Nowadays you can't move for programmes about the 1970s. It's official - the decade of Starsky and Hutch and Spangles is more fashionable now than it ever was. Fresh on the heels of this retro conveyor belt comes George Pelecanos' King Suckerman, a book clearly influenced by the 70s blaxploitation movie boom that reached its mainstream acme in Shaft. King Suckerman forms the second part of the DC Quartet, and its characters reappear in the other three books, each highlighting a different take on the sleazy, drug-filled underbelly of black American crime. King Suckerman is the book Quentin Tarantino would have written had he not ventured into filmmaking. It is engorged with so many 1970s film references - real and imagined - that it's hard to know whether you're reading a straight story or a parody. Each character's dialogue is hipper than a very hip Huggy Bear, and a honky like me (this means a white person - I learnt it from Live and Let Die) is probably not going to get the full picture. Violence and humour sit side by side, in a style well honed in such diverse fare as Lock, Stock… and Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino's second mention this review) - although the surfeit of characters, and their similar attributes, can make the plot a little hard to follow. And some of the motivation is so cryptic you can easily blink and miss it. But the dialogue is where Pelecanos really scores, delivering an engaging stream of street patois direct from the ghettos of Harlem (the second Live and Let Die reference this review). So if you yearn for the days of Easy Rider and Jimi Hendrix, this is the book for you. It may be hard work, but then so was riding a space hopper.
