Crime Story

He has also tried to change some bad habits. He pines for the novice energy of his first novels, he says, but he can't read them now because "I had been timid in those books about being honest about race, and I wanted to change that. I hadn't let the characters speak as they would speak. I was walling them around too much, idealizing the black characters too much. You have to not be afraid to be misinterpreted."

More fully inhabiting his black characters and letting them speak as they would speak has drawn some critics' ire. The author and activist Ishmael Reed has fulminated against Pelecanos, whose black characters, Reed has said, "speak like the cartoon crows in those old racist cartoons." Writing in The Washington Post, the novelist Guy Johnson accused Pelecanos of purveying broad ghetto stereotypes that create "doubt about whether he knows his subjects well enough to capture them."

"For me, it's not so much about black and white as it is about knowing Washington," said Pelecanos. "I get letters from black readers saying, 'Thank you, you got something right.' Like, after Hard Revolution, I heard from a few different people about the riots. Stokely Carmichael has always been blamed for inciting them, but he didn't, and I had to get that right. But, more often, they'll write to say I caught something about how people talk, or they'll say, 'How did you know about that bar?'_" You read Pelecanos for the way his characters experience a workplace moment, the rush of being out among people drinking where there's music, the rhythm of an unremarkable weekday evening in a lower-middle-class household -- not for poetic language, intricate plotting or gloriously inventive action tableaus. Going into people's heads is what he does. "If I shouldn't be allowed to go into a black character's head, then I shouldn't write women, or 'The Pacific,' since those people aren't like me, either."

Pelecanos has pursued his character studies into a variety of fictional people: white and black, male and female, contemporary and historical. Putting them in motion through the plots of crime stories produces surprising results. Nick Stefanos, his first hero, progressively drinks his way out of a starring role and becomes a supporting character in later novels. Every instinct bred by crime stories and action movies encourages a reader to expect that Lorenzo Brown, the ex-con trying to keep his nose clean in Drama City (2005), is headed for a spectacular showdown with gangsters -- but he steers around it. You never see the serial murderer in The Night Gardener, and the frustrated cops don't, either.

Pelecanos was a writer, story editor and producer for "The Wire." He wrote crucial scenes as different as the ex-junkie Bubbles' breakthrough at a 12-step meeting and the western-style standoff in an alley between Omar Little, the street legend who robs drug dealers, and Brother Mouzone, the prim shootist from New York. Pelecanos also created Cutty, a character who turns away from the street life and opens a boxing gym, and gave "The Wire" its Greek gangsters, even providing the background voices shouting in Greek when the cops raided a warehouse. In story meetings, he refereed arguments between Simon and Ed Burns, the show's other co-creator.

"Ed and I are often butting heads in a way that somebody who doesn't know us might think is toxic," Simon told me. "George's essential role was to be the gravitas, to make the decision. We'd present our best arguments, and he'd sit and listen until he couldn't stand it any longer. He was the one with the storytelling chops to decide. He has a really strong ear for theme and idea. He writes books and scripts that are about something. When George says you won an argument, you feel good because it means the idea was good."

Expanding on his description of Pelecanos as a moralist, Simon said: "We didn't know we needed Cutty until George invented him. It's not about plotting, it's about defining some aspect of human endeavor that wasn't covered by other characters. Institutionally, not much is redeemed in 'The Wire,' yet all of us believe in the individual's ability to act. George said, 'We need a moral center.'_"

Burns told me a story about scripting the death of Wallace, a likable corner boy gunned down by his pals. "It could have been just Bodie, who was pretty much a monster back then, who would just walk up and kill him. But that would have left nothing for Poot, and it would have sealed Bodie as a character. The way George wrote it, Bodie can't finish it, and Poot, who's a good friend of Wallace, has to step up and do it. That transcends genre; that's squeezing all the juice out of a scene." Bodie opens up as a character from that point, grappling with a dawning understanding that the large forces bearing down on him make it almost impossible for him to act honorably and survive. "That's why you hire writers like George," said Burns, "because they find what's inside a scene, what's inside the character."

"The Wire," in return, left its mark on Pelecanos. It "changed the way I look at a lot of things," he said. "In the past, I would go down to a drug corner and go, 'Why doesn't the government do anything about this?' Now I see better that they're not gonna do something about it, and just throwing money at it won't work. The people who live there have to take things into their hands."

DRIVING UP GEORGIA AVENUE TOWARD MARYLAND, following the historical route of the Pelecanos family and others who moved up into the suburban middle class, we passed through a redevelopment district. Banners hanging from streetlights announced that "Good Things Are Happening" on Georgia Avenue. Crossing into Silver Spring, we entered a classic post-World War II suburban landscape of detached houses, each set off by a lawn.

