{"id":5963,"date":"2016-10-03T13:23:47","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T13:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5963"},"modified":"2016-10-03T13:59:05","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T13:59:05","slug":"revolver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5963","title":{"rendered":"Revolver"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Revolver\"<\/a>Duane Swierczynski,\u00a0Revolver\u00a0<\/em>(Mulholland, 2016)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Review by Kate Horsley<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Duane Swierczynski\u2019s\u00a0Revolver<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>opens in the mid-60s, with two\u00a0cops, one black and one white, drinking beer in a North Philly taproom when\u00a0\u201csunlight blasts into the bar\u201d \u2013 along with a man holding a revolver. No\u00a0one is\u00a0officially charged with the murder of Officers Stan Walczak and George Wildey,\u00a0and the sequence of events that unfolded on that spring day in 1965 is only\u00a0revealed to us at the end of the novel, when the scene of the shooting is recreated in full. For decades\u00a0after the crime, the pain caused affects the lives of the families of the officers killed,\u00a0and the unanswered questions drive an obsessive need to find out what happened.\u00a0Revolver<\/em>\u00a0is a complex, compelling account of successive\u00a0attempts to discover the truth.<\/p>\n

We see\u00a0events primarily through the eyes of Stan Walczak and his family \u2013 beginning with the Polish cop\u2019s police work and his growing friendship with his black partner in the months leading up to their deaths. Thirty years on, in 1995, the unsolved case is still tormenting his son Jim, now himself working as a policeman;\u00a0and the investigation is carried further by his granddaughter Audrey, who returns to\u00a0Philadelphia in 2015 for a\u00a0memorial service held on the 50th anniversary of her grandfather\u2019s death.\u00a0Focusing on these three years \u2013 1965, 1995 and 2015 \u2013 Swierczynski teases out the interconnected traumas of\u00a0private and public life \u2013 the guilt, the tangled\u00a0secrets and long-hidden connections.\u00a0 Audrey reflects that \u201call this drama in her life\u00a0and screwed-up family began at that corner of Seventeenth and Fairmount, in a\u00a0dive bar. And maybe she\u2019s holding on to this foolish dream that if she can\u00a0figure out what\u00a0happened back then, she can try to understand what the fuck is\u00a0happening to them now.\u201d And that is ultimately, of course, not just a personal but a historical question. What happened then to make things the way they are now?\u00a0How have past wrongs created the calamities of the present?<\/p>\n

Swierczynski\u00a0first thought of writing\u00a0Revolver\u00a0<\/em>when he read a\u00a0Philadelphia Inquirer\u00a0<\/em>piece about the 1963 murders of two police officers and realized that \u201cthe\u00a0bitter anger of their families, even after all these\u00a0years, was palpable.\u201d It is a novel that movingly captures the ramifications of hurt and\u00a0anger over the years, amongst the Walczak descendants in particular, but also in terms of the wider and\u00a0ongoing racial conflicts within Philadelphia.\u00a0Revolver<\/em>\u00a0is based on impressive historical\u00a0research, ranging from newspapers and\u00a0academic studies to archival material on the civil rights movement in\u00a0Philadelphia, establishing a vividly realized sense of the city over a fifty year period.<\/p>\n

Within\u00a0this carefully established historical context, Swierczynski creates\u00a0powerful images of the conflicts that tear apart both cities and families. A commitment to honourable action persists over the decades, but so does the will to deceive and corrupt, and all of the characters in the novel are mired in the consequences. People long to keep alive the memory of\u00a0what happened: it is important\u00a0that Stan\u2019s descendants hear the\u00a0story of the 1965 shooting because \u201cwhat happened here needs to be\u00a0remembered.\u201d But there can be no uncomplicated identification of the guilty party, and there have been many different motives for keeping secrets. What ultimately must be uncovered are personal treacheries, family betrayals and public lies. The public dimension ranges from unprincipled union bosses and gangsters to politically ambitious people anxious to conceal past transgressions on\u00a0the way to the top \u2013 because \u201cthe mayor wants to be America\u2019s mayor,\u201d because there might be \u201ca run for the governor\u2019s office, maybe even the\u00a0White House\u2026\u201d\u00a0Revolver<\/em>\u00a0is an ambitious novel, and one that succeeds in its aim of giving readers uncomfortable insights into a half-century of urban turmoil. It is a story told with great warmth and\u00a0humour, but also with a dark sense of the ironies and\u00a0contradictions underlying generations of violence and misunderstanding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Duane Swierczynski,\u00a0Revolver\u00a0(Mulholland, 2016) Review by Kate Horsley Duane Swierczynski\u2019s\u00a0Revolver\u00a0opens in the mid-60s, with two\u00a0cops, one black and one white, drinking<\/p>\n

Continue readingRevolver<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5963"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5963"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6033,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5963\/revisions\/6033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}