Riders costumed in Wild Bill Hickock gear do their best to turn tiny
Riders costumed in Wild Bill Hickock gear do their best to turn tiny circles without disturbing wooden poles placed strategically on the floor. Riveting stuff.By now the shadows are lengthening and it’s show time. The action moves to the town square and the conductor from Central Casting takes to the platform with his celebrated orchestre. Of course if you feel the need for a city fix, there’s Cahors which is attractive in the way Market Harborough might be to the unsuspecting foreigner There’s a genuine city as well Toulouse is only an hour along the motorway. It is a life that takes place east of 14th Street.”The soul of the city is located in the side of the city that you probably don’t go to,” he says as he starts to eat “It’s people who have lived here for generations. This whole thing about Washington being a transient city is a myth.
It’s only a transient city for a very small segment of the population. They come and go and the other people stay and they are the majority.”This focus on the less glamorous side of Washington has provided a rich seam for Pelecanos. Since his first novel was published in 1992, he has completed another dozen pulp crime novels of a quality and erudition that few writing in the genre have matched or even aspired to. He has been likened to Elmore Leonard and James Elroy, been described as “the poet laureate of the DC crime world” by Esquire and found himself a regular at the top of the bestseller lists.Now, one of his novels, Right as Rain, is to be made into a film by producer Curtis Hanson and starring Denzil Washington, and his 13th novel has just been published. Drama City tells the story of Lorenzo Brown, a former convict trying to lead a better life and working as an animal cruelty prevention officer with the Humane Society. As with his earlier novels, Pelecanos took the time to do firsthand research and spent several weeks investigating the world of illegal dog-fights and gambling.
The book suggests, ultimately, that in both human society and the animal kingdom, there are those who simply cannot be saved.Pelecanos believes he has earned his success the hard way. When he dropped out of college with dreams of being a writer, he supported himself working a string of low-paying jobs: in coffee bars, as a waiter, selling shoes. In his spare time he worked on his writing, believing it was a trade rather than an art, something at which he would improve with effort and perseverance.The result was A Firing Offence, a detective story about the disappearance of the stockboy from an electronics store When he reads that novel now he does so with a shudder. “When I look back at some of the early stuff it’s quite embarrassing,” he says.If there is a common thread running through Pelecanos’s stories, it is his readiness to do more than simply tell a tale. Quite consciously, his novels are part social commentary, focusing on issues such as poverty, inequality and – very often – race.
Hard Revolution, for instance, is set against the backdrop of Washington’s 1968 riots, an event that led to the white exodus from the inner city and a stifling of development from which the east of the city is only now recovering.”I try not to sound like I’m on my soap-box, but I do pick things and I put them into the characters’ voices That means I let the characters do it. It’s a lot better than simply hearing me talk,” he says.Pelecanos is aware that this is a break from the usual format “Americans don’t really want that in their crime fiction. A lot of things I put in the books, and the way I structure the books, are not really a recipe for success, I can tell you. The other thing that people don’t want to talk about is having black characters, unless you give them a white guy’s ideal version of a black guy.”Most of his leading characters lead flawed, morally questionable lives and struggle with the choices presented to them. In Hell to Pay, the main character, a (black) private detective called Derek Strange stops off for regular lunchtime sessions of hand relief with a Chinese masseuse, all the while wondering why he struggles to commit to his girlfriend.
Other characters struggle with alcohol and depression.”Well, it’s just human nature. I don’t know anyone who does not have darker thoughts and sometimes gives into temptation,” he says. “I remember when I used to be a much harder drinker than I am now, I found I was at the place where I knew I would be going out and that I wouldn’t be coming home for a few days. You just know where you are going and you cannot stop yourself. [Strange] has got these great things at home and he’s feeling like many men do, men more than women: he fears mortality and that drives him, so a man would think ‘I’m never going to be 38 years old again, I better fuck that woman.’ Or, ‘I’m never going to be 48 years old again, I better fuck that woman Especially if my wife is not going to know. If it happens when she was out of town it did not happen’.”Pelecanos was born in 1957. His grandfather, who moved to the Washington area from Greece, worked in kitchens and owned a series of caf? His father followed in his grandfather’s steps and ran a coffee shop and soda fountain in the centre of Washington.
