His book advances kept growing. The latest, in 2004, was $1.5 million for three novels, the second of which is The Turnaround. The first of the three, The Night Gardener (2006), based on the case of Washington’s never-caught serial murderer known as the Freeway Phantom, got a big push from Little, Brown, and made the New York Times best-seller list, a first for Pelecanos. “The trajectory of his sales is steadily upward, and the span of potential readers is unusually broad for him, including readers of traditional crime fiction and literary fiction,” said Michael Pietsch, executive vice president and publisher at Little, Brown. The Night Gardener sold 41,829 copies in hardcover, according to Little, Brown. (Nielsen BookScan, which claims to count about 70 percent of sales for a typical hardcover, counted 29,109.) Michael Connelly, who is also published by Little, Brown, routinely sells more than ten times as many in hardcover, and Pietsch believes that Pelecanos can get to that level with a breakout book connected to a successful movie adaptation. “There’s still a lot of gunpowder lying around,” said Pietsch, meaning that while The Night Gardener was a major step up in sales for Pelecanos, it didn’t touch off the explosion of interest in him that, say, Mystic River did for Dennis Lehane. Little, Brown thinks it can turn Pelecanos into a brand that produces a best seller every time out.
Whether or not he achieves greater commercial success, Pelecanos said, “I’ve had a dream career, and at this point more money would be money stacked on top of the money there.” Every writer wants more readers, of course, but Pelecanos realizes that he’s been able to provide for his family while settling into a deeply satisfying life’s work as an artist that would have been impossible to imagine when he was a young man.
He’s very clear about what that work is. In an online chat session with readers in 2000, he wrote: “When I started out, I didn’t feel as if Washington, DC, had been fully represented in literature. And by that I mean the real, living, working-class side of the city. The cliche is that Washington is a transient town of people who blow in and out every four years with the new administrations. But the reality is that people have lived in Washington for generations, and their lives are worth examining, I think. I didn’t have a specific plan in the beginning, but the way it’s worked out, I’ve pretty much covered the century in Washington, going back to the 1930s, and the societal changes that have occurred there.”
In addition to imparting a lot of period-specific information about food, drink, shoes, bars, muscle cars, music, movies, sound equipment, tipping, sales work, and how and when to hotbox a cigarette, he has used the formulas of the crime genre to explore the city and its social order. Perhaps the biggest historical theme moving beneath the action is the long engagement of white ethnics and blacks, part marriage and part war, the crucial turning point of which was the riots of 1968. They loom so large in his historical imagination because they mark the fall of New Deal Washington and the hope for unity that shaped it. They mark, as well, the emergence of a harder and more desperate Washington where government—both federal and local—was widely understood to be part of the problem, not the principal guarantor of justice and equality of opportunity. Many whites, especially immigrants newly arrived in the middle class, abandoned this declining city in a suburbanizing age.
“We lived right up here when I was little,” Pelecanos said as we cruised slowly through an alley in Mount Pleasant. “The National Zoo’s right over there. You could hear the lions roaring at night.” He pointed out the back of the house on Irving Street NW that his mother’s parents owned back then. “This is where everybody was. Kids played out back, and there were sleeper porches. You slept out here when it was hot. We moved to Silver Spring when I started school.”
We got out of the car on the corner of Klingle and Park roads to look at a historical marker, number 9 on the Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail. On one side of the marker is a photograph taken in 1977 of the residents of Blue Skies, which, a caption explains, was “a group house devoted to antiwar work and social justice.” The neighborhood, in transition then, attracted “political activists, artists, and unconventional family groups.” There are a couple dozen adults and children in the picture, an integrated countercultural household posing proudly in front of their home at 1910 Park Road. One of the small boys sitting on the stoop is Adrian Fenty, now mayor of Washington.
Despite his suspicion of institutional power, Pelecanos believes that Fenty has done a good job, finally beginning to right the damage done by decades of capital flight, resegregation, and misgovernment. He acknowledged that it might seem odd to hear such boosterish optimism from a writer whose collected works reinforce the city’s image as a murder capital and decry fundamental inequities in American society. “But hey,” he said, “we’ve had a couple of good mayors; the construction of the Metro is beginning to pay off; there are finally a few good signs out there.” When we drove down H Street NE, he said, “This was black Washington’s place to shop, ten long blocks, and it all burned down. Just now, 40 years later, it’s coming around.”
On the other face of the historical marker at Klingle and Park is a photograph of the family of another illustrious son of Mount Pleasant: the Pelecanos clan at the table on Thanksgiving Day, 1962. George’s older sisters, Alice and Jeannie, and his mother, Ruby, wear Sunday-best dresses, jewelry, and makeup. George, who at 5 already has his distinctive sleepy-eyed look, appears to be counting the seconds until he can devour the turkey. His father, Peter, stands over the main course, carving tools at the ready, a hint of a hard little smile on his lips. Crew cut, clean-shaven, projecting banty male confidence in suit and tie, Peter Pelecanos looks like a Spartan variation on Glenn Ford in The Big Heat.