"This is where I grew up," said Pelecanos. "Whittington Terrace. It was Jewish, Italian, Greek -- ethnic people buying their first house." We parked at Forest Knolls

Elementary School and got out. From the schoolyard, we could see into the back yard of the house he grew up in. "I climbed the fence and went home every day for lunch," he said. "Same thing in high school. That's how I got in trouble."

He was referring to an accident with a gun when he was 17 in which he nearly killed his pal Frank Carchedi. The boys, who had been tight since first grade, were fooling around with Pelecanos's father's unregistered .38, and it went off. "I blew the side of his face off," said Pelecanos. "He just looked at me and said, 'You shot me.'_"

I asked if the moment resurfaces when he writes violent scenes. "Honestly, yes," he answered. "To shoot somebody at close range like that, you don't forget." He has written elements of the episode into more than one novel, including Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go (1995): "The right side of his jaw was exposed, skinless, with pink rapidly seeping into the pearl of the bone. You're okay, LaDuke, I thought. You turned your head at the last moment and Coley blew off the side of your face. You're going to be badly scarred and a little ugly, but you're going to be okay."

Pelecanos told me that his father had his arms full of groceries when he came home after Carchedi had been rushed to the hospital. "He was carrying these big bags, and he came in, and there was blood all over the walls. The wound had geysered. He just dropped the bags, they slid right out of his hands, and he turned white."

"The truth of it was, it wasn't a real sinister thing," Carchedi, now a successful area businessman, told me on the phone. "It was a couple of teenage kids being knuckleheads, playing around. But it was an important experience, in a way. It made us both stronger, and if anything it made us closer. It was a pretty lonely place out there when it happened." No criminal charges were filed; the men remain close. Pelecanos is Carchedi's daughter's godfather, and he named the mayor in "The Wire" after his friend.

Carchedi said: "It was more or less a flesh wound, which sounds funny to say, like Monty Python or something, considering how bad it looked and the surgery I had to have. But it was a bloody mess, and it changed us." One affereffect of the episode he detects in his old friend's writing is a deep respect for the transformative power of violence, part of a larger skepticism about the fantasy figure of the action hero with a gun. "Reading his books, on the surface you think that the way to be is the characters who are the tough guys, fast and loose on the edge, alpha-male types. You feel like kind of a loser because these guys are out there drinking and playing, but they usually end up being losers. We're attracted to the fantasy of these guys, but as the book wraps up, it's the guy who gets up and goes to work in the morning who ends up really cool."

The shooting drew in the starkest terms the line between youthful hijinks and the kind of catastrophe that can end a life or warp it beyond redemption. Carchedi said: "It was a turbulent time. Things were different in the '60s and '70s, and every kid wasn't tethered by a cellphone, but that was as far out there as we ever got. We were basically good kids. We did well in school; we listened to our parents. We'd get out on the edge. We took risks, and we'd do crazy things that parents now, who are so on their kids, would be horrified by, but one of our bonds was that we knew we weren't gonna go over that edge. A lot of that was the strength of our families -- blue-collar, ethnic. That was behind us, and kept us accountable." The shooting was the two boys' big mistake, and they still wonder at the sheer dumb luck that allowed them to recover from it.

Carchedi feels that dwelling on the incident can lead to a romantic misreading of Pelecanos that confuses a dutiful, responsible family man with one of his own characters. "If you look at the stories written about George, they focus on the macho side, the tough side -- and he does have that side. He was on the streets; he was that kind of kid and young adult. But he's mellowed, and he's quicker to talk about family than about this other stuff. George is really focused on family, in his books and in his life. He's taken a path that a lot of guys in his position would not have taken. I know for a fact that he's turned stuff down because he wanted to stay here with his family. He's flown high, but he could have flown even higher."

"MY WORLDVIEW CHANGED BECAUSE WE HAD CHILDREN," Pelecanos said. We were sitting in the den in his house, not far from the house in which he grew up. Books with his name on their spines lined two shelves. His wife, Emily, 50, and their kids -- Nick, 17, Peter, 15, and Rose, 11 -- came and went, attending to weekday evening business.

Pelecanos was talking about a turning point in his life, his experience in Brazil in 1993, when he and Emily went there to adopt Peter. (Nick and Peter are adopted from Brazil; Rose from Guatemala.) They had document problems and ended up spending the whole fall there. They were struck by the nakedness of the poverty and despair they saw. "You couldn't walk around at night; there were fences with nails in them around the houses, kids with murder in their eyes. Here it's more hidden. It radicalized me a little bit, and it made me want to reach a bit higher, like Steinbeck."

Thinking about the changes in his writing encouraged by fatherhood, he said: "The answer to 'What makes a good man?' has changed. Some of the men stop themselves. They're more in control of their impulses. And if they cross the line, they know they'll have to give up what they are."

Carlo Rotella, director of American studies at Boston College, last wrote for the Magazine about WaterFire, an environmental art piece in Providence, R.I. He can be reached at carlo.rotella@gmail.com.