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‘It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington DC’. I’ve got this line from a Gil Scott Heron song going through my head, I’m sure the rest of the song is a smart and sarky  portrayal of the Chocolate City’s legion of social ills, but sadly all I can remember, as the plane dips in to land at Dulles airport, is the clinching tag line which, taken on its own, is a spot on the inane side.

 

Its emptiness is kind of appropriate though, it strikes me, as I make my way through the airport to the coach that will take me to the metro station that will take me to my hotel, as it mirrors my own profound lack of knowledge about America’s capital, Washington DC.

 

Okay, this is what I know. It’s where the big state buildings are, the White House, the Capitol etc. Apart from that it's mostly black and poor. There’s also an area called Georgetown where diplomats and politicians, people who appear in spy novels, live. What I don’t have is much of a sense of how all these places fit together.

 

I also know Washington DC through the crime novels of George Pelecanos, the guy I’m here to interview. There’s no question Pelecanos’ DC is a vivid, 3D kind of a place; big on diners, bars and strip clubs, full of life and danger. I can imagine George Pelecanos’ DC pretty well. I just can’t make it marry up with the actual images of Washington I have, the manicured lawns of the White House, the Capitol and the Mall, the end-of-movie set piece places.

 

So I’m kind of curious, when I make it out of the metro at the Capitol Hill stop, as to what I’m going to find. Well, first thing I find is that I really am on Capitol Hill, there’s big white buildings, armed cops and tourists milling around, all sweltering in the September heat. My hotel is a couple of blocks east down a leafy road, full of elegant brownstones that doubtless house lawyers and lobbyists.

 

The hotel itself, or at least its lobby, is packed with what would appear to be the archetypal Midwestern conventioneers, people so straight that they’re almost self-parodic. So packed is the hotel, in fact, that the staff, while acknowledging that I do indeed have a reservation, are very dubious as to whether that does in fact entitle me to a room. After much humming and hahing they decide me that there will probably be a room available some unspecified time later, and maybe I’d like to leave my bags in the meantime.

 

Fine by me, as my immediate priority is to go out and find something to eat. A quick scan of my immediate neighbourhood doesn’t reveal anything particularly promising, so I decide to avail myself of one of George Pelecanos’ recommendations and head back to the Metro station.

 

George Pelecanos is the crime novelist who’s made DC his own. When I wrote the original Into The Badlands, I’d been keen to have a chapter on the city, it being the nation’s capitol and all, but I hadn’t found a writer to hang it on. The great, and now sadly late, Ross Thomas had written at least one very fine Washington novel, Briarpatch, but to call him a Washington novelist would have been stretching a point a little far, and anyway he was living in Malibu at the time.

 

In fact, around about the same time I was writing my book, Pelecanos must have been writing his first book, A Firing Offence. This was a novel which seemed to announce the arrival of a new generation of crime novelists, not so much post Vietnam as post punk, even in some cases a little post-modern (actually, in some cases, a lot post-modern - e.g. the new generation’s avatar, Quentin Tarantino, a man responsible for more bad crime novels than anyone since Robert B. Parker).

 

The postmodernism in Pelecanos’ work thankfully confines itself to a constant barrage of references to films, books and music. In every other way these are traditional hardboiled crime novels whose twin strengths are recognisable street level characters and recognisable street level milieux.

 

Pelecanos writing career began with the Nick Stefanos books, three contemporary private eye novels. They’re a young man’s books, full of sex, drugs and rock and roll. He followed up with the mature work, his DC Quartet of novels offering an alternative history of the city over the past half century, and arguably still his defining work. Next came the Strange and Quinn series of contemporary DC crime novels and lately there’s been a move into stand-alone crime novels, including the epic story of the city’s descent into racial conflict in the late sixties, Hard Revolution.  What the books have in common is that they’re all part of a long love letter to the city of DC.

 

So, before setting out on this trip, and in the interest of matching up his DC with the one in the guide-books, I asked Pelecanos by email to provide me with a few tips as to where to find this city of his. I’m planning on trying a few of them out this afternoon, prior to meeting up with Mr Pelecanos in the morning

 

Now, I have to say, I'm not sure I totally understand George Pelecanos. Our email exchanges leading up to this visit have been intermittently baffling. One email will rather sternly warn me against imagining I could visit with him on a Sunday morning as he will of course be taking his wife, kids and aged mother to church, the next one suggests an all black strip club on the east side as one of the city’s not to be missed attractions. I’ve been starting to wonder if he’s winding me up.

