Jobbing crime writer finally makes The Cut

GRAFT pays off. George Pelecanos is the proof. Commended for his work as a screenwriter and producer on The Wire, television’s most revered drama series, the dust jackets of his novels are adorned with a Stephen King comment that he’s “perhaps the greatest living crime writer.”

But it took him a while to get to the top of the mountain. He’s written a novel a year for the last 20 years. For his sixth, he only got paid $7,500.

Born in Washington in 1957, he has remained in the city. It’s where his novels are largely set, as in the case of his latest, The Cut. Its mean streets are his laboratory. His ear is cocked for the stories and rich, crackling language that peppers his work.

“I still do live in the neighbourhood where I grew up,” he says. “It’s a blue collar neighbourhood. It’s very ... I hate that word diverse, but there’s a lot of different people here, and I pointedly have not moved into a nicer place because this is how I make my living, by just living here and talking to people all the time.

“The kids that are over in my house are young people that are out in the world and I listen to them. You know, I’m always working, man.”

Pelecanos and his wife have three adopted children on the cusp of adulthood, two boys from Brazil and a girl from Guatemala. Spero Lucas, the protagonist of The Cut, is also one of three adopted children in a mixed-race family. Pelecanos often leaks bits of his own biographical detail into his novels. His family are of Greek extraction — his father, who served in the marines corps during World War Two, moved to America as a toddler; his mother’s parents were Greek. Spero’s family are also Greek-American. The Cut is drizzled with descriptions of Greek food and Greek slang.

The ‘c’ in Pelecanos replaced a ‘k’ to make the name sound more American; Spero’s grandfather does the same with the original ‘k’ in his surname. There is no ‘c’ in the Greek alphabet. Spero goes to church on a Sunday, as Pelecanos does with his family. Spero plays in the church basketball team as a kid, as his author did. They both have a thing for westerns; Pelecanos set off for university to major in film, but drifted towards crime writing in his final year.

Spero, “who served over there in I-raq,” is a private investigator who specialises in recovering stolen goods. He takes a 40-point cut — hence the novel’s title — on retrieval. His latest client, Anwan Hawkins, is in The DC jail. “Inmates like to say that they live on waterfront property, as several of the east-facing cells give to a view of the Anacostia River.” Hawkins is in prison for dealing marijuana. He hires Spero because his last two shipments, and later three, have gone missing. The case drags Spero into a violent, double-dealing underworld, which he is good at navigating, unlike his emotional life.

“He’s carrying some guilt because he wasn’t around when his father passed away,” says Pelecanos. “He was in Iraq. He missed out on his twenties, basically. He was over there while other kids got to go to college, hang out in bars, screw a bunch of women and stuff like that. He’s a little unformed. He wants to catch up on all of those things. It spills over into his relationships with women, for example. In his mind, he’s still a teenager: ‘I’m gonna sleep with as many women as I can. What’s the problem?’ But he’s not a kid anymore. That’s the thing. He’s 29 years old. I actually liked writing a character like that, because I’ve been writing a lot of middle-aged characters, guys who are more settled, with families and so on. It was refreshing to write a guy who likes women, but also likes to be in bed with them.”

When he’s not trying to snake women or cruising bars stocked with “determined alcoholics,” Spero hangs with Leo, his older brother by a year, who teaches at Cardoza High, a school full of marginalised kids, which was once, in an earlier, loftier incarnation as Central, the school of J Edgar Hoover. One of Leo’s students, who is raised haphazardly by a single mom, gets dragged into Spero’s case by accident, which affords Pelecanos the chance to shine a light on his underprivileged world.

Pelecanos is interesting when he gets gritty on social realism. He mentions that Cutty, the ex-con who goes straight and runs a boxing gym, was his favourite character in The Wire. “My contribution,” he says. He harvested the character from the off-cuts of one of his novels, Drama City. His story is life-affirming. America is pessimistic at the moment. It’s broken. Pelecanos suggests the way to fix it might be hiding in plain sight.

“During the Great Depression,” he says, “Franklin D Roosevelt put America to work by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Work Progress Administration. He put Americans to work by building roads and bridges and the infrastructure of the country.

“What that did was two things: it gave people jobs, obviously. It also trained them how to work. Those people became managers. Their kids saw their parents in a work culture every day. It translated into families.

“The other thing it did was that when you build roads and bridges and things of that nature, you allow people to go to work. You’ve given them an avenue. The trucks are rolling out, the trains can move. It’s no accident that after World War Two there was such tremendous economic growth in this country, because the groundwork had been laid by Roosevelt before the war. And when you suggest that now, when you suggest the government put people to work, everybody starts screaming socialism.

“I don’t care. Call me a socialist. I don’t give a shit. I’m talking about a solution.”