George P. Pelecanos Nick's Trip 276 pp. Serpent's Tail UK
£7.99 / US $12.99 paperback ISBN 1-85242-562-8
Although this is the third of George P. Pelecanos's Nick
Stefanos novels to be published by Serpent's Tail,
chronologically speaking, it is the second in the
series.
Here, in Stefanos's first 'real' case, set a year after the
events related in the first novel, A Firing Offence, an old
friend, Billy Goodrich, turns up to ask for Nick's help in
finding his missing wife, April. While the case of the
missing wife is the pretext for Nick's trip, Stefanos
undertakes a number of other journeys during the course of
this investigation.
First there's the literal journey, which develops
chronologically fowards through the investigation, and
proceeds geographically south from Washington DC, as Stefanos
and Goodrich travel south, deep into the woods of Maryland,
to Tommy Crane's pig-farm...
Then there are Stefanos's other journeys: he journeys back in
time to reserches the temps perdu of his own youth,
recollecting the set lists of bands he went to see with now
lost friends, and recalling various youthful escapades,
usually enjoyed under the influence of more recreational
drugs than a member of the serious crime squad could swear
under oath to have found in your pocket.
While every Pelecanos novel is something of a journey around
Washington DC, in Nick's Trip it's fascinating to watch
Stefanos revisit the sites of his youth. Travelling to
Brooklands, now a poor black district, but once a 'nice' area
where his grandfather, 'Big Nick' had property, allows
Stefanos to reminisce about the pleasant Sunday strolls of
his childhood and to compare the new 'poorer, harder' DC with
the old.
Needless to say, there is a fair bit of drinking, lots of
driving around, and plenty of relationship stuff. Nick
Stefanos carries a lot of pschyo-baggage and rarely wastes an
opportunity to air his emotional laundry. Apart from the
'Greek' aspects which allow him to explore his relationship
with his ethnicity, and his grandfather, Big Nick (now
there's something for the Freudians), Stefanos has a habit of
re-running his childhood in his head. This tends to make him
something of a Peter Pan figure-in a sense he resists
'growing up' by continually seeking to return to the past-and
this fatherless private dick recalls some 'male bonding'
moments from his adolesence with an attention to detail that
is surely a cry for therapy. As he remarks to Billy Goodrich,
'I expected things to be like they were ... when we were
kids.'
Here too, as ever, the women who are close to Stefanos
fare reasonably well. Although Stefanos's old friend Jackie
tests Stefanos's capacity for male-female friendship to the
limit, she does provide the possibility of a soujourn to San
Fran at some later date. Meanwhile, his new friend Lyla
McCubbin, managing editor of DC This Week, can serve as both
a source of information for later investigations as well as
provide the love interest.
Pelecanos's writing is highly self-conscious, and this is
apparent in the way in which the first-person narrative
suffers from the all-too-present 'I'. For example, in one
passage of eleven consecutive sentences (pp. 42-43) narrator
Stefanos uses 'I' nine times. This serves to draw attention
to what can only be described as self-obsessed narration; it
is as if Stefanos/Pelecanos is trying just a bit too hard,
with the effect is that, in places, the story has something
of an
'over-written' feel to it. (There's also a highly improbable
telephone conversation with April Goodrich's doctor, if this
is the place to air such niggles). That said, the novel is
well plotted, thoroughly enjoyable and highly entertaining.
And Pelecanos's style does improve, as his later
work-especially the recently published King
Suckerman-attests.
If you've already read Pelecanos, you'll know exactly what to
expect: slickly written rites of retro-passage stuff, in
which we always know what every character in the scene is
wearing; and precisely what track is playing on the juke-box
or what cassette is currently in the tape machine.
If you haven't tried Pelecanos before, he's certainly well
worth reading, if only to see for yourself what all the fuss
is about (the truly brilliant Barry Gifford, for example,
declares in a blurb on the jacket, 'to miss out on Pelecanos
would be criminal'). And of course, to see how Stefanos
resolves the case of the missing wife, and to see how he
manages his various 'return journeys', both those that take
place in the past, and those in the present. Stefanos is
alright: anyone who kisses 'hello' as a wind-up deserves to
be given a chance.
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