There’s a story of Mount Pleasant in the juxtaposition of the two photographs on the marker, a fragment of a larger story of the city that Pelecanos has told in his novels, but there’s also a meditation on the meaning of family. For Pelecanos, history and family coalesce in an interest, running deeply throughout his work, in how his male characters handle the pressures the changing world exerts on their sense of themselves. Michael Connelly, an early supporter of Pelecanos’s career who became a friend, told me, “He’s totally consumed with the idea of what makes a good man.” For Pelecanos, as for a lot of men, any discussion of that topic begins with his father.
“My father never laid a hand on me,” Pelecanos said. “He was a badass, and I knew that, and that was enough. He’d boxed, and he was an ex-Marine. He fought on Leyte, real island fighting. I knew he’d killed people with his hands, but he didn’t talk about it. Those guys didn’t talk about it much.”
Andrew Walsh, a friend of Pelecanos since childhood who is now a professor of religion at Trinity College in Connecticut, explained the mythic power that grandfathers and fathers exerted over boys of their generation. “Our grandfathers had come over, alone, from tiny villages in Greece when they were fourteen or something, and made it. We knew at first hand the romance of immigrant success. George’s grandfather and father worked like dogs, and together with other people like them climbed up from poverty to respectability. And then our fathers had fought in World War II. So we thought we led dull, average lives by comparison.”
On his first try at college, Pelecanos had to drop out after one semester to run the family diner for a few months while his father recovered from a heart attack. “I got to do something a lot of boys never get to do until later,” Pelecanos told me. “I proved to my dad that I was a man.” It was 1975, and he was eighteen, hanging out with his friends and chasing girls. It took a sustained effort of will to submit to his father’s working grind. “For a guy who liked to party, to get up at 4:30 and go [to work], it changed the way my mom and dad looked at me.”
His novels are so full of diners that an attentive reader could get a pretty good education in how to operate one. If a customer asks for an old-fashioned item like liverwurst or buttermilk, go get it, and keep a little on hand to encourage return visits; keep the peace among employees by allowing each to choose the mu
sic on the radio for part of the day; cut off the cash register tape at 3 p.m. to exempt some of the day’s profits from taxes.
The novels are full, as well, of scenes in which fathers and father figures try to teach younger men how to live. In The Turnaround, Alex Pappas, who has lost one son in Iraq, tries to pass on to his younger son both his diner and what he learned from his own father: “Work is what men did. Not gambling, or freeloading, or screwing off. Work.” Meanwhile, Raymond Monroe, whose son is serving in Afghanistan, teaches his girlfriend’s young son to walk like a man. “Chin up, and keep your shoulders square, like you’re balancing a broom handle on there. Make eye contact, but not too long, hear? You don’t want to be challenging anyone for no good reason. On the other hand, you don’t want to look like a potential victim, either.” Sometimes the father figures demonstrate that forgiveness requires more strength than does vengeance, but often the most dramatic lessons-by-example in masculinity come the hard way.
In his fiction, Pelecanos stages again and again an iconic showdown in which a small businessman emerges from behind his counter or walks tall off the sales floor to face off against gangsters. In Hard Revolution, a crew of bank robbers runs afoul of a fellow whom we know well as a type from other Pelecanos novels, a type for whom his father serves as the template: an immigrant who fought on Guadalcanal, operates a small diner in a rough neighborhood downtown, and carries a .38. This do-or-die striver has dropped by the bank to deposit the previous day’s take, and he’s not about to give up his hard-earned American money just because he’s outgunned. A bloodbath ensues. Such scenes are, in a sense, valentines to men like Peter Pelecanos, investing hardworking dads with heroic qualities on a par with those of gangsters, private eyes, and cowboys.
“There’s a line we’ve talked about in a western, Ride the High Country, that I think is really important to him,” Connelly told me: “‘All I want is to enter my house justified.’ I think that’s George’s thing.” But steeped though he may be in the seemingly timeless moral certitude of the western, Pelecanos traces the ways in which the definition of a good man, a man who at the end of the day or of his life can truly enter his own house justified, changes over time. His male characters negotiate tricky paths between the traditional manhood represented by his father and the options for masculinity that have opened up since the ’60s. The older model may have been potent in its virtues, but it had significant flaws, not least of which was a general acceptance of racism as the natural way of things.
Pelecanos told me a story about a script meeting for The Pacific, HBO’s companion piece to its World War II combat miniseries Band of Brothers. One reason he accepted the invitation to write for The Pacific, which is scheduled to air in 2009, was to honor his father’s service to his country, but that didn’t cause him to shy away from ugly complexity. “Somebody at this meeting brings up the fact that we don’t have any black major characters, and then somebody else says that the military was still segregated, and blacks were often forced to do menial jobs instead of fighting. So, I said, how about a scene in which the guys are watching black soldiers clean up the bodies on a landing beach, and they say, ‘Look at those niggers. They’ve got it so easy, they never have to fight’? These are the heroes, characters we care about, and yet they’re saying these terrible things, because that’s true to what it would have been like.” It was too much, even for HBO. “There was this long pause,” during which the rest of the creative team considered presenting the heroes of the Greatest Generation as bigots. “Nobody said a word, and after a while they just went on to something else like I’d never spoken.”
