"Yeah," said Nick Stefanos. "King Suckerman was bad."

George P. Pelecanos's 1997 back handed ode to masculinity, getting high and growing up.

King Suckerman, George Pelecanos’s (at the time George P. Pelecanos) 1997 novel and the second in his DC Quartet, is the book that pulled me out of a reading slump. It was handed to me by my sister who told me I should read it because it felt as though it was written for me. Which of course it wasn’t, and my sister probably never said that anyway, but that’s how it felt once I’d read the first page.

Before the action starts (and it starts fast, loud and bloody), Pelecanos chooses to quote Curtis Mayfield’s track ‘Back to the World’ for the epigraph:

“In these city streets — Everywhere / You got to be careful / Where you move your feet, how you part your hair / Do you really think God could ever forgive, this life we live / Back in the world, back in the world.”

Following this typically soulful warning (listen to the track and let Curtis’s beautiful vocals carry you), Pelecanos opens Chapter One with Wilton Cooper, a black man just released from Angola and back into a world that he sees as his plaything, an arena where his sociopathic tendencies get to run riot during a killing spree that will see coke peddling bikers, his psychopathic cracker sidekick, and essentially innocent men caught in the crossfire. Cooper is a film buff, and the story begins with him watching Black Caesar at a drive-in cinema in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The sound through the speakers is tinny, the static rendering the dialogue all but indecipherable “like he was watching some chop-socky thing, Five Fingers of Death or something like that.” Cooper doesn’t mind too much though; he’s watched Black Caesar countless times before, and besides, the real draw for him is The Master Gunfighter, a 1975 western starring Tom Laughlin and Ron O’Neal (“Billy Jack and Superfly way out west”), not the “peckerwood biker picture” Angels Hard as They Come, the second feature on the triple bill. Including mention of ‘Down and Out in New York City’ and ‘The Boss,’ two tracks from James Brown’s soundtrack to Black Caesar, and you already have three songs and six films referenced in the first two paragraphs and epigraph.

For a spell during the mid-nineties it became de rigueur for artists to reference the sources they were emulating, ripping off or paying homage to in films and music, most notably in hip hop with the Wu Tang Clan’s sampling of kung fu movies, and the films of Quentin Tarantino, whose Jackie Brown (released the same year as King Suckerman was published) adapted Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch and gave it a blaxploitation twist all the way down to the garish yellow titles that referenced Foxy Brown, the 1974 blaxploitation classic starring Pam Grier, who would also play the titular role in Tarantino’s film. When I first read King Suckerman, I was already becoming well versed on early seventies funk and soul, spaghetti westerns and the kind of gritty crime pictures that emerged in the 1970s, so I was willing to share in the author’s love for all of the above and welcomed the obscure film and music recommendations that weaved their way into the conversations of the characters. Yet Pelecanos’s referencing felt wholly organic and essential to the story, placing the action in an authentically realised mid-70s setting whilst commenting on the cultural appropriation that would see Tarantino self-indulgently pepper his films with ‘homages’ in Kill Bill, Death Proof and his two westerns, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight.

In King Suckerman, the characters’ lives are soundtracked as though they’re merely players in a movie of their own creation, but as events spin out of their control they are left, depending on their makeup, to suffer or revel in the fallout and question or celebrate their own part in how things have panned out. There’s also a running commentary on whether Jimi Hendrix should be filed under ‘Rock’ or ‘Soul,’ an arguing for and against depending on which Hendrix album you’re referring to: Are You Experienced? (unquestionably Rock), or Band of Gypsies (too funky not to be classed as Soul). The skilfully written shifts in point of view take into account the opinions of both black and white characters, from Rashid, the black record store employee who sees blaxploitation movies as a white man’s money spinning version of black gangsterism, to Eddie Marchetti, the bottom feeding white gangster who echoes the lines he’s heard from TV cop shows. Take Cooper’s first sight of the boy who will become his partner in crime and ‘bitch,’ Bobby Roy ‘B.R.’ Clagget:

“The kid’s left hand was cupped at his side, and he kind of swung it on the down-step. As the kid passed below the light of the floodlamp, Cooper could see the four-inch heels on the boy’s stacks. Those platforms, the Afro, and the kid’s street-nigger strut: a white-boy, wannabe-a-black-boy cracker. He had the walk down, a little too much with the hand action for Cooper’s taste, but not bad. And the kid was cooler than a motherfucker, too, the way he went straight through the door without knocking, not even looking around before he did. Cooper wondered, what’s going to happen next?”

It’s as though Cooper has swapped one movie for another, turning his attention from the action on the screen to the action that’s about to occur in real time. It’s here that Pelecanos shifts the point of view with ease from Cooper to Clagget, who’s just killed his boss in the projection bunker. Covered in blood, Clagget sings along to ‘The Boss,’ the track that is playing through the speakers in Cooper’s car. He’s become the star in his own movie, and it’s left to Cooper to exploit this fantasy and offer him the opportunity to ride with some real life gangsters.

