Crime Story

Of course, it took more than this original inspiration. For one thing, he had to learn more about the city that would serve as his subject and setting. There's a tendency to assume a mystical connection between a crime writer and "his" city, but close-grained knowledge of a place comes not by inheritance or sentimental osmosis but from curiosity, attention and sustained effort. Working for his father took Pelecanos down Georgia Avenue into Washington, and, later, so did sports. He played pickup basketball in playgrounds around the city, and he played second base on a rec league baseball team that won the District title in 1973, he said. As he entered adulthood, his interest in punk and go-go music and his appetite for movies drew him to clubs and theaters offering cosmopolitan attractions unavailable in Silver Spring. Then there was work: tending bar and selling shoes, stereos and appliances in the District gave him copious opportunities to catalogue the speech and manners of Washington's citizens.

Getting to know the city was half the equation; developing the technique to render it in prose was the other. Unconsciously at first, then with a growing sense of purpose as he sharpened his focus on writing crime stories, Pelecanos stocked his authorial toolbox by assimilating various influences.

His earliest appreciation of the storyteller's craft came from the movies. He said, "I had this book, The Movies, a big book full of pictures, and I just studied it obsessively when I was 8, 9, 10." Steve Rados, an old friend of his, told me: "When we were just getting into our teens, I'd sleep over at his house, and we'd maybe steal a little liquor and watch movies all night, and he would know the director, he would know where this movie fit into the history of Hollywood. He was already getting more than face value out of watching a movie." Pelecanos ate up the standard guy pictures of his youth -- "The Magnificent Seven," "The Great Escape," "The Dirty Dozen," "The Wild Bunch," spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation movies -- and they penetrated into his storytelling DNA. (He listens to Ennio Morricone's operatic movie soundtracks while he writes, and he drives a limited-edition 2001 Ford Mustang GT based even down to its exhaust note on the car Steve McQueen drove in the chase scene in "Bullitt.") But he also extended his interest into the more eclectic fare offered by the Circle Theatre and other D.C. repertory houses: classical Hollywood films, European art movies, Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.

He majored in film during an on-again, off-again college career at the University of Maryland, but he had no prospects in the business. "I was just a Greek guy from D.C. who didn't know anybody," he said. "I wasn't going to make movies." In his senior year, he wandered into a course on crime fiction taught by Charles Mish, who introduced him to a trade he could pursue and master on his own. "I said to myself, This is what I really want to do. I could go sit in a room and do this. I didn't have to ask anybody for anything; I didn't have to sell myself. It changed my life." Pelecanos kept the epiphany to himself. "I was a quiet guy in class. Years later, I wrote to the professor after my first novel came out, and he wrote back, 'Congratulations; I don't remember you.' But I can still tell you what we read: Red Harvest; Lady in the Lake; I, the Jury; The Blue Hammer; Call for the Dead; The Deep Blue Goodbye."

After graduating in 1980, he "read for the next 10 years, just to catch up. Crime fiction was changing then. The traditional private eye novel was dying out." He went back to Horace McCoy, Edward Anderson and other pre-World War II masters of social-realist crime fiction, but he also took note of contemporaries who were stretching the genre. "James Crumley, Kem Nunn's surf noir Tapping the Source, Newton Thornburgh's Cutter and Bone -- they took the form and did something different with it," Pelecanos said. "It wasn't police fiction. It wasn't the detective with the bottle of whiskey in the file cabinet. There wasn't a mystery to solve. It was about people out there, kind of lost after the Vietnam War, a generation knocked off center, and it dealt with that through the crime novel, exploring that world at a street level. I started thinking maybe I can just write about what I know. There are a lot of bars and shoe stores in my early books."

He needed a push, though, to make the jump from reader to writer. He got it from the D.C. punk scene that flourished around hardcore bands such as Fugazi, Minor Threat and Bad Brains. He said: "The whole idea was you didn't have to be a musician, you didn't have to have ties to a record company, you didn't have to be somebody's son. You just picked up a guitar and made something -- maybe it was art, maybe not." DIY, as the punk motto puts it: Do It Yourself. So, Pelecanos did the writer's equivalent of picking up a guitar and making something.

He worked day jobs and wrote on his own time. In Pelecanos's first novel, A Firing Offense (1992), Nick Stefanos, advertising director at an electronics store called Nutty Nathan's, searches for a missing stock boy, a metalhead who has sunk deep into trouble over drugs and money. Pelecanos, who had no agent at the time, sent the manuscript to a single publisher, St. Martin's Press, which bought it and the four that followed. The advances were nowhere near enough to live on: $2,500, $3,000, $3,500. During the 1990s, Pelecanos worked for Jim and Ted Pedas, who had owned the Circle Theatre and other movie houses but had moved into production and distribution. While helping to produce the Coen brothers' early films and distribute John Woo's Hong Kong crime classic "The Killer," among other tasks, Pelecanos honed his novel-writing chops and began to build a loyal audience. He switched to Little, Brown and Company, receiving a $45,000 advance for King Suckerman (1997), a 1970s tale that features a hotly awaited but uniquely disappointing blaxploitation movie. When Miramax bought the rights to the book and hired him to write the screenplay, Pelecanos took a chance and quit his day job. "I told my wife, 'I think I can make a living at this.'_" The movie was never made, one of several near-miss attempts to adapt his novels. Unmade screenplays and elapsed options don't improve book sales, but they do produce welcome infusions of Hollywood money.

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 bestseller 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 10 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 bestseller 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, D.C., 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."