McCloud: 'Ain't That Just The Way' (1975)

McCloud: 'Park Avenue Pirates' opening credits (1975)


Barbi Benton: 'Ain't That Just The Way' (1976)

McCloud was an American TV show that lasted from 1970 to 1977, starring Dennis Weaver (who many remember from Steven Spielberg's 1971 debut, Duel) as a country marshal transferred to the crime-infested New York City; the basic premises of the series taken from Clint Eastwood's 1968 Coogan's Bluff. 'Ain't That Just The Way' by Barbi Benton (Hugh Hefner's former girlfriend) was heard in the 1975 episode 'Park Avenue Pirates'. Sheriffi McCloud being a popular show in Finland too, Benton's performance in the episode caught the attention of some local music biz people; with the subsequent translation version 'Näinkö meille täällä aina käy' by Virve Rosti becoming a big domestic hit in 1976.

The Wire and the Secrets of Nailgun Use

The Wire 4th season opening & intro

They are now showing in Finland re-runs of The Wire's fourth season on a channel called SubTV, and again in a ridiculous times slot (1:15 am between Wednesday and Thursday). Here is the hilarious opening scene to the first episode, where the tomboyish gangsta homegirl Snoop goes shopping for a nailgun for uses not exactly intended by the manufacturer...

The Wire has been one of the best shows (if not the best) on the idiot box these days, a realistic and cynical (but often peppered with humour and also some great dialogue and memorable characters) drama on the cat and mouse game between Baltimore cops and the drug lords of the ghettos; like a crash course to street sociology, the characters spanning from the lowest rung of society to its very highest; from the most miserable junkie to the greedy, opportunist politicians. Here's hoping they will show the fifth and final season here soon, but when the general emphasis of programming seems to be on the mind-numbing spectacle of Idols, it's better not to hold one's breath waiting.

Mika Waltari 100 Years

"So it has been and so it always will be."
- The motto from The Egyptian.

Today is the 100th anniversarsy of the birth of Mika Waltari (19 September 1908 - 26 August 1979), a Finnish writer (and national institution) best known for his extensive historical novels that are widely translated into many languages; the biggest favourite among readers continuously being Sinuhe Egyptiläinen ("The Egyptian", 1945), which is also known as less-than-successful Hollywood film version of 1954. Sinuhe was voted in April 2008 as the most loved Finnish book of all time.



Sinuhe Egyptiläinen/The Egyptian with the famous cover illustration by Björn Landström.


Telling something about the canonized position of Mika Waltari in Finland, even the domestic edition of Donald Duck dedicated its latest issue to the author's 100th anniversary.



The extremely prolific Mika Waltari was also a detective novelist, his Inspector Palmu books becoming a series of four films in the 1960s, directed by Matti Kassila and starring Joel Rinne as Palmu.


Komisario Palmu


Leo Jokela: 'Silmät tummat kuin yö', off Komisario Palmun erehdys (1960)





The first three films remain classics of Finnish cinema; less successful, though, was the last installment of the movie series, Vodkaa, Komisario Palmu (1969), the first to be filmed in colour and not based on any of Waltari's original books but only retaining their central characters; having as its tone campy agent comedy making fun of Finnish-Soviet relations and other phenomena of the day. An interesting curiosity, though:


Viktor Klimenko & Inga Sulin, off Vodkaa, Komisario Palmu (1969)


Potent Flash "commercial" from Vodkaa, Komisario Palmu (1969)

MikaWaltari100.net

Mika Waltari @ Kirjasto.sci.fi

The Streets of San Francisco

The Streets of San Francisco opening credits

More Streets of San Francisco clips @ YouTube

It's pHinnWeb's Couch Potato Time again! Nelonen, Finland's channel 4, has now shown almost the entire run of The Streets of San Francisco, an American cop show made from 1972 to 1977, based on the characters in Carolyn Weston's detective novel Poor, Poor Ophelia. Starring the old potato-nose Karl Malden as a no-nonsense, hard-driving but humane old-school cop called Mike Stone, and then-a-newcomer Michael Douglas as his youthful, more hip and educated partner and apprentice Steve Keller, this generation-joining combination was a sure-fire hit for TV ratings, and only flopped when Douglas, who wanted to concentrate on his career as a movie producer and film actor, was replaced in the last season by Richard Hatch (best known these days from Battlestar Galactica).

