The Edge Online - Reviews: George P. Pelecanos

Right as Rain
George P Pelecanos
Orion, paperback, 298 pages, £9.99
Review by Hassni Malik (2001)

Contemporary Washington DC: In an opening shot straight out of the first scene of Chinatown we see Derek Strange, a middle aged black ex-cop turned Private Eye, with the bread and butter of the PI business: breaking the news of infidelity to a husband. Small time investigations with none of the paranoia and stress that cop life brought.

But all that changes when Leona Wilson comes to Strange to help clear the name of her disgraced dead son Christopher. He was a black cop spotted late one night out of uniform and holding a gun at a white man’s head. A passing patrol car swerves in, and white officer Terry Quinn sees what he's been programmed to see since the day he was born in a racially divided nation, and shoots Christopher dead.

An experienced man like Strange has the maturity to know when to walk away from a fight, and when to face it head on. He takes up Leona Wilson's plea and confronts a drug ravaged, racially ruined city that the politicians never even knew existed. An underbelly where even the skeletal junkies have their own circles of hell. Following through with the investigation Strange asks for the unlikely assistance of Terry Quinn, the very man who pulled the trigger. A tense partnership that evolves into mutual respect (something helped by some fine soul music and Morricone western music) and the simple understanding that they really are on the same side.

Now resigned from the force, Quinn works in the mundane world of a bookshop, but that adrenalin thrill of police work is something he could never shake off. Even a somewhat brash figure like him soon realizes he was made a patsy. Sometimes the colour of money speaks louder than the colour of skin, and no one not even a white man can get in the way.

Pelecanos’ new PI lives in a city in which the people are denied the sense of ‘self’ and are always defined by the colour of their skin. From the day they are born everyone in the town – like Chester Himes’ towns, a glorified prison – lives up to the stereotype because that’s what they’re expected to do. Even the ones who know what stupidity it is, like Quinn and Strange, remain imprisoned.

There is a sense of defeat in the characters, though Pelecanos draws them with great humanity (rather than morality), portraying all but the very worst as shades of grey. His style of writing has a great cinematic sweep to it, much in the way of writers like James Sallis, and, without resorting to sentiment, creates believable and convincingly flawed characters.