Tangled Web UK Review November 2000
The Big Blowdown by
George Pelecanos
pbk out August 00
(Serpents Tail)
at £10
At last, the first book (published last in the UK) of the DC Quartet,
George Pelecanos’s cherishable and never less than top-notch series.
You can see the problem. Word of mouth is building on Pelecanos,
sales too perhaps as the first three Nick Stefanos PI novels are
published. Then George delivers this one. It’s quite a stretch from the
small victory against the drug cartels in 90’s Washington that concludes
Down By The River Where the Dead Men Go to 1933 and the story of
childhood friends Pete Karras and Joe Recevos, as they grow apart and
then later, inevitably, clash. Hardly any wonder that Serpent’s Tail
elected to go with the fluorescent, ‘70’s set, effortlessly hip King
Suckerman, number two in the series. Absolutely no reason however why
you should go the same route. Indeed there is much to be gained from
reading them in the order as written.
“I’m writing about my neighbours,”said Pelecanos in an
interview earlier this year. Not to mention his family and forbears too.
For much of the background that lends such indelible authenticity to his
books (and especially this one) is derived from his own family history,
firstand second generation immigrants from Sparta in Greece. Pelecanos
plunges us (literally, for in the first chapter the young Peter Karras,
the father of Dmitri in the later books, learns to swim, like everything
in his life – the hard way) into a world whose early loyalties become
unreliable, frayed by time and circumstance.
The novel is once again lucid on the choices that have to be
made as both Peter and Joe tangle with the criminal world, Peter paying
a terrible price for his refusal to turn his back on old friends and
people like himself, struggling to maintain honour and self-respect in a
corrupt, unbending world. Once again music and movies play an important
role, both defining their times and as short-cut clues to character. You
can tell, however (key bebop figure Tadd Dameron, for instance, is
unfortunately rendered as Ted!) that Pelecanos is less comfortable with
the pre-rock’n’roll era.
Pelecanos writes plainly, but powerfully, and with an eye for
the precise defining detail. Like his heroes Goodis and Willeford, he
hits all the right buttons. And when the time comes for violent, bloody
confrontation, neither his people (remember Thermopylae?) or his prose
are found wanting.
This is a novel with a wonderfully detailed, extensive cast, a
large canvas both in space and time, not to mention a vibrant and
beating heart: it has the epic feel of Leone’s Once Upon A Time In
America. It’s the perfect opening volume for the three that follow (King
Suckerman, The Sweet Forever, and Shame the Devil). Listen carefully and
you can just about hear a haunting score by Morricone (or should that be
Theodorakis?).
(
Bob Cornwell
)