A lot of the series' charm lies in nostalgia, of course, from the rapid-fire-edit opening credits with its groovy blaxploitation wah-wah guitar-laden jazzy theme music and the pompous voiceovers (an emphatically masculine narrator announcing "A Quinn Martin Production!" and presenting the dramatis personæ and tonight's guest stars) you just don't hear any more these days; to the Zeitgeist and styles of the post-hippie Bay Area when even the "squares" had decided to let their hair down a bit: bushy haircuts, thick sideburns, flared trousers, wide ties and tight shirts, afros, belated hippie chicks, garish colours and naturally some unforgettable ocean liner-size pre-oil crisis Yankee cars. Not to mention the memorable San Fran scenery with its steep hills (ideal for car chase scenes, as we already learned from Steve McQueen's Bullitt in 1968) and Victorian architecture.

Part of the fun was spotting in the show many familiar faces of silver screen and TV, both past or future: Leslie "The Naked Gun" Nielsen, James Woods, Nick Nolte, Mark "Star Wars" Hamill, Sam Jaffe, Stefanie Powers, Martin Sheen, Tom "Happy Days" Bosley, Tom "Magnum P.I." Selleck, Larry "Dallas" Hagman, Paul Michael "Starsky & Hutch" Glaser, Joe Spano and James B. Sikking (both Hill Street Blues), Bill "Hulk" Bixby, Meg Foster... even pre-fame Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Though the years passed might have added some unintentional humor as to the show's looks, the tone of the series was far from camp. The detective pair Stone & Keller of Patrol Car 81 solved week after week crime cases involving the whole gamut of social scene: from the derelict areas of winos, youth gangs, prostitutes, runaway kids and drug dealers to the secluded world of the well-to-do, the rich, the celebrities and your usual bunch of greedy businessmen getting rid of their rivals by way of murder. Social agenda was high on the list when several storylines (many of them quite well-written in comparison to the more fluffy cop show fare) concentrated on the hapless murderers who ended up killing not by their innate evil but by some unfortunate circumstances caused by poverty and other social injustices.

Rather than being simply happy blowing the bad guy away in the climax, Stone and Keller always understood they had to deal with far more complicated causes and effects inevitably leading to tragedy; even though in most epilogues (adding to the series' charming old-fashioned style, each episode was divided into four "acts" and an epilogue) they left for home cracking ham-fisted jokes after having solved the case; Stone probably heading afterwards for a well-deserved snack of junk food and Keller to a football match with another foxy girlfriend of his. Vintage!

The Streets of San Francisco @ TV.com

The Wire Fourth Season Starts In Finland

The Wire: opening credits and an excerpt from an episode

The Wire, often called the best cop show of all time, starts its fourth season in Finland (6 October 2007, on MTV3, 1:10 am). But why the show is hidden here to a wolf's hour slot in the middle of night in between Saturday and Sunday is totally beyond me.

Kiss Me, Deadly

(Click here if you can't see this film trailer of Kiss Me, Deadly.)

The controversial American crime writer Mickey Spillane just died this week. Known for his extreme right-wing opinions and the violence, nihilism and misogynism of his books, the very persona of Spillane paints a bleak picture of the post-World War II American psychopathology. Though I've never read any of his books (and probably never will until I shall ever become even more cynical, jaded and vengeful than I already am), I've found Robert Aldrich's aptly hard-boiled 1955 adaptation Kiss Me, Deadly one of my favourite pieces of film noir. Reflecting the 1950s Zeitgeist of atomic paranoia and anti-Communism, and with its suitably apocalyptic climax when the nuclear(?) Pandora's box will finally be opened, this nihilistic journey of Spillane's sadistic and truly dislikeable anti-hero detective character Mike Hammer (played by Ralph Meeker) reveals something really fundamental about the mindset of this era. Va-va-voom!

