Now, before the fan club strikes up a committee, a sub-par Pelecanos novel is still better than 80 percent of the garden-variety crime shelf. In fact, I'd put two - King Suckerman and The Big Blowdown - on my all-time top-10. Problem is he's been hitting the same notes for a decade, and I expect more range from someone who's increasingly compared to legends of the game.

In Hard Revolution, a prequel to the Derek Strange series, the book may as well begin on page 158, which is about the time anything of real consequence starts happening. We've gone from 1959 to 1968 by then, catching up with Strange during his rookie year on the Washington police force.

He has learned that choices early in life - namely the choice to steal - can affect his future goals of becoming "a police." But we've spent a third of the book getting there with what amounts to an epic preface to learn that Strange has made mostly good choices in contrast to his brother, Dennis. And try as he might, Dennis can't quite recover from a misspent youth, resulting in a murder Derek must avenge.

Set against Washington circa the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, the story has the makings of a period piece that might have served as a historical landmark. And, as always, the author's depiction of time and place is right on. But so in love with his cookie-cutter and politics is Pelecanos that he gets progressively stale through a franchise (Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, and Soul Circus) that started off so well telling more or less the same story on a different day.

My chief complaint is that we're leading up to another shoot-out, and I was hoping Pelecanos had come up with new and interesting ways of killing people. At the same time, his left-wing sloganism is becoming as intrusive, over-bearing, and tired as conservative mantras hoisted by Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald.

That wasn't a problem in earlier books, especially with the Nick Stefanos trilogy (A Firing Offense, Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and Nick's Trip), mainly because those were first-person narratives. Whether you're left wing, right wing, or refreshingly apolitical, Stefanos is politically correct to a flaw and that - along with a few self-destructive habits - was just part of his character.

Like him or not - personally, I don't feel the need to admire a protagonist so long as they're interesting - I know people a bit like Stefanos, which is what makes him real, flawed.

Conversely, Derek Strange is a black cop (turned private eye in the previous three books) with a thing for rub-and-tugs who doesn't pretend to understand gays. Strange is in no position to judge. That he does anyway earlier in the series is what makes him real. But Pelecanos third-person narrative glosses over Strange's understated intolerance while using a cartoon sense of it in so many other characters to foreshadow their demise.

It's like this: It's gotten to the point where as soon as someone makes an off-colour comment in a Pelecanos book, I can hear myself saying, 'Well, I guess that's it for them.' And that sort of defeats the purpose because I don't want to figure it out so early.

Unlike King Suckerman where Pelecanos dared to pit a street-wise, violent gay character who doesn't identify as gay against a dope dealer selling to school kids, the criminals have been getting dumber and dumber-er. Frustratingly, Strange genuinely deserves a more formidable foe, characters as developed and interesting as him. By Hard Revolution, however, the message has devolved into an identity politics 101 public service announcement deeming homophobia, racism, and woman-hating bad. But while these communities figure prominently in Pelecanos' work, there is no examination, for instance, of racism or misogyny in the gay community or violence within lesbian relationships.

See, those are complex, less popular issues, issues that are less acceptable to discuss, and they might just blur the lines between good and bad. It's the type of thing a writer might very well be condemned for - much like Chester Himes was beaten down by the left for daring to probe racism in the labour movement as well as tensions between black and Jewish communities in Lonely Crusade.

Himes had an itchy trigger finger for white America, no question, especially white women crying wolf on rape. But he was just as willing to force his own constituencies under the same harsh light, and that’s exactly what allowed Himes to reveal his literary secrets on his own time.

Good and bad exists in all walks of life, and rooting it out in places where you’d least expect is one of the neatest tricks of crime writing. Increasingly hesitant to turn over certain stones, Pelecanos has regressed into re-writing his older works, some of them contemporary classics, and doing a lesser job of it by pitting beer-swilling, fag-baiting white trash against people who stand for everything that is good. That's called a sacred cow, and if Pelecanos keeps on preaching to the choir in such primary colours, he's going to be about as relevant and interesting as David Caruso chasing bad guys selling good kids bad drugs.