>From: William Denton <
buff@pobox.com>
>I finished Mr. Pelecanos's DOWN BY THE RIVER WHERE
THE DEAD MEN GO
>(1995) today.
This was the first book by Pelecanos I read and is still my
favorite. It's very dark, especially the end, but I really
liked it. I really enjoyed the feeling that you'd been
dropped into another person's life. He does things outside of
his "work" on the case, but it doesn't feel like it's
shoehorned into the narrative, like a lot of detective
fiction that includes the detective's private life.
My two favorite scenes: where Stefanos has dinner with his
girlfriend's parents, and gets a private lecture that starts
with, "You're an alchoholic, Nick." The other scene is where
he meets with a young black man, the boyfriend of the
victim's sister. Though the boyfriend "dissed" Nick at their
first meeting, he's also working a menial fast-food job so he
can support his child with the sister, so Nick understands
that he's a man who takes care of his responsibilites, and
they relate man-to-man. I think this
"be a man" theme runs through much of Pelecanos' fiction,
especially THE BIG BLOWDOWN, where Pete Karras thinks of
himself as just the crippled cook in a greasy spoon, but all
his friends see him as a pillar of the community.
Incidentally, you're right about Nick's appearance in SWEET
FOREVER. And while RIVER ends very darkly, SHAME THE DEVIL
ends with hope, for both Nick and his friend Dmitri
Karras.
(As you may have guessed, I am a big Pelecanos fan.)
Graham
----------------- http://www.BleekerBooks.com
Hardboiled and Noir
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 19 Dec 2001 EST