 

Oh well, now’s the time to find out. George Pelecanos’ number one must-see tip is a place called Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street, in a neighbourhood called Shaw. Ben's Chili Bowl apparently offers ‘the best soul juke box in town, not to mention the best chili dogs in the world’, while U Street was the main street of black DC in the old days (the old days being any time before the riots of 1968 that changed the city irrevocably).

 

Twenty minutes or so on Washington’s very smart metro and I resurface in an area so spick and span and equipped with Footlockers and Starbucks that I can’t help but double check that I’m in the right place. Black parts of American cities do not, in my experience, look this prosperous, or at least they only do if they’re not really black neighbourhoods any more but gentrified white neighbourhoods that nod slightly to their black heritage as an extra selling point for bohemian types. But this area, Shaw, doesn’t seem like that. It just seems like a buzzy businesslike area that’s mostly populated by black people.

 

Which is of course how things should be, but is not exactly the norm in America – or at least hasn’t been in many places I've been  - and, to be honest, its very calm and functionality makes me a little uneasy. Can I relax the level of vigilance I would habitually maintain, if I was in Southside Chicago, say, or would that simply be naïve?

 

Well, I’m not going to be relaxing at all unless I get something to eat, so I’m just checking the address, trying to figure out where Ben’s Chili Bowl might be, when I see that answer staring me in the face. It's right opposite me on U Street with a sign saying Ben’s Chili Bowl in three foot high letters

Cross the road and head inside and I’m in a classic fifties American diner, the sort of place that a million shopping malls and waterfront developments try and fail to copy. There are tables to the left and a counter to the right. I take a seat at the counter and watch an array of chefs and counter staff tending to hot dogs and chili and probably some other stuff, burgers and so forth, but what kid of person would go into Ben’s Chili Bowl and not order a chili dog? Not me, that’s for sure.

 

I’m hardly in a position to judge whether George P is right in proclaiming them the best chili dogs in the world but they’re the certainly the best I’ve ever had, and, just to check, I order lunch all over again, right after I’ve finished the first lot off. Then, sated to the point of being barely able to move, I decide to check out whether the jukebox likewise lives up to its billing. It’s certainly very fine with an exemplary mixture of new and old r&b. Best of all, from my point of view, is the hefty amount of Maze to be found.

 

Maze? Well if you have to ask you certainly weren’t on the London jazz funk scene in the early 1980s and that’s for sure. Basically Maze were a soul band whose heyday came at a time  - the late seventies to mid eighties - when the conventional wisdom was that soul was dead. In the USA they were enormously popular with black audiences, and almost entirely unknown to white audiences, despite being a multiracial combo with a very accessible Earth Wind And Fire meets Marvin Gaye kind of vibe.

 

In the UK they were almost entirely unknown to everyone except the jazz-funk crowd to whom they were basically the Beatles. They came over to play in London in the early eighties and were stunned to find a multi-racial capacity crowd who knew every word of their songs and generally went nuts. There are a couple of their songs – Joy and Pain and Golden Time Of Day in particular - that are amongst the most upful life affirming pieces of music I know, but I’m also aware that for most people I know their music comes over as intolerably smooth.

 

Smooth is a bit of  problem for culture vultures. We tend to prize the rough every time. Frank Sinatra is allowed to be smooth and that’s about it. This however is essentially because we – as in people like me - are spoiled and decadent. In places like Ben’s Chili Bowl, with its clientele of generally black working people with both blue and white collars, smooth is still good, sophisticated is still good. It’s about aspiration and about building a better world where we can all live together as one and all that cheesy stuff. That’s what Maze are about and if you’ve any interest in soul music you should check them out.

 

Anyway, sermon over, the point is that Maze are a group DC has taken to its heart. And while a lot of African American communities tend to be voracious in their appetite for new artists, and quick to tire of those who’ve fallen out of fashion, DC, by contrast, respects those acts who continue to deliver the sound that made them great in the first place. As a result it has its own black music stars like Chuck Brown who’ve been local legends for decades without hardly ever playing out of the city, and its venues have a long history of hosting the real greats from black music history.

