Like most of the trouble that’s happened in my life or that I’ve caused to happen, the trouble that happened that night started with a drink. (Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go).
Above is an interview conducted in front of a Greek audience in Athens with prolific Greek-American crime novelist and screenwriter George Pelecanos.
The interview concentrates to a great extent on Pelecanos’ partnership with David Simon that resulted in the classic TV series The Wire – about the decline amid crime, corruption and racial polarisation and strife of one of the great American cities, Baltimore, which mirrors the decline of so many once thriving US metropolises, such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Cleveland. The TV series is regarded as one of the finest ever made.
Pelecanos also collaborated with Simon on Treme, a short-lived series about New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and The Deuce, which took us back to early 1970s New York City and the birth of the hardcore pornography industry.
Pelecanos was uniquely placed to write about Baltimore because his novels are all based in neighbouring Washington DC, where the writer was born and has always lived. Pelecanos worked in his father’s diner – crewed entirely by African-Americans, who made up 80 percent of DC’s population – and served white men in ties who he never felt much affinity for.
Inevitably, then, in charting the travails and modern history of Washington DC, Pelecanos is charting the history of its black community, even if some of his heroes, like Nick Stefanos, Dimitri Karras, Spero Loukas are Greek Americans, presumably Pelecanos’ alter egos.
As influences, Pelecanos cites crime writers Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, as well as film noirs and Westerns, while music – soul, funk, rock and roll, the DC punk rock scene – clothes, cars, sports, drugs, alcohol and guns are also an integral part of the world Pelecanos creates and recreates.
The strength of Pelecanos’ writing – its vivid and passionate documenting of the trials and tribulations of Washington DC – might also reveal its limitation. For Pelecanos, crime – stepping out of bounds of what is socially and legally acceptable – is a materialist phenomenon and can ultimately be explained by social and political circumstances. As he himself says: ‘Any time you have poverty, joblessness, sub-par public schools, and a lack of opportunity, you're going to have a high rate of crime.’
This explanation of crime pervades Pelecanos’ novels disallowing other, perhaps darker reasons, for criminal behaviour, greed, envy, psychopathy, power, loathing, and explains the absence of tragedy in his work, which sometimes makes reading a Pelecanos novel like reading a political tract.