Over the past 15 years, George Pelecanos has earned a reputation as the James Brown of urban funk noir. Writing gritty novels set in Washington, D.C., by day, the hardest-working man in the crime-fiction business moonlighted in Baltimore writing scripts for HBO's The Wire. His new novel, The Turnaround (Little, Brown), a story about the consequences of the murder of a bored white teenager who yells racist remarks from a car window on a hot summer day in 1972, offers a lower body count (and less snorting and inhaling) than the books that made him a critic's darling. Fans will think of The Turnaround as Pelecanos's Stand by Me — a heartfelt, deeply personal work about the limited but real possibilities for redemption. It also features a three-handkerchief trick ending set 30 years after the killing that would have inspired cheers and tossed coffee cups in the writers' room of The Wire, where Pelecanos traded set-ups, betrayals, and dick jokes with his fellow American crime gods David Simon, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane.
A quick introduction to the kinds of characters who populate Pelecanos's novels can be gained at Crisfield Seafood Restaurant in Silver Spring, Maryland, a few blocks from the D.C. city line. Seated at the horseshoe-shaped bar, a 30-year-old white guy with long hair and ripped Nikes eats a crab-cake sandwich next to a young black man who keeps his gold-rimmed Gucci sunglasses firmly in place while spooning down a bowl of clam chowder. An American flag stands by the far wall near a homemade shrine to Jimmy Buffet. No one here is too pretty, too rich, or too poor.
Standing exactly five foot nine and a half and weighing in at 165 pounds with big shoulders and a thin gold chain around his neck, Pelecanos looks at least 10 years younger than his actual age of 51. His voice has a twangy, unexpected bottom to it that reminds me of the country singer Waylon Jennings. "This is the top of the South here," he explains, sitting down at a private table and asking for a bottle of Crisfield's house sauce to go with his soft-shell crabs.
