"What is happening with our children?" was the question that inspired Henning Mankell’s Gold Dagger-winning Sidetracked. Here’s a Stateside contribution to the debate.
The book is dedicated to Dennis K. Ashton Jnr, "seven years old, shot to death on June 27, 1997, by a criminal with a handgun in Washington DC." That of course, sets up an argument too often thrashed out in simplistic extremes: Hollywood and hip-hop on one hand, poverty and hand-guns on the other. Pelecanos is clearly in the latter camp, but the second book in the Derek Strange series sets out to show that the situation is far more complex than that - and in the process delivers a book that packs a powerful punch.
Just another day in down-town Washington DC? A black teenage hoodlum and his gang is owed $100. A long-time friend asks Derek Strange to investigate a prospective son-in-law. Side-kick Terry Quinn is working with a couple of independent investigators who specialise in the location and rescue of under-age prostitutes. Meanwhile Strange and Quinn, in their spare time, along with those black fathers striving to give their kids an alternative to the gang culture that beckons on every side, coach a local kids' football team. Just another day? Not quite. For these commonplace events will finally culminate in yet another tragic, avoidable death of a black youngster - and the waste of several others.
Pelecanos depicts a nightmare world where the wrong kind of body language can mean the difference between life and death, his characters caught forever between a rock and a hard place, where even doin’ the right thing, as Spike Lee once had it, is not enough. You must take sides. It’s a world where even the Pelecanos musical references lend weight to the argument, for instance Stevie Wonder’s "Heaven is Ten Zillion Light Years Away", Teddy Pendergrass singing "the world won’t get no better if we just let it be".
Nor is this (except in racial terms) a world of black and white. Everyone has their reasons, even Granville Oliver, drug king-pin of the locality. Most striking of all is Garfield Potter, the leader of the teenage gang. On the surface foul-mouthed and mean, he is also intelligent and entrepreneurial. Later revelations will add an even more human dimension showing him also as much victim as perpetrator.
It’s a pity that the female victims, as depicted in the Quinn investigation, are not given equal weight. Even so, the plot strand does serve to shift the moral focus to Strange himself. A user of prostitutes, he too must confront his own contradictions.
It’s another low-key masterpiece from Pelecanos, vital and thought-provoking, his gifts in both tight narrative and spot-on fluorescent dialogue always well displayed. One more for the collection.