Hard Revolution: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ George Pelecanos (Author) "DEREK STRANGE GOT down in a three-point stance..." (more)
Key Phrases: open bay door, colored guy, black cop, Derek Strange, Darius Strange, Dennis Strange (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author's admirers are familiar with middle-aged black PI Derek Strange, featured in several novels (Soul Circus, etc.) so strong that one critic has dubbed Pelecanos the Zola of contemporary crime fiction. This memorable tale is a prequel to those novels, set in Washington, D.C., mostly just before and during the 1968 riots sparked by the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. The first few chapters, though, unfold in 1959, introducing major characters whose paths will entwine later: Derek-who's nabbed for shoplifting but given a break that will set his life on a (more or less) law-abiding pat-hand his older brother, Dennis; their hardworking parents; and some ancillary figures. By 1968, Derek is a young cop partnered with a white guy; Dennis is a pot-smoking slacker; and many of their acquaintances from '59 are working dead-end jobs with an eye toward crime. The ensuing narrative swirls around two scenarios: a plan by Dennis and two street-thug pals to rob a local Greek-owned store (Pelecanos wrote extensively about D.C.'s Greek community in early novels, and many of the nonblack characters here are Greek-American) and a plot by three young white hoods to rob a bank, but only after they drunkenly kill a young black man for sport. The action is fueled by the heat of race relations, which Pelecanos explores with acuity-particularly in his portrayal of Derek, who as a black cop is considered an enemy by many other blacks. Written in rich, observant prose, the novel is a brilliant study of a society tearing apart as racial tensions escalate after the King killing; no wonder some observers have pointed to Pelecanos as the kind of thriller writer who should be nominated for a National Book Award.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Pelecanos first introduced a 50-something Derek Strange in Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, and Soul Circus. Hard Revolution takes us back in time and juxtaposes Derek's childhood with his early years as a cop. Pelecanos, a hard-boiled crime writer, sets this novel, like his previous ones, in a gritty, violent, and racist Washington, D.C. He makes no excuses for the era or place, describing the city and its workings in detailed, urgent, and often offensive prose. It's not a page-turner, but rather a window into the hope--and despair--of an era. The characters seek redemption, but don't always find it. At heart, notes The New York Times Book Review, the story speaks to "the ways Americans love, betray, help and cannot help one another."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316608971
• ISBN-13: 978-0316608978
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #761,568 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This is item 4 in The Derek Strange Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Social issues, day to day life, and hard crime, March 29, 2004

By	LGwriter "SharpWitGuy" (Astoria, N.Y. United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

George Pelecanos is one of those writers you start reading and then in spite of having to take out the garbage, or check the parking meter, or pop a prescription pill, you can't put the book down. What he does is hook you by making his characters so fleshed out, so well drawn, so real, that it's all you can do to stop--even if your wife, husband, girlfriend, or boyfriend is yelling at you because they need something immediately.

Hard Revolution, set in the late 50s, then the late 60s around Pelecanos' neck of the woods, Washington DC, seamlessly fuses a tale of social issues, day to day life of the working class, and hard crime. It does this by focusing on, as noted, the characters. Pelecanos does this a whole lot better than a slew of other writers working today. It's the characters that drive the situations they're in--whether they create the situations, or are forced into them, or stumble upon them.

Derek and Dennis Strange, brothers, are anything but two peas in a pod. The sons of a solid black working class couple, they live their lives the way they see fit. Dennis drifts--by the time the main action gets underway--1968--he's a VietNam vet and is directionless. This prompts him to move in drug circles, with those a lot nastier and more violent than he is. After getting caught by the proprietor of the store he tried to steal from when a kid, Derek gets his life straight and becomes one of the first black cops on the DC force.

No Pelecanos novel would exist without Greek characters and they're here too. But more than that are three lowlife white guys (Buzz and Dominic are two of the names, instantly giving you a sense of the time) whose actions ignite the black-white tension that forms the crux of the novel. Martin Luther King figures prominently here, so Pelecanos has made this far more than a crime novel--although crime itself is present, thanks to both the white and the black guys who just have to get what they want right away, whether it's the murder of an innocent black teenager, or the theft of a piece of jewelry.

One of the author's trademarks is definitely in evidence here as well--the music of the time. While this can even be slightly annoying (over and over, he quotes the name of the song and of the artist who sang it, listened to by a number of characters), eventually you really sink into the feel of the street in 60s DC, the atmosphere of the time, the rhythm of day to day life.

And in fact it's the description of this day to day life at which Pelecanos excels, and because of which this is such a compelling read. It's not so much the minutiae that he describes, but the way the characters respond to very select details of their lives as they're lived that gives this novel its meat and flavor both. When crime does erupt, it's sudden and violent and inevitable and intense, and at the same time it's what you KNOW will happen because it's what the character who's committed it HAS to do.

This is a great, immensely satisfying novel that is a solid addition to the Pelecanos canon. Highly recommended.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pelecanos's Best Yet, October 17, 2004

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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 loses its verve and lapses into clipped reportage reads like a dry newspaper account. Still, if you've never read about the riots, this will give you a sense of the chaos and senselessness of it all. (For a more complete picture, track down a copy of Ten Blocks From the White House.)

Other subplots involve Derek's attempt to make up his mind about Carmen, his childhood sweetheart and former girlfriend, and his uneasy relationship with his liberal white partner. Of course there's all the usual Pelecanos pop-culture stuff, cars, bars, movies (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly plays a prominent role), and especially music (there are loads of discussions of soul, R&B, Motown, Stax, Volt, as well as many props given to DC-rocker Link Wray and his Raymen). At the end of the day, this is a brilliant book, not only because of its value as a cultural portrait of the real Washington, D.C., but for its discussion of race. Derek and his partner like and respect one another, but it takes them a while to realize that even with all the best intentions, one can never know what it is to walk in another man's shoes. There's also a very strong message embedded about the dignity and value of work--in this book, doing your job well is sometimes its own reward. This is a mature novel, one that deserves to break out of the crime shelves and into general readership--great stuff.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pelecanos continues to amaze, December 20, 2004

By	Richard A. Jenkins "Richard A. Jenkins" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"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.