There's hardly a more suitable director for this one than Robert Aldrich (1918-1983), known for his controversial films often verging on nihilism; the star-studded war movie Dirty Dozen (1967) probably the most famous of them. Aldrich's films are often about a group of tough, masculine men trying to survive in a harsh, violent environment but he also directed melodramatic (though not less cynical) psychodramas featuring women in such works as Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962), Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) or The Killing of Sister George (1968).

Back to Mike Hammer, a totally different Spillane adaptation is Richard T. Heffron's I, The Jury from 1982, with slick Armand Assante as Mike Hammer and one-time Bond girl Barbara Carrera as the female protagonist. In my teenage video nasty years I actually found this one quite entertaining with all its fast-paced gory action and sordid sex scenes (the plot involves a sex clinic with prostitute-like characters offering an interesting form of "therapy"). But then, the film was scripted by Hollywood's bad boy Larry Cohen, known for such cult shockers as It's Alive, with some social agenda full of satirical picks on consumerism and corporate values, so Cohen probably well understood the garish sleaziness hiding behind Spillanean gung-ho patriotic worldview. I haven't seen this film for years, though, so I can't really assess any of its worth now.



(Click here if you can't see this clip.)

Incidentally, the apocalyptic destruction scene at the final climax of Kiss Me, Deadly (with its ghastly screaming sounds) makes me somehow think of the infamous slow-motion ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) where Daria Halprin's character imagines the destruction of a luxury villa, being simultaneously the symbolic demolition of the American bourgeois way of life, with all the exploding fridges and flying Wonderbread packages. While Pink Floyd's 'Come In Number 51 Your Time Is Up' (a reworking of their 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene') plays in the background -- what a beautiful scene: one of my all-time favourites, absolutely. (Too bad the film itself is considered one of Antonioni's worst.) -- Anyway, I wonder if the makers of Koyaanisqatsi ever saw this one?

Other Mickey Spillane-related video clips @ YouTube + some with keywords 'Mike Hammer'

Juri on Spillane:

1 | 2 | 3

Matrioshki, The Belgian Sopranos?

Finnish TV2 has shown during this summer a Belgian crime drama series of ten episodes called Matrioshki (2004), as its Finnish title Tyttökauppiaat ('The Girl Traders'). Directed by Marc Punt and Guy Goossens, Matrioshki follows a Belgian criminal gang that travels from Antwerp to Lithuania to recruit young Eastern European girls.

The story starts in Vilnius, Lithuania, where a gang of criminals are recruiting local girls to work as dancers in Belgium and Holland. A blonde girl called Daria is anxious to leave behind the life of poverty in the family with her abusive father but her friend, tall and dark Kasandra is more suspicious by the deal offered by a Belgian "businessman" Ray Van Mechelen, in fact a hardened, sleazeball-like criminal (played by Peter Van den Begin, who creates one of the most evil creep-looking TV villains ever). First of all, the contract offered for the girls to sign is written all in Greek...

Kasandra, like her ancient namesake in Greek mythology, acts as a prophet of doom -- eventually doomed herself -- whose warnings will go unheeded, telling Daria she will only end up as cheap prostitute in Europe, but Daria refuses to believe Kasandra. Nico Maes, a Belgian journalist who's making a story on woman trafficking from Eastern Europe prompts Kasandra and Daria's brother to contact police but in the end this is futile, and Daria, with a bunch of other girls, both Lithuanian and Russian, embark on a journey to Belgium, after a "training period" in Cyprus. Meanwhile, Kasandra's fate is sealed in the hands of local criminals working as accessories to Van Mechelen's gang.

We have already witnessed the cruel execution of two Eastern European dance girls-turned-prostitutes in the hands of Ray Van Mechelen and his henchmen. The operations are formally led by an elder businessman John Dockx whose violent, ruthless and intimidating son Vincent becomes in the course of series Ray's nemesis in the power struggle over the strip club called 69 in Antwerp, Belgium, run by the gang. At Club 69 Daria and other girls are reluctantly first turned into strippers, then virtually prostitutes offering sexual favours to the club's clients in a backroom. The criminals have confiscated the girls' passports and visas, so they are actually held as prisoners at the club. Some girls refuse to have sex with clients and find themselves in trouble with their ruthless contractors. A sensitive girl called Luna is raped by one of the clients and ends up braindead in a hospital.

