Right as Rain: Not quite but getting there

September 12, 2008...4:11 pm

Right as Rain: Not quite but getting there

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Title: Right as Rain
Author: George P. Pelecanos
Publication Year: 2001
Pages: 332
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
Count for Year: 50

How I discovered

I was introduced to this book a couple of weeks ago by an octogenarian named Joe DeFillipo from our town’s men’s chorus of which we are both members. He has introduced me to a few mystery/crime novelists with whom I was unacquainted, including Bill Pronzini and M.C. Beaton. While I have read a few of Beaton’s Agatha Raisin series, which I enjoyed, I have only read one of Pronzini’s books because our library doesn’t have the early ones in Pronzini’s Nameless Detective series (I am a stickler for reading series in order and not missing anything). When he told me about Pelecanos, Joe said Pelecanos wrote about D.C. and pulled no punches on race relations there. “Gritty” is how I think he described it.

The setup

Derek Strange is an ex-cop who’s making a good living with his own business, a detective agency called Strange Investigations. A new case hits him close to home: A police officer has been slain by another policeman in a confusing late-night clash, and the dead officer’s mother asks Strange to help make sense of the killing. That mother’s request sends Strange into the darkest chasms of the D.C. underworld, where police officers and criminals operate by their own secret laws, and where human life is sometimes of less consequence than cash, drugs and other forms of currency.

Strange is joined in his quest by Terry Quinn, the officer who was exonerated in the police inquiry into the shooting but who is still haunted by that terrifying night. Together Strange and Quinn confront the ravages of an unquenchable drug trade, the realities of race in the capital police force, and some of the most implacable, dead-eyed killers ever to haunt the pages of a novel.

From the book jacket

So was it “gritty” and did it live up to the hyperbole mentioned in the latter part of that last sentence? Yes and no. First, yes, the book was gritty, as suggested by Joe, in its depiction of life in the city. Since he began this series, Pelecanos has been a writer for the HBO series The Wire and the grit he exhibits in his characters and setting here in this first book are a foreshadowing I believe of what he would use later on the show set in nearby Baltimore.

But no, I don’t think the killers were as haunting as suggested by the book jacket. Yes, they were “dead-eyed” but not in the sense of “ever to haunt the pages of a novel.” The killers, in this case, are a father and son duo named Earl and Ray Boone, methhead rednecks in the hills of Virginia– and while they were bad, I’ve read of worse characters.

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Maybe it was just because I had been reading Great Expecations when I started it, but the first thing that jumped out at me was the language, as in vulgarity. It slapped me in the face for the first few pages, altough now that I look back at it, it wasn’t like it was the movie Midnight Run in which the f-bomb was dropped 119 times! In fact, I only counted one f-bomb in the first chapter. However, I think the vulgarity, again not that there was that much in comparison to other movies and books, helped set the tone that this wasn’t going to be your mother’s Miss Marple kind of mystery.

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Pelecanos broke up his chapters by scenes such as in a movie or a script, so it didn’t surprise me to learn that he was a writer for The Wire later. However, the choppiness sometimes took me a while to get used to. Also he put in scenes I felt could have been cut — for example, sections about Quinn and his girlfriend, which didn’t seem to help the flow of the story any. Maybe it was to help us get a feel for the character, but I don’t think it quite worked.

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My rating: 3.5/5 No, it wasn’t as good as promised, with blurbs from Elmore Leonard, Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane declaring the book “terrific” (Leonard), and Pelecanos “the best-kept secret in crime fiction– maybe all fiction” (Connelly) and “one of the best crime novelists alive” (Lehane). Personally, I enjoyed Connelly’s Harry Bosch more than Pelecanos’s Derek Strange. However, I still thought it was a good start to this series and decided to pick up Hell To Pay, the second in the series, from the library earlier this week to see if Pelecanos can “flesh out” Strange’s character a little more than he did here and continue to present that grittiness which I enjoyed in The Wire and also here.