Savages - Don Winslow

Savages (2010) comes between The Power of the Dog and The Cartel. It is connected in so far as it is set against the cartel wars in Mexico which are the subject matter of the two linked novels. Some of the key characters in those get a mention in this. Otherwise Savages is very different. The Power of the Dog and The Cartel are like James Ellroy on good cocaine rather than bad speed. Savages has flavours of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen and the texture of George V Higgins stripped down.
What? you wonder. Can you get more stripped down than George V? Winslow can. As The Donald might say, Bigly.


As an indication, we have 290 chapters in 302 pages. Some lines are so fragmentary they don't have full stops. Sometimes Winslow takes the time to explain the etymology of some of his acronyms. Ophelia's mom, for example, is Pacu - Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe. Others you are left to work out for yourself. Some passages are presented as movie script - a fun inside joke once you realise that Oliver Stone had bought the movie rights before Savages was even published. I have mentioned the Stone movie before. It's his best in twenty years and well worth a watch. But it's not as good as the novel.


Ben and Chon grow dope in South Orange County, the best dope on the market. Ben is a third world activist, Chon an ex-SEAL who has served in all the nastiest theatres of post-millennium war. Ben and Chon are best buds from childhood. They are both in love with Ophelia, who calls herself simply O. O loves them both equally.


But then the Baja Cartel seeks to muscle in on their action. Ben and Chon say no. They are happy to walk away and leave the Baja Cartel to it, but the Cartel says no. They want to market Ben's genetically modified blow. They want the boys' market, they want their people. And to make their point, they kidnap O and threaten to dismember her with a chainsaw.


Which is when things get really nasty...


The pace is relentless, the action bloody. Yet Winslow's gift is to stay perfectly balanced on the thin line between violence and schlock. Even the worst of the bad guys have backstory, people they love. The characterisation is rich and varied. It is, in short, a masterpiece.

The Double - George Pelecanos

Some people say George Pelecanos is best known as one of the writers on The Wire and, latterly, Treme.  I had definitely read at least one of his noir crime novels before then, but I'm damned if I can remember which one.  I think it might have been Soul Circus.  Anyhow, this is his latest, barely a year old, and it's a classic.

The Double is the second novel featuring Spero Lucas, ex-marine turned private investigator.  There are a number of storylines but the main one concerns a woman who had her painting (The Double) stolen by an ageing stud.  The title of the painting is a metaphor for the story.  It's not a double but the two sides of one man's personality, and hunting for it reveals the conflicting sides of Spero's personality, to him as well as to us.

Once you read Pelecanos's prose, you will recognise his dialogue in the TV series.  He has crafted a unique voice for himself, not so extreme as Ellroy, nor so flamboyant as Elmore Leonard, but crisp and hard and utterly compelling.  I get the impression Pelecanos is not as well known in the UK as he should be.  Now that Elmore has passed and Ellroy seems to have got stuck, there really is no better crime writer operating in the US today.

Unknown Man No. 89 - Elmore Leonard

This dates from 1977, the beginning of one of several golden periods for the late Leonard.  It is, as usual, a caper novel featuring assorted grifters and lowlifes.  This being a relatively early novel, it is set in Detroit where Leonard did most of his growing-up.

It scarcely needs saying, but it reads like a dream.  The premise is flimsy, inconsequential, but who cares?  The Elmore Leonard experience is totally immersive and credible for exactly as long as it takes to finish reading.  On reflection, I don't find the key characters sufficiently beguiling.  Jack Ryan, process server, is a returnee from an early (and rare) Leonard failure, 1969's The Big Bounce.  His antagonist, Mr Perez, is a super-smooth dodgy businessman whose practice was probably sneered at back in 1977 but which in Twenty-First Century Britain is celebrated in BBC1's daytime dross Heir Hunters.  The lucky legatee Denise is winning enough in her way, but it is the secondary characters who really catch the imagination: superfly Virgil Royal and his hapless brother-in-law Tunafish; Mr Perez's downhome hitman Raymond Gidre.  Technically, this is a fault that relatively early Leonard often has, but somehow it never dulls the enjoyment.

Raylan - Elmore Leonard

This is, by my calculation, Elmore Leonard's forty-fifth novel.  It is by no means Leonard's best work (my personal faves are Glitz and Cat Chaser) but Leonard is 86 years old now and is still the master of his game.  Nobody does it like Elmore does.

Raylan is, of course, Raylan Givens, protagonist of the wickedly-good TV series Justified, now coming up to its fourth season.  Raylan existed in fiction long before hitting the screen (Pronto and Riding the Rap in 1993 and 1995 respectively, plus the 2001 short story Fire in the Hole) but Raylan is a sort of novelisation of Justified season two (2011).

I say 'sort of' because it is the same yet different.  What we have here is really three novellas interwoven and, it has to be said, not very well.  The first story is about organ theft and would work well on TV.  The third story features the American fascination with high-stakes gambling and, if you're not American and don't share that obsession, pretty damn feeble, particularly since Raylan and Boyd are only peripherally involved at the denouement - literally spectators.  It is the second story, Harlan County resistance to opencast mining, that mirrors the second season of Justified.  But there are major differences: instead of the matriarch-dominated Bennett tribe, the mountain-owning crime clan are the patriarchal Crowes.  The sons have the same names - Dicky and Coover - but are nothing like the screen versions and, indeed, are only there to get shot.  The superficially acceptable face of big mining, Carol Conlan, is much more complicated in the book than she was on TV and is also despatched in a way I certainly don't recall from the gogglebox.

A curiosity, then, within the Leonard canon, but a decent read and another object lesson in style.