Commenting favorably on The Big Blowdown, Bill Denton had one
slight negative:
"The only thing I didn't like about it is due to personal
taste: I'm not a fan of the use of small chunks of narrative
sets years in the past to set up the later events. I like
things more continuous."
I remember this modernist feature, which slows things. At the
time I read the novel (couple years ago), I thought it was
really shaped like a naturalistic family saga, but
deliberately broken to mask that convention. The scope of Mr.
Pelecanos' Washington is so large, so much more fully
rendered than is typical of crime novels, that I wondered
whether the plotline evolved as he wrote, towards a blowdown.
However the plot was planned and written, it's a magnificent
achievement.
Bill Hagen
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