Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

Dortmunder and his associates get signed up to star in a "reality" show. Even toward the end of his life, Westlake still wrote the with energy and invention of a man a third of his age.

!940's Hollywood, the HUAC is working its dirty work, and a disgraced ex-oater hero and his "Red Indian" sidekick get drawn into it machinations as he uncovers the secrets behind the death of a scriptwriter accused of Un-American Activities. Nevert a dull paragraph, not a single page that doesn't make you want to hurry on to the next.

One of "The Wire" writer George Pelecanos's earlier efforts, this doesn't quite demonstrate the stripped down dialogue that he developed later in his career. It does, however, have pace, and a narrative thrust that makes you want to consume the whole, slim, book in one sitting. Like a latter-day pulp writer (think Horace McCoy, James M Cain or, most especially, Jim Thompson) Pelecanos's hero's fate is entirely out of his habds once he makes a single choice (an this case, giving away his last cigarette to a man who gives him a lift). The hero is a drifter, amoral, emotionally disconnected, trapped by the circumstances of his earlier life. He hitch-hikes his way into the middle of a criminal endeavour where almost everyone's intentions are quite what they seem, and discovers his own moral centre and sense of purpose in a climax that is both bloody and Thompson-esquely bleak. What a wonderful movie this could make.