 

Most of whom appear to have eaten at Ben’s Chili Bowl. According to its website they include everyone from Duke Ellington to Miles Davis. However my confidence in this information ebbs a little when I notice that among the legends listed is none other than the Empress of the  Blues herself, Bessie Smith. For a moment I really was impressed, then I stopped to consider that Ben’s opened in 1958 and Bessie died in 1937.  Anyway, of more relevance to people who like quality American food may be the endorsement of Bill Clinton, a man who, one can’t help suspecting, knows his chili dogs.

 

Back out on U Street, DC’s respect for musical tradition is immediately evident. U Street has a heritage trail marked out for visitors to follow with regular information boards pointing out sights of interest. Now these kinds of heritage trail are quite a common sight these days, but, again, not normally in African American neighbourhoods, and not with the same sense of relevance that this one has. I stop outside a theatre where Sarah Vaughan used to sing, and it’s still used for jazz , and I get the sense for once that people actually do care, and know who Sarah Vaughan was, and that this is a city in which respect for tradition is real.

 

Just to back it up on the other side of the road there’s a Duke Ellington mural – Sir Duke was a long time local resident – then, on the next corner, there’s the African American Civil War Museum. Keep going a little further and hang a left and there’s the Howard University campus.  Howard is an all black university founded in 1867 in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and it has played an enormous role in American public life since.

 

Its alumni include Thurgood Marshall, the legal architect of the civil rights movement. It’s where Lyndon Johnson came to announce key civil rights legislation in 1965. It’s the alma mater of a host of notable African American politicians from Andrew Young to David Dinkins. On the arts side it taught both Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. If there’s a spiritual home of the black middle class, it’s Howard University. Tellingly enough, among its more recent old boys is none other than Sean Puffy Combs, the music and menswear marketing phenomenon.

 

From here I wander back west, and while on closer inspection there are plenty of signs of gentrification - newly renovated brownstones, shops selling things no one actual needs and so forth - there isn’t the sense you too often get that  it’s simply a matter of rich white people taking over nice but rundown inner city housing from poor black people, rather there’s a feeling of a community rising up and attracting some newcomers along the way. At least that how it seemed to me, one sunny afternoon in September.

 

West of Shaw I take a bit of an uphill turn though leafy, faintly Mediterranean, streets until I arrive in Adams Morgan, an area I've heard referred to as the Greenwich Village of Washington. Which, I suppose, is a way of saying that it’s something of a melting pot.

 

Where Shaw is still essentially culturally African-American, Adams Morgan is essentially multi-cultural. There’s a definite Hispanic flavour, but also African-American, Ethiopian, West Indian and white boho. There are bars and clubs and record stores where you can buy hardcore punk and alt country along with go-go and funk, and every other building has the image of Bob Marley somewhere on display.

 

It’s the kind of place that is scarcely ever written about without the word funky being applied to it. And it’s very nice, but compared to the freshness, and sense of a unique tradition, apparent in Shaw, this feels a lot like every other multi-ethnic boho zone I’ve ever been. Which is fine and cool but less, um, interesting, I suppose.

 

Head southwest from Adams Morgan and I emerge on to Connecticut Avenue heading for Dupont Circle. And I'm in another world again. This world, oddly enough, looks  rather Mediterranean as well, but Mediterranean like an expensive shopping street in Madrid or Athens - slightly deracinated. Maybe it’s something to do with all the embassies around here. One thing it does have though is a fine bookshop, Kramerbooks, with a really excellent innovation that more bookstores should consider – its own bar with a bewildering range of beer options.

 

And having walked around a fair percentage of DC by now, I fall up on it with Assyrian on wolf levels of enthusiasm, put my feet up and a pint of something dark and microbrewed down my neck, and pick up a George Pelecanos novel from the shelves.

