George Pelecanos. Hard Revolution

The writer George Pelecanos, recently involved in the production of the very successful HBO series The Wire, belongs to a generation which can be defined as crime driven realists. Most of his fiction is taken from crime scenes, the result of social devastation, lacking education and a profane and established cruelty. This kind of literal production would be discriminated if it was reduced to crime fiction. Especially Pelecanos is known as a very naturalistic observer of social living conditions and their influencing force on human action. With Hard Revolution Pelecanos has chosen a more complex and traumatizing subject: The riots in Washington D.C. as an aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968.

The book starts with an introduction of the main characters in 1959, when they were young and playing together. Two worlds were very clean separated by race, although there had been contact and some social relations. After a cut it goes on in 1968. We see Derek Strange, a coloured young man who decides to take the profession of a policeman and becomes a witness of the deteriorating development of former playmates, white guys, and his own brother. Most of them had served in Vietnam and came back with drug problems and a loss of values, now looking for the idle and cheap way of living. Derek suffers with his own family from the same problem his bother Dennis has. Latter gets killed by black friends, who tried to arrange a robbery but the shop owner was warned by Dennis. White guys around Dominic kill a black guy in a hit and run set up, done without purpose and symbolizing a growing racial hate on the white side.

At the end all cases get solved in the middle of the street fights and lootings which are followed of the broadcasted assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis. Especially the black quarters and suburbs in Washington D.C. become scenery of rioting young black folks, hundreds of police squads and later the National Guard send by President Johnson restoring order by firm action. The story of the families acting differently which was told before the escalation of everything with the political uproar ending in criminal deeds, is creating a very well woven tension. All the time the reader knows that there will be no happy end, that the process of emancipation of the black people will be counteracted by the losers of the white working class milieu, that the pride and self esteem of the well doing und successfully operating young black people will be destroyed for a long time by the own fellows who prefer crime and destruction.

With Hard Revolution Pelecanos has produced an intriguing picture of the year 1968 in Americas capital, and his many notes on black music give the reader an underlining soundtrack of these shaking times, wild, but everything else than glorious.