Owning Up by George Pelecanos

Pelecanos is a supremely gifted crime writer. 21 crime thriller/mysteries to his credit - I've read them all. He's also an Emmy-nominated screenwriter/producer best known for what many critics have said is/was the best crime show ever on television: HBOs The Wire. Add to that other HBO titles like The Deuce, The Treme, and We Own This City. Look him up on IMDB.com

And he graduated from my high school, the venerable Northwood HS in Silver Spring, MD . . . yeah, I'm biased. But I didn't know he was a fellow alum until well after I'd been hooked by his work. 

Owning Up isn't a crime novel. It's four short stories, as always, based in Washington DC:

1. The Amusement Machine: a small timer out of jail after passing some bad checks. On a lark, he puts his name in as an extra for a TV show being shot in Baltimore. Makes friends with an ambitious extra who wants more than to just stand in the background. He's after a speaking role. The check grifter? He's just looking for a score.

2. No Knock:  a successful book and magazine writer's home is the subject of a no-knock warrant being executed. Seems the writer's oldest son was part of a mugging/hold up involving a drug dealer.

3. Knickerbocker: A young woman aspires to write. Wants to write an historical novel. She decides to narrow her research to her family history specifically in the years after WWI. She manages to locate a couple elderly relative and engages in some revealing oral history particularly around a disaster in a movie theater in the pre depression years.

 4. Owning Up: A grown man remembering racial confrontations that have repeatedly descended upon DC over his lifetime. 

Now these are a bit of a departure from his usual street crime forte. From the very start, these seem to be personal. Really personal. All of his books are respected for his skill at developing characters. While searching for a .jpg of the cover, I came across an NPR interview from Feb 2024 (at the time of publication). Turns out, No Knock actually happened to Pelecanos. 2009. Just blocks across the DC/MD border. Lights, cars, SWAT, rifles, to the floor, zip-tied, made fun of by the cops. In the 4th story is considerable detail about being in high school and getting talked into participating in a break-in. Does it sound like the author got roped into driving his car one night?  And who knows just how much else were tales from his life. Betting there are plenty. 

And while there are many reasons to admire his work, one aspect runs true through all his books - Washington, DC. He manages to portray DC geography and its sense of being into a critical character in all his books. I've read tons of mysteries/thrillers based in, or pass through, DC where the authors take liberties with the city (e.g., started walking from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol arriving about a half hour later. Yeah, like that's gonna happen. Given the current DC traffic you'd be lucky to drive that distance in a half hour). Not Pelecanos. He give DC to us as it is, warts and all; importantly, nary a mention of the federal government. Don't believe me? Have a DC atlas open and follow along. 

And he STILL lives in Silver Spring, MD. Has stayed true to his roots. No Hollywood suck up here.

Pick up this book. It's short. You can read all 4 stories in an undisturbed day. And if it's your first Pelecanos book, plan on heading to your library to dive in and appreciate the gift Pelecanos shares with us. 

Dennis Lehane says, "The guy's a national treasure." Stephen King has called him "Perhaps the greatest living American  crime writer." Who are we to argue with the likes of Lehane and King?

East Coast Don (Northwood HS class of '67)

The Diabolical

The Diabolical is David Putnam’s 11^th Bruno Johnson Novel. ECD, my fellow blogger and great friend of 52 years since we were beginning our post-college degrees, reviewed the 9^th book, The Scorned about one year ago, and the eighth The Sinister about two years ago. All three books have been published by Oceanview Publishing, one of our very favorite publishing houses. At some time, were going to have to do a deeper dive to get all of Bruno’s background stories. In ECD’s review of The Scorned, he described that much of the first half was devoted to backstory and especially about feelings. He wrote, “More discussion about feelings than you might find in a romance novel.” I’ve never known ECD to admit that he spent any time reading romance novels.