 

It’s The Sweet Forever, the third book in his DC quartet, set in the late 1980s, a year or two before I wrote the original Badlands, just as the city was ravaged by drug wars. It starts, oddly enough, right on U Street, just a block or so from Ben’s Chili Bowl. The hero, Marcus Clay, a black businessman with a small chain of record stores, has just opened up his newest store there. At the time the book’s set this is seen as an act of philanthropic folly, as U Street is terminally run down and is being taken over by the drug trade. Now, I suspect, it would look like a shrewd investment. Things have clearly changed, and for the better at that.

 

It gives me pause to think. In recent years, both in Europe and the US, I've been noticing plenty of bohemian areas getting richer, but I suppose I’ve tended to suspect that the rich have been getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer. Otherwise my left liberal worldview might have to accept that capitalism is working, even here in George W. Bush’s USA, which would be a shock to the system.

 

It’s something to think on, though, as I prepare for the next day’s tour of the DC badlands with Mr Pelecanos, the question of whether the mean streets are just a little less mean than they used to be? Another beer and I head back to the hotel where, after a protracted wrangle, I persuade them that they may have a room for me after all, and by that time my plans to check out the DC nightlife have shrunk down to a weary decision to find the closest viable place for a burger and beer, ideally in the company of sports TV, before hitting the hay very firmly indeed.

 

The answer to my prayers cones in the shape of the Tune Inn, a real old school American beers, burgers and sports establishment round the back of the Capitol, with a cute tired waitress who digs out a pair of glasses every time she has to check something on the menu, just as I do. I watch a little baseball in there, a little soccer in the yuppie bar next door, and a little tennis on my hotel TV as I fall asleep.

 

Next morning I head downstairs to meet Pelecanos. I've got half an hour to kill so wander into the breakfast room for a cup of coffee and a look at my complementary USA Today. The breakfast room is full of the cartoon Midwesterners from the day before, all talking about their assorted lobbying activities. I wonder what on earth people this straight looking could be lobbying for; something grain related, most probably.

 

Outside on the sidewalk, however, I find the answer – there’s a bus gradually filling up with Midwesterners and on the side of it there’s a billboard with a spectacularly bloody picture of an aborted foetus on it. Hey, I’ve just been sharing a breakfast room with the right to life crew. I try to persuade myself that maybe they hadn’t seemed so innocuous after all, but obvious foaming mouthed bigots.  But no, its no good, they’re either very  mild mannered flaming bigots, or just people of deep if rather blinkered Christian conviction.

 

Before I can speculate any further, George Pelecanos pulls up to the curb. George Pelecanos is a fit-looking guy in his late forties. Last time I saw him he was sporting a rock and roll goatee, but since then he’s clearly decided it’s time to stop hanging on to outlaw cool, at least on the surface. Instead he looks like what he is: a busy and successful novelist screenwriter and producer, with an Infiniti G 35 to prove it.

 

‘You had breakfast?’ he asks, and I say ‘not really’, and he says ‘good, I’ll take you somewhere really DC.’

 

So I get into the Infiniti and George starts driving, and soul music obscurities start playing on the sound system, and we do a little catching up. I've only met George a couple of times before, once at a crime festival in London, the other time at a book launch, but I was instrumental in George getting a publishing deal in the  UK. Right when I started working as a freelance editor, the writer and deejay Charlie Gillett told me I had to read A Firing Offence and I read it and liked it and eventually things fell into place. So there’s stuff to talk about as we head north past the civic centre and into Shaw, before coming to a stop a few blocks north of U Street, and east of Howard University, at a place called the Florida Avenue Grill.

 

No doubt it’s something to do with being the son and grandson of diner owners but George Pelecanos clearly knows his classic American food establishments. Like Ben’s Chili Bowl, the Florida Avenue Grill follows the classic diner layout, lunch counter and kitchen on one side, tables on the other side, but while Ben’s keeps pretty much to its speciality, the Florida Avenue Grill is more your full service American diner with a soul food base.

 

Taking George’s advice, I go for the Derek Strange special, eggs and half smoke and grits. It’s a combo ordered by the detective in each one of the three novels he stars in. The only difference being that for fictional purposes the Florida Avenue Grill has become the last Greek run diner in town, rather than the solidly African American establishment it is.

