Hard Revolution by
George Pelecanos
pbk out January 05
(Phoenix)
at £6.99
Washington USA, Spring 1968: Roberta Flack is singing at Mr.Henry's; James
Coburn's new movie, Waterhole No.3, is showing around town; Stokely Carmichael,
advocate of Black Power, is also in town, whilst young blacks are reading Soul on Ice,
a collection of essays by ex-convict Eldridge Cleaver. Meanwhile Martin Luther King
has just announced his March on Washington, a march he was destined never to lead.
On the streets we meet Derek Strange, Pelecanos's most recent series character, at an
earlier stage of his career, a member of what his militant older brother Dennis calls
"the occupying army", one of the few blacks in the police force of a city where blacks
already outnumber whites by four to three.
Pelecanos himself was about eleven years old when these events took place.
Even so, through much diligent research that included interviews with participants in
the events he describes, he has put together, in the form of a crime novel, a book that
is nothing less than a hugely ambitious fresco of life in Washington at a crucial point
in its history.
Typically Pelecanos approaches his apocalyptic subject in anything but
apocalyptic fashion. At the core of his plot are two casually criminal gangs, one black
and one white, both loose associations of former teenage friends. The first gang, led
by black hoodlum Alvin Jones, is using a reluctant Dennis Strange to case a local food
store for a planned robbery. The white gang, led by Motown fan Buzz Stewart, also
has robbery in mind. But drunk and in defiance of the rising resistance of the black
community, together they run down and kill a young black man walking peacefully
home at night. The consequences of
these actions come to a head in a splendidly engineered climax that takes place
amongst the riots in Washington, a direct consequence of the assassination of Martin
Luther King in Memphis in early April 1968.
But such a plot summary does no justice to the extent of the Pelecanos canvas.
At every stage, sometimes slowing the pace of the book, Pelecanos is concerned to
explore, within both communities, the background, thoughts and motivations of his
cast of characters. As always in this series Derek Strange, though flawed, is the moral
centre of the novel. But here his example is thrown into relief by the problems of his
brother Dennis, struggling to rescue himself from the bad decisions he has
made in his life. Ranged alongside are fine portraits of such as seasoned white cop
Frank Vaughn, with contacts in both white and black communities, and the ex-
Vietnam veteran Dominic Martini, coping with his own rejection by the white
community that he thought he had served.
What the book loses in pace therefore, it gains in complexity. Music for instance,
always vividly foregrounded in Pelecanos stories, is used not only to root the action in
its time and place, but more cleverly, to show the contradictions in white characters
such as the unthinkingly racist Buzz Stewart, racist, yet enamoured of the great black music
of the time as it moves into the mainstream. A particularly brilliant move is the
seventy-page prologue, depicting not only many of the book's characters three years
earlier, but also illustrating the attitudes and feelings of a previous generation.
At the close of the book, Derek Strange becomes involved in an incident of cold
violence and is forced into a momentous decision about his future. The riots have
been necessary, Pelecanos seems to be suggesting, but the hard revolution, the battle
for hearts and minds, must still be fought. This is Pelecanos back in the epic form of
The Big Blowdown and The Sweet Forever. Essential reading.
Hard Revolution by
George Pelecanos