Clagget is the natural heir to Lester Ballard, the redneck necrophiliac in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God; he’s a grotesque with severe acne, garish fashion sense, and a short-barrelled rifle seemingly melded to his side. He is also, like Cooper, a film nut, and their first conversation revolves around cinema and the anticipation of watching King Suckerman, Pelecanos’s invented blaxploitation movie that promises to out-pimp The Mack. In Clagget, Cooper not only sees a boy whose fearlessness and handling of a firearm as a worthy addition to the small gang he’s gathered around him (which includes the equally reprehensible brothers Ronald and Russell Thomas), but also another piece of white meat that he’s developed a taste for in jail. In Cooper, Clagget sees a father figure and co-star in the movie that’s playing in his head. It’s a meeting that spells doom and acts as a counterpoint to the salt and pepper pairing of the book’s heart and soul, Marcus Clay and Dmitri Karras.

Clay is a black Vietnam veteran struggling to maintain while he looks to the future and dreams of expanding his record store. Karras is his best friend, a Greek immigrant and the son of the protagonist in The Big Blowdown, the 1950s-set first instalment in the quartet. Dmitri is a small scale weed dealer and womaniser, who is all too happy to spend his time getting high, screwing and playing pick-up basketball. Marcus is more level-headed, working on a relationship with his girlfriend Elaine and staying relatively straight, though he has the edge that comes with men who have served and witnessed the kind of violence that can forever change how a man in his mid-twenties can view the world he’s been thrown back into. When their paths cross with Cooper’s gang, they find themselves being forced to face up to their responsibilities, sickened by the actions of men who, certainly in Dmitri’s case, they’ve thus far only watched through the filter of a cinema screen.

On the surface, King Suckerman could be read as just another white author appropriating black culture to make money. This is not only a misreading, it’s also ignorant, and tightens the stranglehold on writers who strive for authenticity in their work; if this means repeated use of the ‘N’ word spoken by African Americans in the story, then more power to the writer. The book would have suffered if the characters spoke any other way. The dialogue flows naturally, and Pelecanos’s ear for the rhythms of speech and slang is as finely tuned as a radio station that sidesteps the conveyor belt dirge of the Top 40 for the more rich and organic sounds of Hendrix, Gil Scott-Heron or The O’Jays.

Pelecanos is an author who has gotten high, flirted with criminality, and indulged his love for music, films, cars and sport throughout his youth and early adulthood; a claim he readily admitted to The New Yorker in 1993. He is, for want of a better phrase, a ‘man’s writer’ (a tag my sister would ram back down my throat), and he makes no apologies for it. His voice is real, his passion infectious (though even I tuned out a little during the sometimes lengthy, almost masturbatory descriptions of cars), but above all, what shines through is a heart that matches Mayfield’s lyrics. This is something I’ve always admired in Pelecanos. His earlier novels (the Nick Stefanos trilogy that runs chronologically with the DC Quartet, and whose second instalment, Nick’s Trip, has a brief but poignant prologue in King Suckerman) had an equally spiky edge. Soundtracked by DC hardcore bands like Minor Threat and Fugazi, the Stefanos novels were angry, urgent and filled with drugs, sex and violence (much like the quartet novels that followed it), but at their core they paid heed to the importance of family values, the attraction and dangers of peer pressure, and a plea for men to stand up and try to do the right thing in the face of mounting pressure. His output throughout the 1990s and early noughties had the rawness of youth and many readers, myself included, thought Pelecanos became a lesser writer when he dropped the ‘P.’ from his name. This was on publication of Hard Revolution in 2004, an historical novel that harked back to the earlier days of Derek Strange, the lead character in his second salt and pepper series that followed the quartet: the Strange and Quinn books. With it came a certain preachiness that I guessed was a result of becoming an adult and a parent (though Pelecanos became a father two years after the publication of his first novel, A Firing Offense, published in 1992), and the stand-alone novels he wrote between 2005 and 2012 lacked the edge of his earlier work. However, this is a natural progression that only adds to his authentic tone, and the fault may be in the reader who prefers their artists to remain the same in the way we feel a band has sold out for not continuing to rage against the world. Testament to this was Pelecanos’s 2018 novel, The Man Who Came Uptown, which I’d argue was his first literary novel dressed up in crime fiction’s clothing, focusing as it does on the prison literary programmes Pelecanos himself has been active in. Similarly, King Suckerman breaks free of its genre conventions, serving as both a coming-of-age novel and an astute commentary on its times, without ever losing sight of the fact that it’s a bad ass (appropriation deliberate) crime novel that’s as rough around the edges, thrilling and unpredictable as the movies it holds a heartfelt reverence for. Make no mistake, Pelecanos was bad, and King Suckerman is his masterpiece.