 

The actual Florida Avenue Grill is clearly a popular place. Its walls are festooned with photos of pretty much every black DC celebrity you can imagine. There’s Natalie Cole and there’s, wow, there’s Kashif, the much underrated godfather of electronic funk, from back in the eighties. There’s any number of sportsmen and women and plenty of people in uniform. And of course there’s a picture of DC’s most controversial black celebrity, the sometime mayor, Mr Marion Barry.

 

Barry became mayor of DC back in the eighties, when the notion of major cities having black mayors was a lot less common than it has since become. Add in the fact that Barry was a loudmouthed populist and it isn’t surprising that the press gave him a terribly hard time. Then again, Barry didn’t exactly help himself by getting arrested after being caught on film smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room with a prostitute.

 

This event provoked one of Barry’s many celebrated public utterances of the kind you're slightly surprised to hear coming from the mouth of an elected public official, in this case the pithy ‘Bitch set me up’. Another self-explanatory classic following a brush with the law runs as follows  ‘First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what can I say? I'm a night owl.’

 

It’s hard not to warm to a guy capable of such spectacular insouciance. Likewise another celebrated quote "If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very, very low crime rate." And this one is actually not half as dumb as it initially sounds. The fact is that, even at its lowest ebb back in the 1980s, Washington DC was not overall a dangerous city. It only became one if you were engaged in the drug trade. Otherwise your chances of being killed in DC were about the same as in Copenhagen.

 

And the victims of the drug trade were, after all, overwhelmingly poor and black, living in parts of DC that the kind of people who liked to mock Mario Barry’s supposed idiocy never went near. Thus the public humiliation of Barry suited the media well: it was much easier to laugh at the crackhead mayor than try and do something about the crack epidemic that was threatening to wipe out DC at the time, or to try and understand, let alone sympathise, with the lives of those caught up in it.

 

This is at the heart of the task George Pelecanos has set himself. If his work has a single subject it’s that of the racial divide. Almost all the crime in his novels is underpinned by this divide. And in every American city there’s always that line, a railroad or street which marks the boundary between where the white people live and where the black  people live. And on one side of the line the drug trade causes havoc. On the other side of the line people are reassured that the war on drugs is a sure-fire winner.

 

As we eat George talks about the personal importance the issue of race has for him: “Racism is our national disease. I have a personal stake in seeing it cured. My sons are mixed race and my daughter is Latina. I love my children, of course, and like any father want a better world for them than the one we live in now. I want racism to go away. And I can honestly say that when I look at my children I don't see their skin color, except to remark on its beauty.

 

“Still, when I walk the streets at night and a young black man is headed my way, I assume things, and often these assumptions are negative. What I'm saying is, I'm an American and a product of my generation, and as much as I hate this thing inside me, I too have prejudices that will probably never go away. I'm sick just like anybody else, and it bothers me. People who say they don't "see color" are either liars or delusional, or both. Liberals are the worst because they are always talking about other people's problem with racism and ignoring their own. They think that by putting a nice bumper sticker on their car or sending Happy Kwanza cards or by giving their white daughter a black baby doll that they are doing something...that they are doing enough. And they are doing nothing. They are doing jack shit. The crazy thing is, I have no answers. But I do raise a lot of questions. That's my job as a writer, in my opinion.”

 

In the interests of illustrating these points George leads the way out of the Florida Grill and back into the Infiniti for a tour of some of the neighbourhoods that too often get written off as no-go areas. Heading north from Florida Avenue up Georgia Avenue, the main street of black DC, there’s soon an obvious decline in the prosperity levels. It’s a familiar ghetto mix of shut down businesses and barely hanging in there businesses. Liquor stores and the occasional barbershop are prominent among those hanging on. Signs are mostly badly hand painted, no multinational food corp stumps up for neon signs in these parts.

 

After a while George points out the block where Derek Strange has his office. It’s in one of the more functional looking commercial strips. This area is called Petworth and, if you look closely, you can see the signs that this is a neighbourhood struggling to make it way back up, albeit from a pretty serious down. Just around from Derek Strange’s imaginary office there’s even an unlikely sounding but real, and distinctly chic, Polish café called Y Domku.

