George Pelecanos: Fiction that sings

‘...as Pelecanos' beloved Springsteen (whose Adam Raised a Cain deliberately name-checks Steinbeck's classic) once put it: "Man, the dope's/that there's still hope." It's an idea, not always popular in these cynical, fatalistic times, and one that you certainly don't often see in crime fiction, but Pelecanos is unrepentant: the choices we make always matter, and damn it, there is hope for the future.’
Kevin Burton Smith


ACCOMPANYING the 2004 issue of George Pelecanos’ stand out novel, Hard Revolution, was a CD of classic soul music, the music of 1968 as Washington and a host of other predominantly black cities burned amid the riots which followed the murder of Dr Martin Luther King.
It may have been a straight forward attempt at joining the multi-media age of cross platform marketing which typified much of the early 2000s, but it highlights the centrality of music to Pelecanos’ 16 novels.
The link between social events, either grand or small, and music is one of the key characteristics of Pelecanos’ work.
Get this straight, Pelecanos uses music in the way that great crime writers do: to illustrate a key facet of the time or of a key character’s psyche. Some writers have been accused of shoe horning in hip music, and even the best do sometimes cloyingly throw in classics. It becomes easy to spot.
But, like Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus and his love of prog and dour 70s folk rock and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander and his deep attachment to opera, Pelecanos’ characters are defined by the centrality of music to their lives. Music is in their background, just as Wallander a former classical hopeful, has the music in his DNA.
In Pelecanos, music touches everyone as it plays on Washingon DC FM stations frequently name checked in the car journeys and diners of the stories. Songs and artists literally bleed through into the prose setting the background to the plot devices making them seem more authentic. Just as it does in such an unobtrusive way in the unfolding narrative of The Wire.
In his Pelecanos’ first novel, A Firing Offence, Nick Stefanos a former punk kid who works as a marketing manager for an electrical outlet (like Pelecanos once did), takes his alcohol loving friends to a series of bars playing Camper Van Beethoven in the car while The Cure’s saxophone solo and The Pogues join up along the way on a bar crawl. There is a vividness in what this music evokes in its time and atmosphere.
Music also is central to many characters’ lives, it footnotes their existence and their remembrance of those years. Record store worker and coke head Dimitri Karras, caught up in the mid 80s drugs explosion of Washington in The Sweet Forever, hits the famous DC hard core club the 9:30:
‘...How Soon Is Now’ played through the sound system. This would be the single Karras would think of when he thought of 1986, the way 'Brass in Pocket’ would always mean 1980 and ‘Dancing with Myself’ would always trigger 1981 in his head.’
There is another wonderful episode of social history after this section, when Dimitri and the girl he has picked up, do a ton of coke and shag listening to The Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Pogues and The Replacements on vinyl. As the coke runs out Karras, depressed, manages to get a tiny amount for the last miniscule line, chopped squealingly with his razor,
‘The tap tap tap of the blade on the glass. His dealer called that the mating call of the Eighties.’
In Shoedog, perhaps Pelecanos’ least acclaimed novel released a decade after it was written, the central character Constantine, a drifter who gets dragged into a hellish situation, marks his joining of the army,
‘It was the month of October in 1975 and Constantine would always peg the date of his matriculation into bootcamp as the time he was a mild Springsteen fan (‘Kitty’s Back’ was his Katherine’s song) and Bruce was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek on the rack. Mal and Gary were Bachman Overdrive Freaks...’
In a throwaway paragraph at the start of a chapter in Right as Rain, perhaps the best book of his Derek Strange/ Terry Quinn series, Pelecanos’ choice of music signifies the genre he works in.
It’s not simply crime or thriller but an updating of the much maligned western genre, Strange checks his stocks listening to Elmer Bernstein’s soundtrack to The Magnificent Seven. It’s a tellingly minute and hugely important moment in the novelist’s career. In another Quinn Strange novel, Hell to Pay, the former character is reading James Carlos Blake’s hardboiled western book The Pistoleer, the clues are all there for anyone interested.
But we have to return to Hard Revolution to see the complex interplay between music, society and the personal motivations of key characters at its best.
Early on, Strange’s brother Dennis and his drug buddy Kenneth Willis cruise high on reefer and listening to classic soul. Dennis, tortured by his addictions and heading towards the radicalism of the Nation of Islam (through his reading of black awareness books like The Colonizer and the Colonized and The Wretched of the Earth), and Willis listen to Percy Sledge.
Dennis has no truck with this old soul, preferring the proto funk of Sly Stone and The Chambers Brothers, who represent a new kind of blackness.
‘Percy Sledge? To Dennis he was one of those old time, latern on the lawn Negroes, a prisoner to the record company. He dressed in tuxedos. He still wore pomade in his hair.’
For Dennis, the old time night clubishness of Sledge is tantamount to Uncle Tom-ism, he represents the black past, Sly is a radical new future. Music represents both the future and its tussle with the old. The interplay between character, class and social change and the relationship with the music of the time is hugely important in Hard Revolution.
In Pelecanos’ fiction music has the power to represent characters’ essences and evoke all eras of our time in way that few other authors ever achieve.