Matrioshki is a tale of cruel exploitation and treachery, filled with ugly scenes of sex and violence reminiscing Martin Scorsese's mafia films such as Goodfellas or David Chase's Sopranos on TV, also following closely the complicated relationships between criminals and their victims. (As with Tony Soprano, these criminals seem to have some human traits too; in the end we almost start to feel pity even with the main villain Ray Van Mechelen who is trying to maintain a desperate relationship with a Russian girl called Kalinka who is among the girls a hated accessory for the criminals, but he has to dump her because of the demands of Vincent -- if possible, an even more disgusting character than Ray -- leading to the fateful conclusion of the series.) The difference here only is that this time the backdrop is -- instead of American-Italian mob life depicted by Scorsese or Chase -- Belgium's sleazy and dark Eurotrash scene.

And it's not nice watching: girls are being physically and mentally abused all the time, informers talking to the police killed. In one scene a girl throws up over an elder client, disgusted by the idea of having to give him a blowjob. Nico Maes, the journalist intending to expose the gang in a newspaper is intimidated by Vincent. People are blown up, their kneecaps are crushed with a pool cue, they are stabbed with scissors or banged to death with a baseball bat. Girls are turned against each other, according to if they are willing to participate in the whoring game or not.

It's a misogynistic nightmare which reveals the ugliness of human trafficking business in all its stark bleakness as girls are sold and traded like slaves from one owner to another. Backstabbing intrigues are followed as everyone tries to exploit or rip off each other. Some well-meaning Belgian men are trying to help the girls to escape from their virtual prison of sex slavery, but these hapless, lovelorn guys only end up in trouble for their efforts with their own misunderstanding families.

It is also interesting to hear that clips from Matrioshki are to be incorporated into an educational video Amnesty International will be distributing to high schools and potential sex trafficking victims across Europe.

Besides being shown on Canal+ and VTM in Belgium, the series also aired in The Netherlands (RTL4), while the series has also been sold to FX (UK and Brazil), M6 (France), LAPTV (Latin America), Ren TV (Russia), SBS (Australia), TV2 (Finland), RTV (Slovenia), LRT (Lithuania), Latvian TV, Kanal 2 (Estonia), RTVFB (Bosnia) and TV Markiza (Slovakia), with other territories pending. In Benelux, Universal also released the series on DVD in the beginning of April 2005.

Producer/director Marc Punt of Independent Productions has also confirmed plans for a second series.

Matrioshki: the official site (in Flemish)
Matrioshki @ High Point Films
Matrioshki @ Flanders Image
Matrioshki @ Allocine (in French)

Jim Thompson: The Getaway

The blurb of Jim Thompson's The Getaway (1958):

"The story of a bank robbery and its aftermath, of cross and double-cross, told with the unflinching eye of America's greatest crime writer.

When it comes to pulling off the perfect bank job, Doc McCoy wrote the book. But with a partner like Rudy Torrento, who is not only treacherous but insane, and a wife who is still an amateur, McCoy has forgotten something: when the crime is big and bloody enough, there is no such thing as a clean getaway."

Doc McCoy is a psychopath of charming type (and a typical "Right Man" too?), who doesn't flinch to kill anyone trying to get on his way. One can claim he even has a hypnotic hold on his wife Carol, an ex-librarian gone bad. Rudy Torrento, a psychopath of nasty type, is a gruesome end result of lifetime abuse. They leave behind them a trail of corpses, Thompson's hard-hitting prose depicting the unfolding events bleakly but with a great psychological eye.

Filmed by Sam Peckinpah in 1972 starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. Thompson -- also called "the Dostoyevsky of dime store novel" -- himself was initially hired to adapt The Getaway, but was subsequently fired by star Steve McQueen who deemed his style too depressing (in the film Doc and Carol are more romantic villains à la Bonnie and Clyde than Thompson's original murderous and calculating psychopaths). As result, the film is still an entertaining action movie, but misses the real grist of Thompson's novel. Cathi Unsworth writes in the Bizarre magazine: "The Getaway, the novel, begins as a routine caper and ends, steeped in a sense of Biblical retribution, with its bank robber protagonists Doc and Carol McCoy trapped in the Mexican purgatory of El Rey, having previously lain low in underground caves and a room made from shit. It wasn't an ending McQueen was likely to relish."

