Derek Strange

Created by George P. Pelecanos
(1957–)

Let’s just play the race card, and fucking get it over with…

DEREK STRANGE is BLACK.

He’s a former cop, now in his fifties, who runs his own Washington, D.C. detective agency. He carries a buck knife and may get a little slick at times, but he’s respected in his neighbourhood as a decent, quietly compassionate kinda guy; a devoted, church-going son with a dying mother and deep ties to his community. He has a boxer named Greco for a pet and a taste for the soundtracks from old westerns and —this being Pelecanos — sixties and seventies funk and soul.

His agency, Strange Investigations, a neighbourhood fixture, is essentially Derek, his yuppie-ish assistant Ron Lattimer, and long-time office manager/secretary/assistant and sometime lover Janine Baker.

In Right As Rain (2001), the book which kicks off the series, Derek is hired by Leona Wilson, the grieving mother of a young black police officer, to clear her son’s damaged reputation. Her son, Christopher, was killed in the line-of-duty.

By another cop.

And the cop is WHITE.

The notorious and well-publicized incident occurred a year previously, and the shooter, TERRY QUINN, although cleared after an “official” investigation which found the shooting to be as “right as rain,” still struggles with the guilt. Tormented by thoughts that his own racism may have been a contributing factor and no longer a cop, he’s working in a used bookstore, trying to get on with his life. But in the course of the investigation, Derek finds himself teaming up with Terry to work the case — and an uneasy and unexpected alliance between the two former cops, one Black, one white, begins to develop.

Terry is younger, more prone to violence and anger, more impulsive than the cool, collected Derek. When we first meet Terry, he’s working, reading westerns, and taking long walks along deserted city streets, trying to sort out his life. His musical tastes tend toward blue collar rock. Before the typical Pelecanos shootout in Right as Rain, he pumps himself up by playing Springsteen.

And, indeed, music fills the air, as it almost always does, in Pelecanos’ work. Characters are defined by the music. Other musicians name-dropped include The Clash, Otis Redding, The Blackbyrds, Ennio Morricone, Stanley Clarke, George Jones, James Brown and Randy Travis.

In Pelecanos’ novels, music, even more than movies and books, are the great cultural signifiers, and he uses them with scalpel-like precision, dissecting a swirling array of issues. Including, in Right As Rain, the issues of race and prejudice.

If anyone can tear deep into the heart of the issue, it’s Pelecanos, who has always shown a deft hand at plumbing the dark undertones of America’s obsessions with race. He doesn’t just play race cards, he plays them with glee and makes them do tricks.

Right As Rain was just one powerful, kick-ass book, as Pelecanose delivered some of his most compelling characters yet (check out the shitkicker father-son team of drug runners), and delivers one hell of a finale, all rendered in a terse, matter-of-fact style that recalls Dashiell Hammett at times or Joe Gores’ DKA novels. And even better was the fact that it was followed by Hell To Pay (2002) and the heart-rending Soul Circus (2003), which seemed to wrap up the series.

The books featuring both Strange and Quinn (Right As Rain, Hell To Pay and Soul Circus) comprise one of the all-time great trilogies of the Shamus Game.

But Pelecanos wasn’t quite done with Strange, it turned out. In 2004, a prequel of sorts, Hard Revolution, Strange returned, offering a savage glimpse into his life as a young rookie cop caught in the turbulence of the DC riots. Eight years later, What It Was (2012) appeared, with Strange relating a case of his from “back in the day” to Pelecanos’ first great series detective Nick Stefanos, and 2026 saw an older and maybe wiser Strange still working cases in The Blue Flame.

As has become pretty standard in his books, some of Pelecanos’ other series characters, including Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay, make cameos in his books. Pelecanos has created an entire D.C.-bound universe of fictional characters whose lives (and those of their relatives) intersect each others in often strange and sometimes amusing ways.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Pelecanos‘s original British publisher, Serpent’s Tail, once proclaimed Pelecanos “the rightful heir to the noir tradition of James Cain, David Goodis and Jim Thompson,” and judging from much of the critical praise he received around the turn of the century, they may have been right. One reviewer even dubbed Pelecanos “the Zola of Washington,” a reference Pelecanos (and I) both admitted we had to look up.

He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957, and worked as a line cook, dishwasher, bartender, shoe salesman, electronics salesman, construction worker, and retail general manager before publishing his first novel in 1992. The Big Blowdown was the recipient of the International Crime Novel of the Year award in both Germany and Japan; King Suckerman was shortlisted for the Golden Dagger Award in the UK. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire and the collections Unusual Suspects and Best American Mystery Stories of 1997. He is an award-winning journalist and pop-culture essayist who has written for The Washington Post, GQ, Washingtonian, Your Flesh, and numerous other publications.

An acknowledged movie freak, Pelecanos has had a second career in  television and film. He served as manager of Circle Films, a D.C. independent best known for producing the Coen Brothers’ first three movies and for breaking John Woo’s The Killer in the States. He worked as a writer for The Pacific, and contributed scripts for David Simon’s mini-series The Wire, Treme, The Deuce, We Own This City and the feature film DC Noir. In 2011 introduced a new P.I., Iraq war vet Spero Lucas, but he’s been working mostly in television. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife, and is allegedly  at work on his next novel. Or his next show. It’s hard to tell.

UNDER OATH

• “Bad reviewers still sometimes say that a crime book is so good it “transcends the genre” and becomes actual literature. Pelecanos’s stuff is some of the best writing in the US these days, and we all know it, but we don’t need to make up any nonsense about leaving the genre. Soul Circus finishes up the Derek Strange/Terry Quinn story from Right As Rain and Hell To Pay (and even has an update on how Marcus Clay and Nick Stefanos are doing). It’s got the music, the westerns, the gunfights and shootouts, the gangsters, the losers, the cars, the women, the drugs, and the badass behaviour we expect. It’s also got the deeper issues: race, politics, guns and society, honour, fate, raising children, love, redemption, how to be a decent person in a bad world. It’s all wrapped up in the streets of Washington and Pelecanos’s terse, natural style and large cast of characters. All that and he does it regularly every year.”
  — William Denton (Rara-Avis)

NOVELS

 

• Right As Rain (2001) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
• Hell To Pay (2002) | Buy this book
• Soul Circus (2003) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
• Hard Revolution (2004). Buy this book | Kindle it!
• What It Was (2012) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
• The Blue Flame (2026) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!

MUSIC! MUSIC! MUSIC!

• Some lucky reviewers (Me! Me! Me!) received a promotional CD for Hard Revolution, featuring songs by Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Albert King, The Impressions, and William Bell.

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• George Pelecanos: Hard-boiled Family Values
  A biography/interview with Pelecanos, conducted by Jennifer Schuessler in January 2000. A lot of background details on his life prior to writing the Stefanos series. “I thought writers were WASPy guys… not Greek kids like me who worked in carryout shops.” (January 2000, Publishers Weekly)
• It’s All About Soul
  The January Magazine review of Hard Revolution by Thrilling Detective editor Kevin Burton Smith.
• Capitol Crimes
  Washington D.C. Eyes &  Other Hard-Boiled Fiction

THE DICK OF THE DAY

• August 23, 2026
  THE BOTTOM LINE: One of the great modern eyes, it’s a shame that Pelecanos is such a fucking great television writer (The Wire, The Deuce, We Own This City, etc.), because Washington DC’s Strange is everything you’d want in a series eye. Smart, tough, determined and defiant, and locked into his community in a fashion that makes most of his contemporaries seem homeless. The neon sign for his office may flicker, but Strange’s heart beats true.

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Bluefox808 for his help here.