George P. Pelecanos

• Born: February 18, 1957
• Place of Birth: Washington, D.C.

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; private investigator; historical

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Nick Stefanos, 1992–95; Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay, 1996–2000; Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, 2001–12; Spero Lucas series, 2011–13

Contribution

Equally influenced by punk music, the highly stylized action films of the 1960s and 1970s, and writers of noir fiction, George P. Pelecanos has lifted the hard-boiled genre to new heights. Early in his career, he announced that his goal was to take what he had learned from hard-boiled experts, such as Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, and David Goodis and mix it with what he had learned from the punk-music scene (namely bands such as Husker Du, Fugazi, and the Replacements) that swept through the District of Columbia in the 1980s to update the hard-boiled genre to encompass modern urban concerns. Having been successful in this regard, Pelecanos's other significant contribution to current crime literature is his crisp dialogue (heavily influenced by the crime novels of Elmore Leonard) that captures the various voices of the District of Columbia’s mean streets spanning the last hundred years. Pelecanos strips clean the language and expertly adopts the voices of private investigators, police officers, gangsters, members of street gangs, and—above all—working-class people, those who live on the knife edge between the dark abyss of themselves and the dark abyss of humanity. Pelecanos has been branded the “coolest writer in America,” he is widely acknowledged as a modern expert of the hard-boiled genre. He has received praise for each of his novels and continues to be well-received by his contemporaries, including Jonathan Lethem, Dennis Lehane, Stephen King, Daniel Woodrell, and Vicki Hendricks.

Biography

George P. Pelecanos grew up in the Mount Pleasant area of Washington, DC, and in Silver Spring, Maryland. The son of Greek immigrants, he began working at his father’s lunch counter at a young age. Marked by a strong work ethic that he attributes to his Greek American roots, Pelecanos worked at various jobs—stock boy, shoe salesman, bartender, consumer electronics salesman, and film producer—before becoming a full-time writer. He received a Bachelor’s degree in film studies in 1980 from the University of Maryland.

While studying at the University of Maryland, Pelecanos took a class on hard-boiled detective fiction that changed the course of his life. Being exposed to writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler instilled in him a love of the genre that would lay the groundwork for his literary career. It would also leave him with a voracious appetite for books, as his professor, Charles Misch, got him to read at least two books weekly. Like so many of his characters, Pelecanos often, in interviews, riffs on his favorite books of the moment, bringing up key works by contemporaries such as Vicki Hendricks and Daniel Woodrell and classics by David Goodis and Newton Thornburg. His early life is marked by a vibrant love of film and music, two other media that have shaped his life and career.

Pelecanos quit his well-paying general manager job with appliance dealer Bray & Scarff at thirty-one and pursued writing full-time. The loosely autobiographical A Firing Offense (1992) was his first book. Pelecanos sent the completed manuscript to only one publisher—St. Martin’s Press—and though it was a year before he heard back, the book was accepted for publication. After this initial success, he continued to publish books at the rate of about one a year. He began to receive wide recognition in the mid-1990s, as books such as The Big Blowdown (1996) and The Sweet Forever (1998) won him prestigious awards. During this time, Pelecanos also worked as a film producer for Circle Releasing, a company best known for producing the early films of Joel and Ethan Coen. In 2002, Pelecanos began working as a story editor/writer for David Simon’s Home Box Office series The Wire (2002–8), gaining even more critical acclaim.

Throughout the early twenty-first century, Pelecanos continued to work on several of his book series. Although his Nick Stefanos series ended in 1995 with Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go, and his Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay ended in 2000 with Shame the Devil, Pelecanos has nevertheless been a prolific writer for novels and television throughout the following decades. Pelecanos published his Derek Strange and Terry Quinn series with Right as Rain (2001), Hell to Pay (2002), Soul Circus (2003), Hard Revolution (2004), and What It Was (2012). He published two novels in his Spero Lucas series: The Cut (2011) and The Double (2013). Pelecanos has also published myriad stand-alone novels and short fiction collections, including 2024’s Owning Up. However, in the twenty-first century, Pelecanos has made a name for himself as a television writer for acclaimed shows, such as The Wire, The Deuce (2017–19), and The Pacific (2010). Pelecanos served as executive producer and showrunner for We Own This City, which premiered on Home Box Office in 2022.