 

Petworth is the neighbourhood plenty of Pelecanos’ black characters live in. It's had a bad reputation for drug dealing for years, and George points out the apartment blocks which still function as drug dealing hubs, but again there’s a definite sign of improvement away from the main drag, and the streets are lined with well maintained homes. And, as Y Domku suggests, white people, or at least adventurous young white people, are starting to move in.

 

From Petworth we head north and west over to Mount Pleasant, the area George lived in when he was young. He shows me his grandparents house, a roomy looking place in a leafy neighbourhood . Then we head back south into Shaw to see the lunch counter George’s grandfather father used to run. It’s a shop now, run by Ethiopians, as many of DC’s mini markets seem to be (in fact Ethiopians are the coming entrepreneurs across DC, a definite contrast from their fortunes in Britain).

 

From there we head east out to the green expanse of Rock Creek Park, as immortalised in song by the Blackbyrds, and down south to East Potomac Park, whether we stop to walk a while in the late morning sunshine and talk a little about George’s background in Washington DC:

 

“I was born in Columbia Hospital for women, in1957. My early years I lived in Mount Pleasant in northwest, my grandparents house, we all lived together. The rest of my life I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland.

 

“My dad was working for my grandfather when I was young at that carry-out shop on 14th St, and then he bought his own place in 1965, on 19th south of Dupont Circle, a lunch counter with 27 seats. My mom was what they used to call a secretary, and now call an administrative assistant. She worked at various places around DC, government and non government. I started working for my dad when I was eleven.

 

“When I turned eleven, that summer they said ‘you’re going to work for your father now’, so I started taking buses downtown to my dad’s place. For years I worked for him and I learned the business, so when he got sick in 75, during my first semester in college - he had a heart attack then he got cancer - I  dropped out of college to run the business. When you ran  a business back in the day you didn’t have insurance, so I really had to do that.

 

“But really I didn’t want to go back to college. In the end my father had to sell the business as a way of telling me it was time to go back to college. He ended up working at a succession of jobs in restaurants after that, till he got too sick to work.

 

“I went back to school, put myself through college selling women’s shoes: from my teens on I’d worked a bunch of retail jobs. I continued to do that after college. I worked those kinds of jobs till I was thirty years old, and that’s when I wrote my first book.”

 

So what provoked that? “In college I took an elective class in hardboiled detective fiction. This guy Charles Mish turned me to these books. I wasn’t even a reader before that. Wasn’t interested in books. The books they teach you in school definitely didn’t have anything to do with my world, my world view. They weren’t about everyday people, working class people, but crime fiction was. So I was like ‘wow people are actually writing for a living about things I actually know a little about’.  I thought that’s what I want to do, but it took me ten years till I felt like I had the chops to try.

 

“And the way I did that was by reading a lot for the next ten years, making up for lost time. While I was working these jobs, bartending and so on, I always had a book going. I got married when I was 28, we had a little house, more like a cottage, we didn’t have any children. I felt like the time was then to try. And I did.

 

“I had a story to tell, which I’d had for years, it was about two guys on a sales floor. It was a punk rock detective novel, which I felt nobody else was doing. When you're young you're full of piss and vinegar anyway, like I'm going to revolutionise this shit. I was just writing  books for my generation which talk about the music and the popular culture. The punk thing was very inspirational to me; the whole movement was about you don’t have to know how to play guitar, just pick it up and play. I certainly didn’t know how to write a book, punk gave me the inspiration to say at least I’ll try.

 

“I sold it to the first publisher I sent it to. I didn’t have an agent or anything. It took a year for him to pick it up from the slush pile. By then I’d gone ahead and started writing a second book. And I’ve written a book a year since. It’s been a very workmanlike process. I was also working in the film business for a while. I wrote books at night or got up real early. I did that for ten years till I was self sufficient enough to go out on my own.

 

“So I wrote Nick’s Trip, the second Stefanos novel, then I wrote a pulp novel, Shoedog, just because I wanted to write a pulp novel, then I went back to Stefanos and I knew when I was writing the third one that that was the end of it, writing first person about this guy. I've since brought him back in my books as a minor character. It’s become a pattern of mine. Whether the books are successful or not, I tend to end a series after three or sometimes four books. Because I just feel like life’s too short.”

