ON THE SCENE WITH GEORGE PELECANOS

The novelist talks about the allure of crime stories, writing for
television and leaving autobiographical fiction behind

Few novelists have chronicled urban crime as convincingly as George
Pelecanos. The son of a Greek immigrant who owned a lunch counter in
Washington, D.C., Mr. Pelecanos lived in the Mount Pleasant section of
Washington until he was five, and then moved to suburban Silver
Spring, Md., where he lives today.

In his case, geography matters. All 14 of Mr. Pelecanos's novels
unfold in Washington, where troubled neighborhoods set the tone and
reader expectations. In the latest, "The Night Gardener," which will
be published Aug. 8 by Lagardere SCA's Little, Brown imprint, a boy's
murder appears to intersect with a series of unsolved older killings.
Eventually, this brings together a former detective who drank his way
off the force; the supervisor who fired him; and a retired heroic
policeman eager for one last chance at solving an open case that still
bothered him.

Each of Mr. Pelecanos's novels is informed by men acting from a sense
of personal honor. Their victories, small but hard-won, has helped him
build a loyal, albeit modest, readership. Mr. Pelecanos, 49 years old,
has also taken his noir sensibilities to television, where he is a
writer for the HBO crime series "The Wire." The fourth season begins
this fall. Mr. Pelecanos spoke to The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey A.
Trachtenberg by telephone from his home.

The Wall Street Journal Online: You write about crime, drugs, guns and
race. Do you ever worry that this limits your audience? Even James
Patterson has written love stories.

George Pelecanos: The crime part is the engine that moves the narrative
and allows me to write the other things I want to write about. Yes, if
you are the kind of person who won't read a crime novel under any
circumstance, it limits my audience. But it's the best arena for me to
set the kinds of book I want to write.

WSJ com: Violence is a constant refrain in your books. In one
interview, you said that you once shot somebody in the face. How old
were you, how did it happen and what impact did it have on your
literary career?

Mr. Pelecanos: I was 17 years old. It was a gun accident. Gun in the
house, teens playing with a gun. My best friend was shot. He lived.
Today he's the CEO of a very successful company. I don't want anybody to
think that I'm a hardboiled guy. I was just a dumb kid. Anybody can pull
the trigger on a gun. And that is reflected in my books. When people get
shot, you know it. I don't add humor or levity. The books get very
serious when the guns come out.

WSJ com: Do you view yourself as a crime novelist, or a novelist whose
main concern is crime and its effect on those it touches?

Mr. Pelecanos: The second. I want to make the point that I'm proud to be
a crime novelist. What I've chosen is the best way to convey the
questions I'm trying to raise.

WSJ com: How do you come up with your plots and characters?

Mr. Pelecanos: In the case of "The Night Gardener," the murders are
based on the Freeway Phantom murders of the 1970s. But it was only a
starting point to look at the lives of the people haunted by a crime
like that, one which wasn't solved. It's not a serial killer novel, you
don't get into the head of serial killers, and there isn't a lot of
violence in the book. I try not to show the actual violence. Even when
the killings are described they aren't that graphic. I started out with
a crime and everything else is fiction. I don't have a huge imagination.
I'm good at creating characters, but plot doesn't come that easy to me.
I need to get inspiration, and often it comes in the form of real events.

WSJ com: Why does music play such a large role in your books? They
seem to zigzag between punk rock bands and soul.

Mr. Pelecanos: Hopefully, the music is organic to the characters. In the
beginning, it was me name-checking bands I liked. Then, as time went on,
the music reflected what the characters would listen to. I've also given
myself a music education, as in "Hard Revolution," when I immersed
myself in deep soul music. I've been turned on by it ever since.

WSJ com: Your early books featured lead character Nick Stefanos and
appeared very autobiographical. Do you feel you've done as much with
that material as you can?

Mr. Pelecanos: Yes. When I got away from that is when my books got
better. I needed it in the beginning because I was learning how to
write. I'm proud of those books, but I think I'm a better writer by
going to the third person and writing about people who don't have
anything to do with my life or background.

WSJ com: The majority of your characters are black; have you
developed a black readership, and what do you hear from them?

Mr. Pelecanos: I do, but it's more of an underground thing. I get
letters and phone calls. But when I do book signings and personal
appearances, the audiences are mostly white. Growing up here, I expected
that and understand it. Black audiences won't come out for a white
writer for the most part. It really is just a fact of life.

WSJ com: Are you ever criticized for writing in African-American
slang? Are there any other writers who do it well?

Mr. Pelecanos: Usually this only comes up as a question asked by white
journalists. It's not an issue with my readers. If you are doing it
wrong, you'll hear about it.

WSJ com: You rarely write about open racial conflict. Is that because
the two worlds don't often intersect?

Mr. Pelecanos: If it's appropriate, I'll write about it. What's more
interesting are the dynamics between people that involve hypocrisy or
ignoring each other. That's what I want to write about. It turns all
these questions back to the reader. I don't want to write about the
Klan; it doesn't interest me. Those people aren't interesting in
themselves. I like to make people uncomfortable because it's something
we should be uncomfortable about. The state of the relationship isn't
fixed yet. It does a disservice to tell people everything is all right,
although that's what people want to be told in a book or film. They want
to be told specifically they don't have this problem.

WSJ com: What is the biggest difference between writing a novel and
writing a show like 'The Wire,' which tells one story over an extended
series of episodes?

Mr. Pelecanos: Our intention was to write a novel for television.
However, even having said that, you can't meander too much in
television. Every scene has to advance the plot or describe character in
a way that affects the plot. In a book you can stray and get inside
people's heads with internal monologues. You can't do that at all with a
screenplay. And with television or a movie, there are many filters your
writing goes through, from acting to lighting to directing to editing.
Very often, the finished product is not what you have in mind when
you're writing it. That can be good, too. I've written stuff that I
thought was only okay, and others elevated to something better.

WSJ com: One of the recent story points in "The Wire" was the creation
of a cop-free zone where drugs could be sold freely. Is this something
you support?

Mr. Pelecanos: There's a school of thought that says if you legalize
drugs it will solve the problem. We're all good liberals, we said let's
do it and see what happens. We wanted to be honest about it. So in our
brainstorming sessions we'd say, what if? The finding was that all the
negative things came out also. The answer is that we didn't believe in
the full legalization of drugs. But we don't believe in the
criminalization of drugs, either.

WSJ com: Even crime fiction seems to be increasingly dominated by a
handful of authors. Are there any writers you are reading these days
who may be less well known?

Mr. Pelecanos: Yes, Daniel Woodrell. He's one of the great current
American writers. His new book, "Winter's Bone," is comparable to one of
my favorite novels, "True Grit" by Charles Portis. The voice in
"Winter's Bone" is as sharp and authentic as that of Mattie Ross in
"True Grit." He's a guy that I wish people would read.

WSJ com: Your publisher has boasted that it is spending $150,000 to
promote this book. If it fails to break out, will you look for a new
publishing house?

Mr. Pelecanos: I'm very happy there. It's the opposite: Will they start
worrying about me? I would like to stay there for the rest of my career.
I have good friends there. Why would I be unhappy? I'm writing the books
I want to write and taking care of my family. There's this weird thing
that if you aren't at the top of the chart you aren't a success. But I
can't think of any way I'm not a success. I'm my father's son. I like to
work hard and I'm proud of the roof over our heads. If you're a brand
name you have to write a certain kind of book and you'll forget why you
got into this.