Pelecanos City

When I first clicked on this interview of George Pelecanos in the Independent, I had a sinking feeling that it might be another hatchet job along the lines of what Michael Connelly endured from the paper last year. But instead, it’s a different interviewer, with less pointed questions, and result is a little more prosaic:

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.”

Or unless you’re writing “street lit,” which is an entirely different thing altogether and generally not marketed beyond black audiences (though what if it were?)

And in a side note, it’s really not a good idea for reviews to repeat unsubstantiated (and untrue) rumors when there’s no evidence to back said extraneous bit of information up.