 

The change from writing the Stefanos novels also, no doubt, reflected a desire to get away from a writing a character very plainly modelled on himself: “He definitely was autobiographical,’ Pelecanos comments, “ The first book is all me. Then my life began to straighten out a little. I'm not going to detail everything I did, but I did everything that’s in the books, certainly, and I was a harder drinker when I was younger. I mean I was young, that’s what you do, experiment with different things. Now I don’t want to be getting like Jesus here, saying how I've found my way or anything, I'm just in a different phase of my life.”

 

It’s a phase of life that revolves around work and family. George is nothing but friendly showing me around his Washington, but I'm in no doubt at all that really he’d rather be at home working. He's got that driven quality you often see in ex-alcoholics, but allied to a native steeliness that no doubt stopped him ever going all the way into alcoholism in the first place.

 

That and his family. Family is right at the root of Pelecanos’ worldview. His books regularly pay tribute to the struggles of his father and grandfather to establish themselves in the USA. And while the male characters in his novels are generally faithless types, always tomcatting around the place, Pelecanos has been married to Emily - who he met all the way back while working in the shoe shop – for two decades. They have three children, two boys and a girl, all adopted. His two sons were born in Brazil and his daughter in Guatemala. His older son is due to be playing his first high school football game this very afternoon, we’ll be heading over to watch later on. 

 

With that in mind it’s time to get back to the DC tour. Next stop is southeast, over the river into Anacostia. This is serious ghetto territory. It’s where perhaps the bleakest of Pelecanos books, Soul Circus, takes place. I’m fearing the worst, something like the burned out horror of the South Bronx, or west side Chicago, back in the eighties. Instead what I see is a more quotidian despair. The despair of housing projects that could maybe have been nice if enough people who lived in them had some kind of hope, but are instead the deceptively bland frontline of the war against drugs, a war so futile it makes the hundred years war look positively well thought out.

 

Most depressing of all, however, are not the housing projects, which have a certain weary familiarity, but the schools. Each and very school in Anacostia, whether high school or elementary, looks like a prison, and is certainly fortified right up to maximum security level. You look at places like these, and all those statistics about there being more black men in prison than in higher education start to make sense. These places, after all, resemble prisons a lot more closely than they do Howard University. To add insult to injury these schools are almost invariably named after major civil rights figures: one is even named after Malcolm X. It’s hard to imagine Malcolm being too chuffed to see his name being franchised out to endless holding pens for the underclass. And, conversely, what does it teach children? That Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are the patron saints of failing schools?

 

Even in the bleakness of Anacostia, though, there are signs of life There are stores and malls, albeit run down depressing ones, there is still a sense that this is a community that does at least function, unlike the anarchic badlands of the eighties.

 

And then I see something really weird. We pass a clothes store with a sign declaring that it sells ‘Nostalgia ‘ clothes. I’m stunned. The cult of the retro is, it seems to me, profoundly un-American. I noticed its creeping rise in Los Angeles years ago, saw that for the first time America was becoming self-conscious about its history. But in general the lure of the retro is a lure that black communities have been immune to. Black street fashion has always been about the newest and the sharpest. The idea of wearing clothes that used to belong to someone else was shameful – as it generally is in communities for whom poverty is too close for comfort.

 

I'm tempted to stop and have a look inside, find out what kind of nostalgia the people of Anacostia are in the market for, but the shop is closed and anyway we’re on a tight schedule. We’ve just about got time to have some lunch before we have to be at the high school out in the Maryland boondocks where George’s son will be playing his first match. There’s nowhere much to eat in Anacostia so George decides to head out towards our destination.

 

The part of Maryland we’re travelling through seems to be mostly fairly low rent suburbia. The regular shopping malls major on the lower-end stores and restaurants, plenty of McDonalds and Payless Shoe Source outlets. It’s all utterly unremarkable until, after half an hour or so, I realise that all the people I can see going about their unremarkable suburban business are black. And then I realise that I'm in part of America I've not only never been to before, but have barely seen represented on the TV, or in the movies, black suburbia.

 

Once we’re close to our destination we pull into one of the malls and forgo the charms of a takeaway calling itself ‘Steak In A Sack’ in favour of an anonymous but pleasant Thai joint.