We dropped by Cardozo Senior High School in Washington to visit Frazier O’Leary, who teaches AP English and coaches the baseball team. “My parents went here in the 1930s,” said Pelecanos. “It’s black and Hispanic now.” Pelecanos first visited O’Leary’s class five years ago under the auspices of a PEN/Faulkner Foundation program that brings writers into the schools. He has returned regularly.
As we looked out over the empty baseball field, O’Leary, a hale former athlete with a thick white mustache and a paunch, talked about his plans to raise money to renovate it and rename it in honor of the great shortstop Maury Wills, a Cardozo graduate. “I started playing on this field in a semipro league in 1967,” O’Leary said. “I was the token white guy in the whole league.”
He shares with Pelecanos a sense of the riots of 1968 as a turning point in his life, as well as in the city’s history. At the time, O’Leary, who had done a tour of duty in Vietnam, was an Army lieutenant in military intelligence stationed outside the city. “They told me to put together a riot platoon,” he recalled. Having assembled the soldiers, “I looked around, and I could see that these guys would have deserted the second we got out there. It was 1968. They didn’t give a damn about the Army, and they sympathized with the rioters.” He never had to lead the platoon into action. He left the Army later that year, got his degree at American University, and started teaching in 1971. He has been at Cardozo since 1977. Pelecanos said, “I like them to do Hard Revolution” when he visits O’Leary’s AP English class “because a lot of his students don’t know about the riots.”
Continuing on the theme of violence and its lasting consequences, we fell to talking about Kermit Washington, a local basketball star at Coolidge High School and American University in the late ’60s and early ’70s who went on to the NBA. “Good player,” said Pelecanos. “A strong guy.” But all anybody remembers about Washington is that during an on-court altercation between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Houston Rockets in 1977 he hit Rudy Tomjanovich, who was rushing in from the blind side to break up the fight, with an infamous punch that shattered his face and nearly killed him. Tomjanovich, who is white, eventually recovered, played again, and went on to coach the Rockets to a championship. Branded as a thug, Washington, who is black, bounced from team to team for a few more seasons before retiring. Tomjanovich forgave Washington in latter years, saying, “He made a mistake, and everyone deserves a second chance.”
Then O’Leary brought up a former student who had gone on to college and graduate school. “She’s brilliant,” he explained, “but her brothers are drug dealers. It’s crazy at home; she can’t study. She lives in one of the neighborhoods George writes about.” Pelecanos asked what she needed. “Just a room someplace quiet,” said O’Leary. Pelecanos considered for a moment and said, “Okay, if you do the legwork and get me a piece of paper so I can write it off, I’ll finance it.”
The two men looked out across the field, a little embarrassed. O’Leary appeared to be crossing a delicate job off a mental to-do list. A look of physical pain crossed Pelecanos’s face as he considered the possibility that somebody reading this story might think that he was trying to act like a big shot. A pragmatist suspicious of grand social theories and official initiatives, he believes in “pulling kids through the keyhole one at a time,” which requires judicious doses of money as well as sound mentoring.
On the way back to the car he said, “Frazier is one of my heroes, a guy who’s really doing something good for kids in this city. You should be writing your story about him.”
David Simon, cocreator of “The Wire,” who recruited Pelecanos to help write and produce the show, described him to me as “a moralist.” He meant that Pelecanos, “rooted in the immigrant tradition,” is “rigorous about doing everything he said he was going to do and doing it well,” but also that Pelecanos centers his writing on characters’ struggles to do the right thing in a compromised, difficult world.
Pelecanos has fashioned a distinctive plot structure that allows him to explore those struggles while meeting the demands of the crime story. His novels typically feature a main plot in which a protagonist wrestles with multiple moral problems that offer no easy course of action—what to do about an implacable enemy, what to do about an incorrigible son, and so on. These problems are often related to family and to the life-changing consequences of acts of violence buried in the
past, brewing in the near future, or both. Meanwhile, in an intertwined high-action subplot, one or more doom-seekers crashes heedlessly through the novel, headed for an apocalypse. The moral plots have grown richer and more dominant over time, so that the principal pleasures of reading Pelecanos lie more and more in his portraits of the inner lives of complex characters seen at home and at work, as well as in the evocation of place and time.
As Connelly put it, “George is past the backbone of the book being the investigation of a crime; the backbone will be family, or something like it. George is the ace when it comes to delivering mystery with a message.” Pelecanos has worked hard to attain that status, and his peers have taken note.
“Here are the choices if you want to write more than one novel: get better, stay the same, or get worse,” says Laura Lippmann, who writes mysteries set in Baltimore. “George chose to get better with every book.” Lehane, another luminary in the tight circle of crime-writing friends that includes Pelecanos, Connelly, and Lippmann (who is married to David Simon), divides Pelecanos’s novels into three phases. “His early books have a beautiful sense of character, but he’s still getting his head around the mechanics of structure. In the middle period, you see rock-solid structure, and by now it’s a perfect fusion of obsessive character studies and narrative. At this point, he’s comparable to Dreiser, not Jim Thompson.” He’s a novelist, in other words, who happens to write crime stories.
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