Analysis

Pelecanos has been haunted by an incident in which he accidentally shot a good friend in the face with his father’s .38 special at the age of seventeen. His precise and evocative exploration of violence has defined his work. He is concerned primarily with working-class and lower-class inhabitants of Washington, DC, children whose consciences have been deformed by society, and broken men and women in desperate need of atonement and some sort of human communion. He is an expert at capturing the various voices of District of Columbia inhabitants—punks, loners, gangbangers, workaholics, alcoholics, drug addicts, and pretty much anyone whose voice has been lost in the mess of the city. His books are never concerned with mere social criticism, but Pelecanos is intent on telling the stories of the capital city’s million sinners. Never writing mere tales of detection, he simply sets the oldest hard-boiled stories of them all—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, stories about hard falls from grace, sin, and redemption—in his city, a place he knows inside out.

Like Ernest Hemingway and Elmore Leonard, Pelecanos is a clean and precise writer who chooses his words carefully. His language not only makes his work accessible to the masses but also is a reaction against often stilted “high literature.” Above all, Pelecanos is concerned with the sounds and rhythms of American speech, with the language of the streets, and with the dangerous and the damned. He has no interest in the academy; instead, he concerns himself with autodidacts, with those baptized by fire.

Similarly, like the Hemingway hero, the Pelecanos hero must operate under extreme conditions and perform their duties gracefully under pressure. They must be able to take punishment. Consider Pete Karras in The Big Blowdown. His sins lead him to be wounded horribly. He never complains about it, though the quality of his life seriously deteriorates after his grievous wounding. The only thing he can do is to make one last decent gesture, a gesture that shows the goodness of which he is capable. In Karras’ case (as in the case of many hard-boiled heroes), he saves a prostitute from a life ruled by heroin and nasty pimps. The Pelecanos hero must also hold fast to their work, friends, and loved ones. Like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, Pelecanos's exemplars are sound of heart even when their consciences falter, and they exhibit physical durability, always maintaining a hard-boiled pose. On the other hand, criminals and other antiexemplars in the Pelecanos universe are marked by their inhumanity, phoniness, or sloppy sentimentality.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines hard-boiled as “hardened, callous; hard-headed, shrewd.” This is a fine rundown of Pelecanos's work. No matter what else it is, his fiction is certainly not soft. He is not concerned with softness and sentimentality, which are equated with weakness. He is wholly concerned with toughness, with maintaining a tough pose even if in a broken, battered condition.

A Firing Offense

Pelecanos's first novel, A Firing Offense, introduces young Nick Stefanos, who weaves his way through Pelecanos's District of Columbia for years to come. A consumer electronics salesman, Stefanos is disturbed by the disappearance of Jimmy Broda, a stock boy who has fallen in with some local toughs. Stefanos, his life in disarray, applies for a private investigator’s license and attempts to find the lost boy. Like many of Pelecanos's protagonists, Nick is perched on the edge of madness, one step away from becoming the sort of bad man he despises. What keeps him from crossing the line is concentrating his energy on doing one good thing. In this case, it is finding and helping young Jimmy Broda. A Firing Offense is not Pelecanos's best work, but—as his first—it is a brilliant introduction to the dark and deadly District of Columbia that continues to serve as his muse.

The Big Blowdown

The Big Blowdown is perhaps Pelecanos's most ambitious crime novel. It tells the story of Pete Karras, the father of Dimitri Karras, who figures prominently in the next three books of the District of Columbia quartet. Pete grows up in the District of Columbia during Prohibition, fights in World War II, and comes home badly in need of a job. His friend, Joey Recevo, an unlikely friend to the son of Greek immigrant parents, gets him work as an enforcer for a local mob boss. When the mob boss turns on Karras because he is not tough enough on Greeks in the neighborhood, he is beaten close to the point of death while Recevo watches. Disabled by this incident, Karras limps through the streets of the District of Columbia, defeated. He fathers Dimitri, treats his wife poorly (often cheating on her with a mistress), and works as a short-order cook at a lunch counter, depressed by his station in life. In short, Karras is the perfect hard-boiled hero, a broken man with one last shot at redemption.

Redemption comes from Lola Florek, a small-town girl from Pennsylvania who has found out the hard way about the District of Columbia’s seedy underbelly. Having fallen into a life of drugs and prostitution, Lola is searched out by her brother, Mike, a naïve kid focused on saving his sister. Enter Lola’s only hope: Pete Karras. Morally torn, spiritually broken, and resigned to living with the consequences of his poor choices, Karras devotes himself to helping Mike track down Lola to do one good final thing.

