Hard Revolution

This is one of the best books I have ever read. It is set in D.C. during the 1960's at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The main characters are everyday people of different races and the plot is moved along by their interactions. Hard Revolution gives an incredible perspective on human relationships,especially in terms of race/ class relationships. Read this book. I cannot say enough...

"Hard Revolution" is apparently part of a "prequel" trilogy that will provide the backstory to the Derek Strange we've met in Pelecanos' recent series of novels. The book gives the texture of DC in a way that's recognizable to someone like me who lived there well after 1968. It also captures the way people were thinking and talking about race at that time. One drawback is that someone who hasn't lived in DC (or hasn't ventured East of the Park or North of Logan Circle) will not get the geography. I used to live in Adams Morgan and worked up near Silver Spring & Shepherd Park, so the action takes place in neighborhoods and streets I came to know very well. But someone else is likely to be miffed, in places. The plot really takes a backseat to the characters and the 1968 riots provide a temporal anchor to the story rather than being its main focal point. In many ways, placing the the riots in a largely secondary role (while priming us for them with the recurring mentions of Dr. King) makes this stronger as a work of historical fiction--we are left to figure out what was happening without someone trying to hit us over the head with "heavy" explanations. At the heart of this are relationships--between Strange and his brother; between the brother and a couple small time hoods; and among a parallel group of three white hoods of similar age. The interconnectedness of the African-American community in Washington and the connections between the African-American characters with various whites also play a big part. The ambiguity and contradictions that frame peoples' ideas about race and their relations with people from a different race are all real and have seldom been described with such meaning and depth, particularly by a white writer. Pelecanos is one of the few really prolific mystery writers whose work has continued to grow and develop without outgrowing his characters or plots. I look forward to whatever comes next.

This fourth book in the Derek Strange cycle (Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, and Soul Circus precede it), finally takes longtime readers of Pelecanos to an event we've been waiting for him to deal with: Washington, D.C.'s 1968 riots. I wasn't even born until a few years after the riots, but growing up in D.C., it was hard to miss the physical and psychic scars they left on the city. Once again Pelecanos brilliantly uses the pulp crime novel as a vehicle for his sociocultural history of Washington, D.C. This is one of his best works yet, acting as a prequel to the Strange series while seamlessly taking on issues of race, what it means to be a man, duty, and the nobility of work. The story opens with Derek Strange passing from childhood to adolescence in 1959, running around his Northeast neighborhood where white and black kids uneasily co-exist. His best friend is a Greek boy whose father owns the diner where Derek's father sweats over the grill. These seventy pages introduce almost all the dramatis personae of the main part of the book, including Derek's family (mother, father, older brother), the no-good Martini brothers, Detective Frank Vaughn and his family, and two racist gearheads named Buzz and Stu. A final character is the city itself, which is undergoing transformation as postwar integration brings demographic changes with it. There's a little heavy handedness, when Derek gets caught shoplifting and a store owner's lecture sets him on the right path, but for the most part this part is a carefully crafted kaleidoscopic tour of the people and places that will come into play nine years later. Part Two takes place in the spring of 1968, during the weeks preceding the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and into the riots that broke out in response. The intervening decade or so has seen Derek grow up to become a police officer (as has his best friend, Lydel Blue), doing his best to protect and serve while being called an Uncle Tom by a lot of his people. Meanwhile his slacker older brother Dennis has drifted in a haze of revolutionary rhetoric and heavy pot smoking. Dennis wants to better himself, but is hobbled by seeing oppression everywhere and a lack of inner strength, and gets caught up in the small-time plots of his unsavory drug friends. The Martini brothers went to Vietnam and only one came back, while Buzz and Stu are spinning their wheels in the same old places, albeit in new rides. As the city simmers in the summer heat and racial tensions mount, the petty half-baked schemes of Buzz and Stu and Dennis' so-called friends start to take shape. The two Strange brothers find their lives intersecting with two armed robberies just as the city explodes in a cathartic orgy of burning and looting. Meanwhile, Det. Vaughn is combing the streets for whomever killed a young black student in a hit and run. These storylines all coalesce into a bloodbath that is punctuated by the riots. The riots are ably described, although Pelecanos' prose lo

This is the first of George Pelecanos' novels I've had the pleasure of reading. I picked it up based on the two pages of blurbs at the front of the book. I expected crime fiction, and hoped for an intelligent read. My expectations and hopes were met, but "Hard Revolution," is much more than crime fiction. Three-quarters of the way through I started thinking about awards. "Hard Revolution," should be a definite contender, if not winner of the Edgar, but that's to cement this effort in a category it transcends. Seems to me "Hard Revolution," should be up for a National Book Award, or Pulitzer. I won't provide a plot summary as other reviewers have more than adequately covered that ground. Mr. Pelecanos gives us a character study in which he proves he knows what makes people tick, a crime story that moves with true motivation, and a particularly troublesome piece of American history. The only character problem I saw was the all-abiding goodness of Darius and Alethea, the protagonist's parents. But even their goodness allowed for a certain edge that kept them believable. It may be more my cynicism than the author's failing. There may be four or five pages in this book - toward the end - that give us a little more detail of the destruction of the DC riots in 1968, but in defense of those pages Mr. Pelecanos does well in making the streets familiar enough that maybe we'd want to know what happened to the various businesses that were torched and looted. I've learned "Hard Revolution," is a prequel to a series of novels centered around DC and the life and times of Derek Strange. I look forward to catching up! Highly recommended to those who are interested in a good novel.

There is a certain sense of realism in the books of George Pelecanos which hits right to the heart of the human emotion. The characters are sparked with the heat of life in situations that reek of reality. Pelecanos novels jump around in time but place seems quite stable with a Washington DC setting. In this case we are in the year 1959 and 1968- a time of great turmoil and change in the civil rights movement. HARD REVOLUTION is a multifaceted story with several subplots occurring at the same time. Derek Strange is a police officer just getting his feet wet as a rookie in the edgy black section of DC. He worries about his older brother who runs with the wrong crowd, yet, is trying to rehabilitate himself but may not have the moral fortitude to do so. Detective Frank Vaughn looks for the killers of a young black man- the victim of a hit and run. While the three killers plan a robbery they hope will make them enough to ease their financial woes. All this is told with the background of the civil rights movement and the neighborhood which is like a powder keg ready to explode. Movies and pop songs give the story its timeline, as well as its character. Nobody can argue with the writing skills of George Pelecanos. He is right up there with James Lee Burke in being one of the most technically perfect writers in the genre. It is the characters which give his books such a distinguished aire. The stories move quickly and all characters are humanized- the bad and the good and that is rare indeed. One of the year's best as usual with Mr. Pelecanos.