This novel takes place in Costa Rica where Bruno Johnson and his wife, Marie, have moved with their 14 children to find a better location to raise the kids. Bruno had apparently lost two of his own kids to LA’s gang and drug culture. He acknowledged that the kids with him in Costa Rica are not all legally his, noting that he had rescued most of them from at risk home in South Central Los Angeles. Bruno has found a job at the Lido Cabana bar where he can keep his eye on anyone who might be approaching him for extradition back to LA for both kidnapping and murder charges. The Johnson’s have also arrived with friends. Bruno depends on generous tips from his customers in order to clothe and feed his kids, and he can’t turn down an offer from Otis Brasher to watch out for people that want to harm him (for reasons that Otis would not fully explain). Otis spent his time sitting at the bar and consuming a 13 to 20 grasshoppers per day, thus getting totally drunk. Otis was an abrasive character, but Bruno certainly liked the $1,000 per day that he was receiving for escorting Otis to and from the bar every day.

 

Things started to go south when there was a mass shooting at another bar which took out some of Bruno’s friends. It turns out some people, including Otis, think there are stolen diamonds in the area – the problem being, the diamonds were stolen from the mob. There were good cops and corrupt cops, more murders, more love with the elegant Marie. Especially there was the struggle that Bruno continued to have with himself from allowing the very dark side of himself to emerge. The author lightened up some of the moments with the dog, Waldo, who was wonderfully portrayed.

 

It's an excellent story, another winner for Oceanview Publish.

Independence Square

 This is the 10^th novel in the Arkaday Renko series. I first read Smith’s novel Red Square nearly 10 years ago when I was going to have my first trip to Moscow, but for some reason that is now hard to fathom, I panned that particular novel. On the other hand, nearly a year ago, I read the first novel in this series entitled Gorky Park, and that was a great detective story that took place under the frightening reign of Putin, and there were major forces to deal with when any blame on Putin or his cronies was suggested by the facts Renko was uncovering. The 10^th book, Independence Square, which happens to be the central square in Kyiv, is on par with Gorky Park.

 Renko was troubled by the desertion of his longtime live-in girlfriend Tatiana and by a boss who was corrupt and more interested in toeing the line of Putin’s wishes than in actually solving a case. Meanwhile, Renko also had the early onset symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease which challenged his stamina to continue his investigation. It was an underworld crime figure who asked Renko to track down his daughter who had disappeared. Even though Renko knew that Putin was about to invade Ukraine, he followed her trail which took him to Kyiv just as the Russian assault on that city was beginning.

 

This is a very timely detective story which takes in one of the most dangerous areas of the world at the present time. I think the portrayal of Russia and Ukraine are pretty accurate, and this novel gets my strongest recommendation.

Three-Inch Teeth

Fresh from reading too many WWII fiction and nonfiction books, I dove into the new Joe Pickett novel, the 24^th in the series. With Three-Inch Teeth, C.J. Box has done it again. I’m most surprised the Midwest Dave didn’t beat me to writing the review on the book. He’s the person who introduced me and East Coast Don to Box’s novels, and we are forever grateful for that. 

Box has written a thriller that I could not put down until it was over, avoiding all other vacation responsibilities. This novel opened with a breathtaking grizzly bear attack on Clay Hutmacher, Jr., a 25-year-old man who was flyfishing by himself in a remote area while also carrying the diamond ring that he planned to use as he proposed marriage to Sheridan Pickett. Clay did not survive the lightning-fast brutal attack, and it was the first of other grizzly attacks that were happening around the state of Wyoming.

 

Sheridan, as a getaway from the funeral scene in her home town of Saddlestring, Wyoming, took advantage of an opportunity to go on her first solo job for Nate Romanowski’s company Yarak, Inc. She had attained the status of master falconer and was off to do a job on bird abatement. The job was just across the state line in Colorado. To say the least, the people who hired her were very odd. Nate had gone legitimate with his company, and he lived with his wife Liv and their 2-year-old daughter Kestrel.

 

There were parts of the bear attacks that did not make sense, such as the distance between the attacks and some other not-bear-like behaviors which Box explains carefully. In the course of this novel, Box brings back some former foes of Joe and Nate, like Dallas Cates who had just been released from prison, and Axel Soledad. Both Cates and Soledad were psychopaths. There’s another big surprise discovered by Sheridan, but I won’t spoil that for you.

 

This is an A+ and 5/5 rated novel. C.J. Box does keep this series interesting, and he left us with a guess about where the Pickett saga will continue.

