Crime Story

WE DROPPED BY CARDOZO SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL IN WASHINGTON to visit Frazier O'Leary, who teaches AP English and coaches the baseball team. "My parents went here in the 1930s," said Pelecanos. "It's black and Hispanic now." Pelecanos first visited O'Leary's class five years ago under the auspices of a PEN/Faulkner Foundation program that brings writers into the schools. He has returned regularly.

As we looked out over the empty baseball field, O'Leary, a hale former athlete with a thick white mustache and a paunch, talked about his plans to raise money to renovate it and rename it in honor of the great shortstop Maury Wills, a Cardozo graduate. "I started playing on this field in a semi-pro league in 1967," O'Leary said. "I was the token white guy in the whole league."

He shares with Pelecanos a sense of the riots of 1968 as a turning point in his life, as well as in the city's history. At the time, O'Leary, who had done a tour of duty in Vietnam, was an Army lieutenant in military intelligence stationed outside the city. "They told me to put together a riot platoon," he recalled. Having assembled the soldiers, "I looked around, and I could see that these guys would have deserted the second we got out there. It was 1968. They didn't give a damn about the Army, and they sympathized with the rioters." He never had to lead the platoon into action. He left the Army later that year, got his degree at American University and started teaching in 1971. He has been at Cardozo since 1977. Pelecanos said, "I like them to do Hard Revolution" when he visits O'Leary's AP English class "because a lot of his students don't know about the riots."

Continuing on the theme of violence and its lasting consequences, we fell to talking about Kermit Washington, a local basketball star at Coolidge High School and American University in the late '60s and early '70s who went on to the NBA. "Good player," said Pelecanos. "A strong guy." But all anybody remembers about Washington is that during an on-court altercation between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Houston Rockets in 1977 he hit Rudy Tomjanovich, who was rushing in from the blind side to break up the fight, with an infamous punch that shattered his face and nearly killed him. Tomjanovich, who is white, eventually recovered, played again and went on to coach the Rockets to a championship. Branded as a thug, Washington, who is black, bounced from team to team for a few more seasons before retiring. Tomjanovich forgave Washington in latter years, saying, "He made a mistake, and everyone deserves a second chance."

Then O'Leary brought up a former student who had gone on to college and graduate school. "She's brilliant," he explained, "but her brothers are drug dealers. It's crazy at home; she can't study. She lives in one of the neighborhoods George writes about." Pelecanos asked what she needed. "Just a room someplace quiet," said O'Leary. Pelecanos considered for a moment and said, "Okay, if you do the legwork and get me a piece of paper so I can write it off, I'll finance it."

The two men looked out across the field, a little embarrassed. O'Leary appeared to be crossing a delicate job off a mental to-do list. A look of physical pain crossed Pelecanos's face as he considered the possibility that somebody reading this story might think that he was trying to act like a big shot. A pragmatist suspicious of grand social theories and official initiatives, he believes in "pulling kids through the keyhole one at a time," which requires judicious doses of money as well as sound mentoring.

On the way back to the car he said: "Frazier is one of my heroes, a guy who's really doing something good for kids in this city. You should be writing your story about him."

DAVID SIMON, CO-CREATOR OF "THE WIRE," who recruited Pelecanos to help write and produce the show, described him to me as "a moralist." He meant that Pelecanos, "rooted in the immigrant tradition," is "rigorous about doing everything he said he was going to do and doing it well," but also that Pelecanos centers his writing on characters' struggles to do the right thing in a compromised, difficult world.

Pelecanos has fashioned a distinctive plot structure that allows him to explore those struggles while meeting the demands of the crime story. His novels typically feature a main plot in which a protagonist wrestles with multiple moral problems that offer no easy course of action -- what to do about an implacable enemy, what to do about an incorrigible son, and so on. These problems are often related to family and to the life-changing consequences of acts of violence buried in the past, brewing in the near future, or both. Meanwhile, in an intertwined subplot, one or more doom-seekers crashes heedlessly through the novel, headed for an apocalypse. The moral plots have grown richer and more dominant over time, so that the principal pleasures of reading Pelecanos lie more and more in his portraits of the inner lives of complex characters seen at home and at work, as well as in the evocation of place and time.

As Connelly put it: "George is past the backbone of the book being the investigation of a crime; the backbone will be family, or something like it. George is the ace when it comes to delivering mystery with a message." Pelecanos has worked hard to attain that status, and his peers have taken note.

"Here are the choices if you want to write more than one novel: Get better, stay the same, or get worse," says Laura Lippmann, who writes mysteries set in Baltimore. "George chose to get better with every book." Lehane, another luminary in the tight circle of crime-writing friends that includes Pelecanos, Connelly and Lippmann (who is married to David Simon), divides Pelecanos's novels into three phases. "His early books have a beautiful sense of character, but he's still getting his head around the mechanics of structure. In the middle period, you see rock-solid structure, and by now it's a perfect fusion of obsessive character studies and narrative. At this point, he's comparable to Dreiser, not Jim Thompson." He's a novelist, in other words, who happens to write crime stories.

"I learned to write on the job," says Pelecanos. "I really got out of the first person on The Big Blowdown" his fifth novel (1996), a period piece set in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. "That's where I got to the generational view, getting into the heads of all kinds of characters, and that's when I started to say, Okay, now I'm a writer. From then on, you see more variety, more different kinds of characters. I started writing more social novels." From private eye stories, featuring his troubled alter ego Nick Stefanos and then Derek Strange, a black ex-cop with a deep sense of social responsibility, he ventured out across the crime subgenres -- criminal noirs, pulps, procedurals, historical dramas, tales of average Joes pushed too far. He doesn't outline before he writes, but he does his homework. Relying more over time on research has obliged him to cultivate sources. "I do police ride-alongs, interviews; I go to trials just to listen to the language; and I've made a lot of contacts on the other side, too, people who've done bad things in their lives and are eager to talk."