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Derek Strange, owner of Strange Investigations, is a solid citizen in his Washington, DC, neighborhood. He's been in business for over 25 years and serves as a role model to the young black people of the community. He continues to give back to his neighborhood, doing things such as coaching Pee Wee football and trying to show kids there are choices besides gangs and drugs. Strange works with Janine Baker, his office manager and a woman who he loves but not well enough; Ron Lattimer, a young man who's stylin'; and Terry Quinn, a white man who was at one time a cop and who carries some past baggage. Terry and Strange met in Right as Rain where Terry was one of the suspects and ended up becoming a part-time investigator for Strange. Right as Rain dealt mostly with racial issues. That theme is continued in Hell to Pay, but there is more emphasis on the impact on children of living in the ghettoized neighborhoods of Washington, DC, in a world of poverty and no privilege. Generally, they fall into two camps -- those who fall prey to the evil around them and become drug dealers or prostitutes and those who are able to resist those influences and lead a relatively straight life. As expected, the latter situation is rare; and keeping some moral turpitude in hell is difficult. Strange and Quinn are hired by some female investigators who specialize in retrieving young runaways gone to hooking. Terry and Derek both have their hearts stolen by some of the young people that they come across, but they don't have the ability to protect the innocent, whether that be a young girl who is cheating on her pimp with some harebrained schemes or a talented eight-year-old on a football team who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. When these young people are threatened, both Quinn and Strange are motivated to the core to wreak revenge and redress injustice. Pelecanos is an incredibly gifted verbal photographer. It's as if he were using black and white film and a zoom lens to focus in on every detail of a very unlovely place. He pulls no punches. There's more despair than there is hope; there's more hate than there is love; there's more death than there is life. In spite of all that, we dare to believe that things can change, that people like Strange can make a difference, that a child can live in this kind of neighborhood and come through into adulthood unscathed or at least stronger from the experience. Not all of them do; indeed, not many of them do. But it does happen. Hell to Payis a multi-layered book that succeeds on almost all levels, the main negative being some awkwardly written narrative. Pelecanos excels at establishing the setting and populating it with real people. The dialog is perfectly rendered, and the look into life in the ghetto with its emotionally handicapped characters compelling. Occasionally, Strange gets into sermonizing, but the message that he delivers about how to live one's life in spite of the environment is an important one. At the same time, he is discovering things about himself that he needs to work through, including squandering his only meaningful love relationship. As in all of Pelecanos' books, music is an important element; and the reader who is familiar with the works that he mentions must have an even richer reading experience than the reader who isn't. Reading about a place where computer-generated photos of dead children are placed on t-shirts and sold at their funerals could be a demoralizing experience. It's a sad commentary that things have sunk so low. Only a writer as talented as Pelecanos could get us to care enough to walk through these rat-infested streets where death is no big deal and feel like there's any hope at all. Only Pelecanos has the guts to try.
Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, September 2002
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