It’s been a mystery for a while—a mystery to me, anyhow—as to why I respond positively to the crime/cop fiction of George Pelecanos. Sure, he’s local. We’re both from the 
College did little to change that, although those years did open a valve to contemporary literature. But I was drawn to the war fiction of Tim O’Brien, the multicultural milieu of Junot Diaz—not the street-level grittiness of police procedurals.
Then, not too long after I graduated from college, I read Richard Price’s “Clockers” and became a huge Price fan. His nuanced portrayals of cops and criminals resonated with me, and the sharp dialogue, though very rough, struck me as authentic. Despite the hardened characters in Price’s novels, they often are striving to find signs of hope. This is, after all, the writer who penned a novel titled “Samaritan,” and whose “Freedomland” spoke specifically of the power of God’s grace.
After reading Price’s novels, I wondered which other writers might mine the same vein of hope amid outward signs of bleakness. I turned to Pelecanos, starting with his series of novels featuring detective Derek Strange, and was quickly impressed. Here was a writer who understood that the police procedurals that were coming to dominate not only the best-seller lists (Patricia Cornwell, et al.) but also network TV (“Law and Order,” “CSI,” and on and on) were too tidy, and more important, too often hopeless.
During a recent appearance in Arlington, Va., Pelecanos labeled TV crime procedurals as “fascistic” for conveying the idea that “if you do something wrong, we’re going to lock you up.” While not dismissing the efforts of law enforcement to bring about necessary justice, Pelecanos coolly states that 50% of the murders in D.C. go unsolved, down from 70% a few years ago. “But the ripples in the community go on forever,” the author said.
It’s those ripples—not the too tidy, false sense of justice that ties up each episode of “Cold Case,” for instance—that interest Pelecanos, who didn’t discover his calling as a writer until around age 30. He developed an ear for authentic dialogue while working as a salesmen of women’s shoes, where he determined that the best sales technique was to stop talking and spend time listening to his customers. His shifts as a bartender in D.C. provided ample opportunity to hear the stories of people who felt disenfranchised or otherwise left behind in life.
Between shifts, he wrote his first novel, “A Firing Offense.” With no agent willing to take him under their wing, the author sent the manuscript to a publisher that demanded he send the manuscript to no other publishing house. A year later, Pelecanos got a call. A low-level employee had picked up the manuscript from a stack of similar submissions, got hooked and alerted the higher-ups to Pelecanos’ budding talent.
The writer found full-time work and settled into a job running Circle Releasing Corp., a D.C.-based film distributor (at which I interned in the late 1980s, just before Pelecanos’ arrival), until 1999, when he made writing his sole vocation. But his experience in film distribution and production would lead to bigger things.
