Saturday 9 August 2014

2 BY GERALD PETIEVICH

Gerald Petievich was an author I discovered back in the late 80’s, early 90’s on one of my twice yearly jaunts up to London’s premiere crime fiction bookshop – Murder One.







He had 8 books, including 3 with Charlie Carr, a Treasury agent between 1982 and 1991. Then there was a 12 year gap until Paramour in 2003 and then nothing since. I wonder why…. (bloody Blogger persists in mucking around with my format!)







Petievich’s website is here.

I did try and get my wife to read one of these the other night as she was looking for her next book. I read the first page to her in bed, followed by a random page from the middle of the book – no cigar, she wasn’t having it. No accounting for taste really. Reading the Publishers Weekly review below – scant praise – I recall enjoying Earth Angels better than that; a future re-read will hopefully confirm.


Money Men

Charlie Carr is Petievich's ruthless T-Man, a hard-nosed detective in the gutsy, no-nonsense tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. In Money Men, Carr is hot on the trail of two thugs who have gunned down a young undercover agent - a torturous trail that will lead from the smoke-filled hangouts of sordid Chinatown, to a desperate scheme to steal counterfeit money from counterfeiters themselves, and finally, to a brutal blood-drenched confrontation in a magnificent penthouse overlooking the streets of LA's seamy underworld.





Earth Angels

A Los Angeles drug squad crosses the line separating justice from crime in an attempt to break the backs of the city's notorious Chicano gangs

Publisher's Weekly

The author of the brutally violent To Live and Die in L.A. turns the trick again in this grisly novel that begins with the accidental murder of a little girl. L.A. detective sergeant Jose Stepanovich heads a newly formed four-member anti-gang unit striving to neutralize gang activity that has been polluting the barrio of East L.A. for generations. An innocent bystander, the girl is killed by an errant bullet fired during gang drive-by. Unfortunately, since evidence is hard to come by, and witnesses harder still, the unit fails to solve the crime. When one member of the elite unit is murdered during another drive-by, Stepanovich and his remaining cohorts take on both gangs. Many gory deaths later, Stepanovich has been transformed into the beast he once hunted. Petievich's graphic descriptions of the violence and of a gang psychology that leans heavily on retribution and machisimo are the only saving elements in an eminently predictable storyline littered with one-dimensional characters. The reader is hard pressed to feel any emotion for the players in this saga of violence, in which texture is substituted for depth.


8 comments:

  1. Col - It's always good to learn about new authors. I have to say, though, that in all honesty, these are probably not for me. I do like the idea of a T-man as the sleuth those. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Margot, no problem. I'll find something in common soon!

      Delete
  2. Safe from breaking my personal embargo. But I do have very fond memories of Murder One - in those pre-internet days a specialist bookshop was magical beyond words. I don't really want to know this, but - T-Man? Treasury Agent? What's that all about? It doesn't sound very hard-boiled, it sounds like a Post Office Investigator or a Social Security Snoop.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Moira - another Murder One fan! Are you dissing my hard-boiled reading credentials? You need to read one yourself then get back to me!

      Delete
  3. These might be interesting, especially the Charlie Carr series. I remember T-men being mentioned in at least one Nero Wolfe story and I wondered what they were, what they did. There was an old radio show in the 50's called T-man about Treasury agents chasing counterfeiters. I never listened to old radio shows (then or now) but evidently a big thing back then.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tracy they are quite short books as well which adds to the attraction for me - less than 300 pages. I'm surprised there isn't more fiction about Treasury agents, or maybe there is and I'm unaware of it.

      Delete
  4. Col, you seem to be familiar with a lot of fine writers and their books from the eighties and nineties. I have never heard of them. Thanks for writing about them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Prashant, no problem. I'm always happy when I'm digging through my books and rediscovering old favourites.

      Delete