Shame the Devil

Its title taken from a Robin Trower song, Shame the Devil (2000), is the fourth book in the District of Columbia quartet. Here, Pelecanos switches gears and begins the novel with a violent heist scene in which Jimmy Karras, Dimitri’s five-year-old son, is accidentally killed. Unlike Pelecanos's earlier novels, Shame the Devil begins with a horrific act and deals with the fallout from the tragedy. Nick Stefanos, back as a major character, finds a broken-down Karras a job as a dishwasher. The novel brings the quartet full circle, as a violent shootout brings readers back to the landscape of The Big Blowdown, and the histories of the Karras and Stefanos families come together in a thunderclap.

Right as Rain

In Right as Rain, Pelecanos was aiming at something markedly different from his earlier novels: a hard-boiled urban Western that would put a spotlight on the racial divide in Washington, DC. Derek Strange, a Black American former police officer turned private investigator, and Terry Quinn, an Irish American former police officer turned bookstore employee, prove to be the perfect pair of protagonists by which Pelecanos can explore the issue of race. Strange is hired by Leona Wilson, the mother of a Black American police officer shot by Terry Quinn in his last tragic act as an officer. Now working at a secondhand bookstore, Quinn is haunted by his mistake. Strange interviews him, and they form the unlikeliest of investigative partnerships. More than that, they become fast friends, and their relationship is central to Pelecanos's next two books, Hell to Pay (2002) and Soul Circus (2003).

Drama City

In Drama City (2005), Pelecanos moves away from his principal series characters to tell the story of Lorenzo Brown, a good-hearted former convict turned street investigator for the Humane Society. Like the typical Pelecanos hero, Lorenzo tries to reform and atone for his past sins. Surrounded by people whose despair has transformed into full-fledged violence, Lorenzo walks a fine line between atonement and falling back into his old habits. Figuring prominently into the story is Lorenzo’s parole officer, Rachel Lopez, who is dedicated to her job but also attracted to an alternate lifestyle that finds her drinking excessively at dive bars and having casual sex with strangers. As usual, Pelecanos moves back and forth between these stories at a breakneck pace, bringing them together in the violent final act.

Principal Series Characters:

• Nick Stefanos, an electronics salesman, is the main character in three of Pelecanos's first four books and is prominently portrayed in several others. Popularly considered Pelecanos's alter ego, Nick transforms from angry punk to amateur sleuth to disillusioned drunk. Nick is the typical tough Pelecanos hero.
• Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay are at the center of Pelecanos's District of Columbia quartet, although the series focuses on Dimitri. In the first novel, Dimitri is born to Peter Karras, a Greek American and World War II veteran. A small-time pot dealer in the second, Dimitri teams with Marcus Clay, an African American Vietnam veteran and the owner of Real Right record store. By the third novel, Dimitri has been a teacher and is a cocaine user who works for Marcus. In the fourth, Dimitri is in his fifties, and his five-year-old son, Jimmy, has been killed by a robber’s getaway car.
• Derek Strange is an aging private detective, and Terry Quinn is a former police officer who left the force under controversial circumstances. Like so many of Pelecanos's characters, Strange and Quinn are defined by the music they listen to, the films they watch, and the books they read. Strange, who is African American, prefers Sergio Leone Westerns and Ennio Morricone scores. At the same time, Irish American Quinn devours Westerns by Elmore Leonard and Ron Hansen and listens to albums by Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle. Strange and Quinn are, like Karras and Clay, an excellent vehicle for Pelecanos—who is haunted by the racial divide in Washington, DC—to explore the issue of race further.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House, 2007.

Daly, Sean. “Heavy Hitter: George Pelecanos Puts More Punch into Capital Crime.” Book Magazine, vol. 14, Jan./Feb. 2001, pp. 18-20.

Fierman, Daniel. “D.C. Confidential: Mystery Writer George Pelecanos Breaks Out of Washington’s Mean Streets.” Entertainment Weekly, vol. 643, 8 Mar. 2002, pp. 36-38.

Greenman, Ben. “Washington Wizard.” The New Yorker, vol. 78, 8 Apr. 2002, pp. 90-92.

Murray, Noel. “'We Own This City' Brings George Pelecanos Back to Baltimore.” The New York Times, 2 May 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/arts/television/george-pelecanos-we-own-this-city.html. Accessed 2 Aug. 2024.

Palmer, John-Ivan. “Roaches Ate My Face, Hard-Boiled Crime Novelist George Pelecanos.” Your Flesh Quarterly, vol. 34, 1996, pp. 55-61.