Excerpts from the book:

Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backwards.

It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity.

You cannot do what you must unaided. So throughout your struggling, your creeping and running, your thieving and killing, you are on the hunt for help. And if you live, you find it, sooner or later.

Doc knew people; and having been born among them, he knew this kind very well. Their existence was centered around existing. They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within society which was organised to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay.

Doc knew them well. He knew how to talk to them.

Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction -- a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under- or overprotectiveness, in a distrust of parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity -- a flexible concept -- be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking, that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first.

Links:

Jim Thompson @ Wikipedia

The Killer Beside Me: The Jim Thompson resource page

Jim Thompson @ kirjasto.sci.fi

Jim Thompson @ eskimo.com

Some reviews @ Amazon

Jim Thompson @ Bizarre

Earlier

And more

Hard Revolution by George Pelecanos

I just read the latest by George Pelecanos, Hard Revolution, which is a prequel to his earlier books Right As Rain, Hell To Pay and Soul Circus; depicting the life of an African-American private investigator Derek Strange (and his white sidekick Terry Quinn) in Washington D.C., the location of Pelecanos' all books. These three books were very fluently written crime stories with occasional flashes of brilliance, even though the black-and-white pairing of a sensible older man and a young hothead and a combination of gory violence and clean family values made me think of those morally questionable Lethal Weapon movies (sadistic violence onscreen balanced by glorifying the values of your basic American nuclear family). Though Pelecanos is far better than those dreary Mel Gibson biopics.

Nevertheless, this time we have to do without Strange's ill-fated Irish partner Terry Quinn, who isn't even born yet in the tumultous year of 1968 when Hard Revolution takes place.

In fact, the story starts even nine years earlier, in 1959, when Derek Strange is a boy of twelve hanging out with a Greek-American Billy Georgelakos whose father owns a diner where Derek's father Darius Strange works as a grill man. Derek's mother Alethea works as a maid for the family of a hardened cop Frank Vaughn and his liberal wife who continuously embarrasses Alethea with her remarks intended to show how enlightened she is on the black liberation. We are also introduced Derek's smart and bookish, "troubled but good", older brother Dennis, who gets involved with a bad company, which will be crucial in how the events of 1968 are going to unfold. Then there are a couple of obligatory white racist redneck greasers Buzz Stewart and Walter "Shorty" Hess, who will also be entwined in the later storyline. Their future associate, neighbourhood bully Dominic Martini will provoke Derek to commit a theft in a local corner store, the outcome of which event will be crucial in his later development.

A leap to 1968. Derek Strange, now 21, is a rookie cop working with his partner Troy Peters, another whitey with good intentions for the black struggle but still missing it from the actual African-American perspective. Dennis is now the black sheep of the Strange family, a small-time drug dealer carrying with him a copy of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice and hanging out with his no-good acquaintances, the murderous Alvin Jones and the womanizer Kenneth Willis. Jones and Willis plan a robbery of a local shop with Dennis Strange as their unwilling partner; while at the same time Stewart and Hess with their reluctant associate Dominic Martini -- who has given up his bullyish behaviour after a stint in Vietnam -- run over an innocent black boy in a drunken hate crime, then are going to commit together a bank robbery. As the backdrop we live the time of Martin Luther's King's murder and the ensuing Washington D.C. riots. The violent drama will unfold both on a common and private level.

Well, Hard Revolution has generally received rave reviews -- reading of which last spring made me eagerly wait for months for the paperback edition to arrive to my local bookstore -- though personally I have some reservations of my own. Perhaps this is so because I can't help comparing the works of George Pelecanos to my own favourite crime writer James Ellroy whose American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand also take place in the tumultous times of the Kennedys' and Martin Luther King's murders but are seen instead from the perspective of white racist redneck criminals and the Mob. (I just can't wait for the third installment of the trilogy, Police Gazette, which should be out in 2005.)

