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 Washington, D.C., metro area, and I spent years reading about his growing popularity and authentic portraits of the people and events that shape the city. But when Pelecanos first started gaining media attention—the late 1980s—I wasn’t too interested in crime fiction.

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.

Asked to write for HBO’s police drama, “The Wire,” filmed in Baltimore, Md., Pelecanos brought his film-production experience to the set, and it didn’t go unnoticed. (Price also wrote several episodes of “The Wire.”) Show producer David Simon saw that Pelecanos knew his way around a movie set, and the author soon found himself promoted to producer of the acclaimed series.

Next up: Another novel, and possibly a filmed adaptation of one of his early novels, “King Suckerman.” The project previously was developed by rapper and businessman Sean “P. Diddy” Combs but fell apart. But following the success of the film “Notorious,” for which Combs served as executive producer, Pelecanos has handed Combs the rights to the project again, in hopes Combs can capitalize on his recent success and relaunch “King Suckerman.” Pelecanos also wants Combs to play the main character in a separate adaptation of one of his novels.

Pelecanos’ latest novel, “The Turnaround,” contains grace and redemption—and a heavy dose of autobiography. Like the novel’s lead character, Pelecanos’ father ran a local restaurant—not a coffee shop, as in the novel, but a small diner on 19^th St. N.W. When his father became sick, Pelecanos had to assume the day-to-day duties of running the diner.

Although the novel was written well before the most recent election cycle, Pelecanos sees parallels between the country’s current crisis, and the personal crisis that the novel’s protagonist must confront. “‘The Turnaround’ is not so much about politics, but it’s about how we turn this country around,” he said. However, it’s not a political book. “Critics sometimes think they know what I’m about politically, but I sort of reject all that,” he said.

As an example of what sets him apart from the inside-the-Beltway politics that consume so many others in the area, he notes that several scenes in the novel are set at Walter Reed Hospital, recently the subject of a prize-winning expose in the Washington Post that highlighted the facility’s failings. “It was an admirable series, but they didn’t tell the whole story,” Pelecanos said. “There’s a lot of good going on down there.”

Pelecanos knows a thing or two about failings. He counsels at-risk kids, using stories of his checkered past to point them to a better future. “I tell them I made a lot of mistakes growing up. I alternated between thinking, ‘I’m worthless,” and “I don’t deserve this,’” he said. He eventually got on the right track, and knows other can as well. That experience informs his novels, which, the author contends, are too often mislabeled as “dark.”

“I reject the description of my books as ‘dark,’” he said. “I never leave the impression on the reader that there’s no light at the end.” Indeed, the ending “The Turnaround” is suffused with reconciliation and a positive outlook on the future—something all too rare in the crime/mystery genre.

“When people say life is short, I don’t believe that,” the author says. “I think life is long.” And that means there’s always time for a turnaround.