Mr. Churchill's Secretary

 Tired of reading nonfiction books about the WWII in the Pacific, what do I do? I listened to an audiobook fiction of WWII in England.  Mr. Churchill’s Secretary is a very clever story about Maggie Hope who graduated at the top of her college class and had all the smarts and skills to be a part of the British Intelligence Service. It was early in WWII, and England was preparing itself for the inevitable German assault, and Churchill was the newly elected Prime Minister. However ever talented she was, because of her gender, she was relegated to being typist #10 at 10 Downing Street. She had regular contact with Churchill who was immediately impressed with her brilliance and straightforward character.

 

There was a mystery with regard to Maggie’s history. She was told that her parents were both killed in an auto accident when she was newly born, and she was then raised by her paternal aunt who she perceived to be none-to-happy about being given such a task. There was especially more to be known about her father and his work for the government. Meanhwhile, there were more dangers to her country than just the Axis powers, specifically the IRA which saw Germany as a partner in the war against England and was willing to plot various espionage acts.

 

Maggie turns out to be a great and able protagonist. The plot and cast of characters were well-developed. I’d be very happy to see a sequel to the Maggie Hope novel.

 

Embracing Defeat

 Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower is a nonfiction history of the end of WWII with the Japanese, and the reconstruction of Japan under far different circumstances than existed in Europe. Dower is a well-recognized scholar of the war and its impact on Japan. The book, published in 1999, is a very detailed analysis of the incredible chaos that Japanese society faced with the collapse of the Japanese empire in August 1945. (This book is a follow-up to my review of Dower’s 1986 book entitled War Without Mercy.) The U.S. had been firebombing 66 Japanese cities to the point of near total destruction, and then there were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war’s toll on the general population of Japan was horrible. In addition to the death of Japan’s soldiers, there were also perhaps two million Japanese soldiers that were stranded throughout the Asian theater of war which consisted of China, Formosa, the Philippines, southeast Asia, and many remote Pacific islands. It took years for those people to be repatriated to Japan and many never made it back to their home island.

 

It should be remembered that until 1862 when Admiral Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay that the Japanese society had been nearly closed to all Western influence, except for the Portuguese and Jesuit influence. Essentially, it had been a feudal society for centuries, first under the Shoguns and then under the Emperors (there were just four in the post Shogunate era). It was after the Japanese defeat of the Chinese in the last decade of the 19^th century and then their defeat of the Russians in the first decade of the 20^th century which led to a rise of militarism and a mistaken belief in their invincibility. It was Japan’s miscalculation of its own power that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That attack was the beginning of a grandiose plan to extend their own resourceless island’s reach throughout Asia, if not even further. Neither Japanese leaders nor the citizenry were prepared to accept their unconditional defeat.

 

Unlike the post WWII situation in Europe where the Allied powers split up the conquered territories, the U.S. was the only such victorious power in Japan, and it was the U.S. that occupied Japan formally until 1952. General MacArthur was given the primary control of the occupation, and just as the Japanese had essentially hero worshipped their Shoguns and Emperors, the generally wise leadership of MacArthur led to such status for him. It was also his task to impose democracy on the populace, although there was clearly a hypocritical position to essentially have a dictator impose such. There were many such contradictions and double standards which the Japanese seemed to endure from the Americans as recovery from the war continued.

 

It was the Korean War that had a favorable impact on the Japanese economy as the U.S. turned to them to provide supplies for the war, but of course the Korean War also led to MacArthur’s dismissal by President Truman for insubordination. Despite the termination of MacArthur’s military career, he left Japan as a hero, and he was seen as such by much of the Republican party upon his arrival back in the U.S.

 

Along with economic uncertainty through the years after the war, the society as a whole was in turmoil. After having lived with minimal freedom under the Shoguns and Emperors, open freedom was something most Japanese had never experienced and there were many bumps in the road. Embracing Defeat was a remarkably well-researched book, and although I’ve had an interest in Japan for many decades, there were themes in this book that I had not previously considered. Many of those themes have not been mentioned in this brief review. If this topic of interest to you, then I invite you to read this masterpiece of scholarship about the war’s aftermath.