King Suckerman (1998) by George P. Pelecanos

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

King Suckerman (1998)

by George P. Pelecanos

Washington DC
Washington DC: 5/12

  Pelecanos was eking out a career as a moderately succesful writer of crime fiction when David Simon showed up and asked him to work on The Wire.  Since then he's been reinvented as an HBO affiliated writer/producer with credits on 'Treme, Bosch and The Deuce.  Of course, I was excited to reach a title on the 1,001 Novels list that isn't YA fiction, the story of an underprivileged young woman and her struggles or  a set of inter-connected short stories about life in a small town.

   King Suckerman brings heavy Tarantino flavor to crime-fiction story:  It's the week of the Bicentennial celebration in Washington DC.  Marcus Clay is a black Vietnam veteran who runs a DC record store with a side of drug-dealing.  His buddy is Dimitri Karras, small-time weed dealer and childhood friend, mostly interested in playing basketball and selling his weed to high school students.   Shit gets complicated when the cross paths with Wilton Cooper, a genuine badass who doesn't see much of a difference between life outside and life inside, maybe he prefers the situation inside- and behaves accordingly, laying waste to all his cross his path.   Pelecanos can be forgiven for making Cooper into a kind of philosopher-god of death,  making a hugely appalling character into the most interesting part of the book.

   Suckerman is a hard "R" with grotesque, gun-inflicted violence, rampant drug use and a side of rape.  I raced through the Audiobook once I got a handle on the case of characters- it was a genuine good time.  Pelecanos is worth checking out.