Described as 'the Zola of Washington, DC', George Pelecanos has written aslew of thrillers based in the US capital city. How does he manage to craft novels so uncomfortably revealing about men, danger andpoverty? John Connolly goes on a snoop job to find out
It is not a pleasant story. Even asking about it feels like an unwarranted intrusion. He is, you sense, an intensely private man, modest and restrained. This is not a story that he wants to tell. But still you ask, because it is important if one is to understand both the man and his work.
So he tells the story. The boy is 17 and knows where his father keeps his gun. He suggests to his buddy that they should take it, maybe fire off a few shots. His buddy is 16. He agrees. Pretty soon, the younger boy is looking down the barrel of the pistol. His friend's finger is on the trigger.
The trigger is pulled.
"Yeah," says George Pelecanos softly. "I shot another kid with my father's gun. It's just natural for a boy to pick up a gun if it's in the house.
"Trouble is, I didn't respect guns and didn't know enough about them to understand how to use one properly. I blew the side of his face off. It was a .38 special, and about this far from him." He holds his hands about 12 inches apart. "Just a hair off, and I would have taken his head off.
"It's something that will be with me for the rest of my life. There isn't a day goes by that I don't think about it, you know what I mean? It's pretty horrible. It was only later that it was pointed out to me that a lot of people get shot in the face in my novels, but I didn't realise it until the third or fourth book . . ."
That last sentence is the reason why the question had to be asked. Few crime novelists write better about men and violence than Pelecanos. In fact, few novelists write better about men, period. He is so truthful in his depictions of them that to read him as a man is to feel uncomfortable, almost ashamed, at times.
Pelecanos's men sabotage their relationships with women by unfaithfulness; the resutling guilt driving them further and further away from the peace and happiness they secretly crave. They drift through mundane jobs fuelled by booze and pot and, occasionally, they explode into violence: graphic, unflinching violence.
"But it's graphic for a reason: to show what happens when somebody gets shot," says Pelecanos. "I don't want any teenager to pick up one of my books and think that the violence in the books is cool. I want people to get a little sickened by it. But I'd be a hypocrite if I said that I don't get off by writing those scenes. I mean, you're sitting there writing a book, and you're going along for months with dialogue and scenes, and you want to bring it up to a point where you can get some release as well."
There is humour, too, in his work, and a love of film and popular music that gives his novels both a vivid cinematic style and a virtual soundtrack from the past four decades. Still, it is sometimes hard to equate the books with the softly-spoken 44-year-old man sitting beside me, nursing a beer in a dark bar. But then Pelecanos is unusual in many ways.
While he writes of men seemingly incapable of being faithful, he has been married for 16 years and has three children. He dislikes guns and is critical of the gun-control laws in the US, yet still admits to enjoying shooting with friends in the woods.
He has acted as executive producer for the Coen brothers on two movies, Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink, and championed John Woo's US breakthrough movie, The Killer, even coming up with the tagline for the poster. ("One bad hit man. One tough cop. And 10,000 bullets." It earned him a place in a book of dumb movie blurbs.)
"Producing movies was no fun," he says. "I can't take any credit for Miller's Crossing or Barton Fink. The Coens are just geniuses. All we did was protect them from the studio. We financed the movies, then basically delivered the film cans to the studio and said 'Here's the movie. No, you can't have any say in it and you can't send us any notes.'
"When I read Barton Fink, I didn't even understand it. What was I going to do? Tell them to change it?"
But it is as a crime novelist that Pelecanos is best known, slowly building a reputation that this year saw him crowned as one of the 10 crime writers to watch in the new century by the influential US magazine Publishers Weekly. Over the course of nine published books, all set in Washington DC, he has mapped out the city and made its territory his own, documenting it from the perspective of Greek immigrants from the 1930s through to the 1990s (the four Karras novels of the "DC Quartet"); from the point of view of a barman and sometime private eye (the three Nick Stefanos novels); and, most recently, through the eyes of a black investigator, Derek Strange, and his white partner Terry Quinn (Right as Rain and the forthcoming Hell to Pay).
The novel sequences overlap, illuminating the histories of characters from other books: Nick Stefanos's grandfather is saved by Peter Karras in The Big Blowdown. Later, in Shame the Devil, the grandson will repay the debt to Karras's son, Dimitri.
