Crime Story

We got out of the car on the corner of Klingle and Park roads to look at a historical marker, No. 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 Rd. 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, 10 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 14 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 18, 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 music 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."