Friday 27 September 2013

The rebirth of the private eye?

Quick plug for a novel that has not yet been published: The Double by George Pelecanos will be released on October the 8th, 2013. This will be the second adventure of Spero Lucas, the first being The Cut, which I read already (well, of course). I am trying to keep up to date with my Pelecanos, who is by far my favourite crime writer (yes, more than Elmore Leonard, there I said it). Spero Lucas is his new hero, or antihero, a 29 years old Iraq war veteran turned private investigator. A private eye. It might sound like a cliché, a commonplace, but it is so not. Because Spero Lucas works in contemporary Washington D.C. Because he is scarred and haunted by contemporary events and belongs to our time and age, because he is not a living anachronism but has a history that belongs to our time, the background of a man his age, I think he just made the private eye a relevant archetype again. Although Spero Lucas is not an archetype. On the contrary, he is a full, grounded, complex character, in a complex world, a world that may sometimes be in black and white but has plenty of shades of grey. Thus, I think Pelecanos may have, consciously or not, given us the rebirth of the private eye. I was enthusiastic when I read the first novel, I am impatient to read the second one. And I am uploading here the preview (!) of the novel, to give people a foretaste of the character and his world. I am not a big fan of video trailers for novels, I think they don't belong to the same medium, but I don't mind this one.

2 comments:

Gwen Buchanan said...

Not a bad trailer. even better that it's for a book.

Guillaume said...

Oh, it is quite good for a book trailer.