Throughout the novels, the city plays its part, its geography and history determining the fates of major and minor characters as much as their own actions. The scale of his undertaking led one reviewer to dub him "the Zola of Washington", a reference that Pelecanos claims he had to look up.
His fascination with Washington is a product of his past as much as his present (he lives in Maryland, just over the District line), and the novels contain traces of their author's own early life. "I'm the son of Greek immigrants," he explains. "My dad had a coffee-shop downtown, and I worked there throughout my childhood. In the summers, I would take the bus to the shop and deliver food for him on the streets, and as I was walking around I would make up stories. In my mind they were movies, because I wasn't a book-reader, but that's how I kind of fell in love with Washington, just exploring it on my own as a kid. It was a real exciting time to be a kid.
"The other thing was that my dad worked in that job in the coffee shop. He wasn't really getting a lot of respect from the doctors and lawyers that he served because he was just the Greek behind the counter. He was an ex-Marine who had fought in the Philippines, and I knew he could take care of business with those guys if he wanted to, but he didn't.
"And I never, ever wanted to be one of those guys at the other side of the counter. I never wanted to be a lawyer or anything like that. My dad was my hero, like all fathers should be, and I wanted to own my own business and be my own man, like he was."
That ambition was not to be fulfilled for some time. Pelecanos worked as an electronics salesman, just as his character Nick Stefanos does in 1992's A Firing Offense, the first and most autobiographical of Pelcanos's novels.
A Greek with an afro, he sold TVs and stereos on commission, fuelling himself with regular hits of weed and malt liquor from the stash the salesmen kept in the storeroom. Later, he sold shoes (he says it was the best job he ever had), a phase that provided the inspiration for another early novel, Shoedog, and introduced him to his wife-to-be. He was, he admits, running wild. He was busted for shoplifting. Embarrassingly, he was also arrested shortly before his marriage, an incident that caused him to alter his behaviour for the better.
"I got busted right before I got married for fleeing and eluding the police, and that was the last time I got in trouble with the law. And I wasn't that young; I was 28 years old. I got in a fight in a parking-lot and then the cops came on the scene. I was drunk, and I kind of got in my car and took off. They chased me. I lost them, but they had my license number, and they came and arrested me the next day. It's kind of embarrassing if you're getting married in a few months and you're going to traffic school with all these losers and stuff. It kind of woke me up." He can't resist adding, with a half-smile: "But I did lose them . . . "
IF there is a real affection for Washington running through the novels, there is also anger at the legacy of corruption and mismanagement that has blighted the city. "The cliché is that Washington is a transient city, but it's not at all: three-quarters of the population have lived there for generations, but because they're black and most of the ones in the city are an underclass, nobody really bothered about them.
"Meanwhile, you have the image of the Capitol dome and the White House, their shadows going right into this city that's full of poverty. You can park your car on North Capitol Street, and the dome is right up at the end of the street, yet you're in one of the worst streets in the country: totally f***ed-up schools, virtually no opportunities, kids who are fatherless for the most part, and the government is right there. They have the opportunity to do something about it and they don't. It's a disgrace, man, and that's what fires me up more than anything else as a writer."
Pelecanos's concerns with poverty, particularly its effects on children, are a product of his experiences not only in Washington but in South America. He has three adopted children, two boys born in Brazil and a Guatemalan daughter. When he and his wife went to Brazil in 1993 to adopt their second son, the authorities refused to let them leave. "I was living in Brazil for a few months, and that was the first time I saw kids living in poverty for real. At home we have welfare and the poverty is behind closed doors, but these kids were laying down in the street and they were dying.
"That visit radicalised me. It changed my worldview just seeing that and the books have been different ever since."
And, with that, it's time for him to leave. He has a wife waiting back home, and children that he misses and books that he wants to write. "It ain't digging ditches. Your back don't hurt at the end of the day and you don't feel like you're pissing away your life, which is the main thing."
He finishes his drink and asks, gently: "Hey, make me sound smart, will you?" The strange thing is that he means it.
A man with nine novels published and another about to be released in the new year; a defender of the notoriously cerebral Coen brothers from interfering studio executives; a writer who has been compared to Zola; and as smart and witty a conversationalist as one could ask for, yet still so unassuming that he worries people will think him dumb.
He stands and frowns. "You know, I've never told anybody before about getting arrested before my wedding." He shrugs.
"Well, at least my mom and dad won't read it . . . "
Right as Rain is published by Orion (£5.99 sterling). Hell to Pay will be published this year