never really hooked me (Strange gets a witty nod in The Cut, almost an acknowledgement of shared DNA) but I find Spero Lucas properly compelling.  Perhaps it's the way he draws in his former comrades, now shattered one way or another.  The Afghan conflict, right or wrong, adds depth and tone which really chimes with me.