George Pelecanos: An appreciation

AS a key partner in the tight group of former journalists, cops, novelists and old stagers who created The Wire, George Pelecanos has jumped out of the narrow genre of hard boiled urban crime writers into the rarified atmosphere of highly successful TV executives.
Thanks to the success of The Wire, of which Pelecanos was the writer and producer, he is now being heralded as one of the kings of American neo noir literature.
But long before The Wire, his previous novels, all set in his native Washington DC, put him in the top bracket of the great social commentators of his generation. Only Richard Price, Dennis Lehane and James Lee Burke can be seen as his equals - the former two also wrote on the Wire.
One of his latest two books, The Turnaround, is a breathtaking example of wonderful democratic fiction, not literary fiction, but fiction which tells a great story but which unveils some of the truths behind race in modern America.
Listen to a short extract from The Turn Around

It has, like most Pelecanos stories, great central figures. In this case Alex Pappas - a Greek American man scarred in a race-related fight he had the misfortune to be involved in, in 1972 and Raymond Monroe, a black man who was involved in scarring Alex.
It revels in the mundanity of ordinary lives and the simple pleasures people take to get through life. There is a tremendous humanity and sense of community in the Turnaround, another characteristic of Pelecanos' work.
Starting in 1972 in the run-up to the incident and then jumping to the present day it showcases Pelecanos' great gift for vivid nostalgia and writing evocatively about the past. It also embraces modern America's race politics and its treatment of its armed forces' Middle East veterans.
More pertinently, The Turnround sees Pelecanos do what he does best - writing the modern urban Western where stoic men face up to their responsibilities, being forced into taking action to protect their families and making up for the sins of the past.
It's a brlliant novel from a writer who has only rarely put a foot wrong.
Hear him speak about his latest novel, The Way Home, currently one of President Obama's holiday reads, below.

Library of Congress interview on The Way Home


Great Pelecanos interviews/ features
Pelecanos on his five favourite books
Pelecanos in the Socialist Review
Amy Raphael from the Observer - with a truly appalling headline
From the Daily Telegraph in July
On Blog Talk Radio
The Times puts him at Number 31 of all time
Here for the full list
The music of Pelecanos, Pelecanos and Washington DC, Pelecanos and the writing life to come later this week

The Wire: A treasure of the modern age

GM is celebrating the news that the BBC has announced that it is to show all 60 hours of The Wire.

IN the last series of The Wire a routine in-joke repeats itself: editors ask reporters of the Baltimore Sun to examine the Dickensian nature of the education system and then homelessness problems of the city.
It's an in-joke between the creators and writers because the Dickensian nature of The Wire was one of the great praises sung of the show by critics exultantly reviewing early series.
They ultimately pointed to its often very gradually unfolding, novel-like plotting as the central pillar of its vast panoramic illustration of inner city Baltimore in decline.
It is the very novelistic, episodic nature The Wire that sets it apart and allowed it to achieve what many TV shows have either failed to do or just clean ignored - classic entertaining drama as a dense political treatise.
The only comparable example in Britain has been Our Friends in the North and even that is merely a super-charged mini series, albeit a bloody brilliant and era-defining one.
The Wire has a set of principle players augmented by many, many supporting members of an extraordinary ensemble, giving the drama an acute sense of place, community and time.
In many ways it mirrors the work of some of its key writers: the novelists Denis Lehane (Mystic River), Richard Price (Clockers) and perhaps most closely, the work of executive producer and crime writer, George Pelecanos (pictured above right with Wire creators Ed Burns and David Simon).
Each writer documents their places of birth, Lehane in Boston, Price Brooklyn and Pelecanos in Washington DC.
Pelecanos, a fellow resident of the Maryland suburb of Silver Springs with Simon, is the creator of several wonderful novels which document the decline of inner city DC from the 1940s through to the present.
The recurring set of characters in The Wire mirror the recurring neighbourhood characters in his Nick Stefanos and Derek Strange books.
Characters from different series often make brilliant cameos in other books which tickle the reader no end. But they act not merely as a post modern in-jokes, they also give a fictive but tangible representation of the living communities of Washington DC in the same way as happens in the West Baltimore of The Wire.
In The Wire, people live and die on the drug corners, they exit and re-enter the narrative often in different series.
We see people grow-up and fall victim, become rehabilitated and fall again and become brutalised by the harsh realities in the ghetto.
The Wire is epic, not in the way that Jeremy Clarkson or Richard Hammond describe some £300,000 super car, but in the sheer scope of its scale and sense of social purpose.
It is rightly called epic because it is on the heroic narratives of Greek drama and Russian fiction that it shamelessly styles itself.
What an aspiration for TV drama to have in the first place. But to achieve that ideal, and then some, makes it a treasure of this often trivial modern age.