James Ellroy's books are furious rollercoaster rides where the distinction between "good guys" and "bad guys" is often blurred or impossible: his characters are obsessed, at their best morally ambivalent, violent, racist, crooked, greedy and sexually lusty, if not downright perverted. The outlook of Ellroy on American life is subversive, even anarchic; a critical viewpoint that could be interpreted "leftist", which is quite surprising knowing Ellroy's own conservative background. Reading American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand two years ago was something short of a revelation to me; it was like Ellroy had succeeded in totally capturing how the (American) system works; with its combined trappings of money, politics, media and crime. The mixture of well-researched historical happenings and people and convoluted fictional characters made reading those books a hell of an experience (as also Ellroy's ingenious "L.A. Quartet"). James Ellroy is clearly a man with a Vision. Perhaps Ellroy's genius is why a comparison even to such an undoubtedly excellent writer as George Pelecanos might be just unfavourable.

Nevertheless, there's no denying of Pelecanos' skills, whose writing style could be called cinematic (Pelecanos also works as a film producer); with a breakneck pace that gives the readers no chance to leave the book from his/her hands before it's over.

Also important are Pelecanos' emphasis on the African-American life and culture and the points he continually makes of the difficulty of different races living together and understanding each other (especially in opposition to Ellroy's overtly racist characters, which make reading his books sometimes problematic). I only find difficult the idealization of the "good" family life in Pelecanos' books in opposition to the "bad" life of crime. There's a sense of a black and white "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" thinking and morality familiar from the cowboy movies (Derek Strange is a big fan of Westerns, and Sergio Leone's films with Ennio Morricone's music are namechecked here often), often leading to simplistic and not totally satisfying solutions: the bad guy gets killed in the end, the hero goes back to his sweetheart and that solves it all. It's continuously emphasized what being a "man" is and what it is not, and what his "honour" consists of. Therefore these are clean-cut morality plays; I guess I personally see James Ellroy's more ambiguous psychological vision more "realistic" in comparison.

Pelecanos is also a big music fan dropping all the time references to his favourite artists and records. In his Nick Stefanos books those are mostly rock, punk, new wave and indie; here they are funk and soul -- Pelecanos has even made Derek Strange a music obsessive the type of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, knowing by heart the catalogue numbers of his favourite soul labels (there was a companion CD of 60s soul and r&b with the book's early edition). It's a matter of one's personal taste if these ongoing music references feel somewhat contrived and slow down the reading, or will they add to the Zeitgeist of the era his books are depicting.

To summarize somehow: yes, George Pelecanos is a good writer and his books are well worth reading, but in the end, they still leave something to be desired, at least to this reader.

True And False Blended Together

"He was dignity distorted, bravery become knavery, sanctimoniousness masking sin. He was a mirror, jeering at the subject it reflected. Yet so muted were the jeers, so delicate the inaccuracies of delineation, that they evaded detection. True and false were blended together. The false was merely an extended shadow of the true."

- Jim Thompson: A Swell Looking Babe

Savage Night

"I was through, wasted up. I wasn't living; I was just going through the motions.
 
Life is remembering, I guess. If you've lost interest, if everything is that same shade of grey, the kind you see when you look into light with your eyes closed, if nothing seems worth storing away, either as bad or good, reward or retribution, then you may keep going for a while. And you don't remember.
 
[...]
 
I snapped out of it then, and came back to life. You have to at a time like that whether you want or not." 
 
Jim Thompson: Savage Night

George Pelecanos

George Pelecanos is a Greek-American writer of detective novels. I got interested in his works, when some reviews compared him
favourably to the God-like James Ellroy, whose "L.A. Quartet" and "Underworld USA" books really blew my mind. So, I got from local library "Nick's Trip" by Pelecanos and two other works of him, and I'm now reading the former, but I really can't yet say anything about it. Probably it's hard for anyone to reach the amazing levels of Ellroy's ferocity,
perversity and genius, but since the last installment to "Underworld USA", tentatively called "The Police Gazette" is promised only for 2005, I have to satisfy my hunger for hard-boiled crime fiction with something else before that. Let's hope Pelecanos will deliver.