 

And as we wait for our food to arrive we get back to the interview. Returning to the  Nick Stefanos books, which finish up with Down Where the Dead Men Go, in which Stefanos is sinking into alcoholism,  I wondered whether he hadn’t been tempted to do a Lawrence Block and turn Stefanos into one of those  popular AA detectives, make him a DC Matt Scudder.

 

Pelecanos smiles at the idea and says “It was a conscious decision on my part, not to do that. I felt like that sub-genre of detective fiction was getting really tired and there were so many reformed  alcoholic ‘tecs out there. There’s one or two guys who make it worthwhile, James Lee Burke and Laurence Block. After that it’s all parody “

 

Instead Pelecanos embarked on writing his DC Quartet. Except he didn’t know when he started out that it would be a quartet. Rather he wanted to fulfil his long held ambition of writing a book about his family history, in particular his father and grandfather’s lives. “I wanted to write a bigger book, third person, and to write about the immigrant experience so I had the idea to write Once Upon A Time in DC. That’s The Big Blowdown. It was a big turning point for me. It blew up a while lot of possibilities.”

 

In particular it gave him the notion that this was just the starting point for an historical series. The only question was which period to jump to next: “I thought about a sequel and what interested me was that in the forties people didn’t leave the house without a Windsor  knot and a fedora and an overcoat, but you go forward thirty years and you see this guy’s son with long hair and ripped jeans selling marijuana on the street. So how did that happen?

 

“So King Suckerman came about.  I was trying to do my version of an Elmore Leonard novel. And then, from there, I saw that I could go to the summer of ‘86 next, and show what happened when crack came to town. That was The Sweet Forever, then Shame the Devil would wrap it all up, show what happened to these characters. Especially with the race thing.  In the seventies we’d thought we’d all walk forward together, by the nineties it was over, we were as far apart as ever. Because of economics, people were getting left behind.”

 

It’s these four novels that provide perhaps the clearest, most comprehensive account of the Pelecanos’ vision to date, and are probably the best place for a new reader to start. For his next book, however, Pelecanos decided to do something at once more and less commercial. More commercial in that he started a series of novels with a private detective protagonist, which is the kind of thing publishers like to hear. Less commercial though, in that the PI in question was a middle aged black guy with a fondness for massage parlors, a Marion Barry kind of detective, in fact.

 

“I felt I was ready to write a book from the perspective of a black man,” comments Pelecanos, “I had gotten better as a writer and I knew more. I was in my forties and I knew more about life. They would be my books about race in America. You take a book like Bonfire Of The Vanities, which is for me probably the most overrated piece of American fiction of the last 25 years, The reason that book is so popular is that it told people – white people that is, black people didn’t want anything to do with that book – that they didn’t have a problem. The rich guy Sherman has a problem cause he doesn’t understand black people, but you, the reader, do. I wanted to write a book that points a finger back at the reader and says wait a minute you do have a problem, and points back at myself too, for that matter.”

 

The character that is used to make a lot of these points is Terry Quinn, a white ex-cop who becomes Strange’s quarrelsome sidekick: “I didn’t know Quinn was just going to be a part of the plot. I didn’t expect him to become such a major character but he did,” comments Pelecanos, before pointing out that, unlike most salt’n’pepper detective team-ups, this one doesn’t end in mutual understanding and shared laughter: “With this guy Quinn, what I didn’t want him ever to do was hold hands with Strange and say ‘you know deep down we really are the same inside, colour doesn’t matter’, and all this bullshit. Instead he never learns. Quinn doesn’t learn. He’s annoying, he's thick and by the third book I knew what was going to happen to him.

 

“And that was me pulling the pin on my career again too, just as things were starting to get successful, but it worked for the book. I gave my publisher the choice of an alternative ending, but my editor, Michael Pietsch, said the way you wrote it the first time works better. I’m very proud of those books, I think they got stronger as they went along. And they led me into Hard Revolution, a book I’d wanted to write my whole career but hadn’t had the chops to do.”

 

Hard Revolution, his latest book at the time of the interview, is indeed an epic. It’s a novel that takes a bunch of characters, among them a young Derek Strange, through the 1960s. But this isn’t the sixties of peace love and Woodstock, it’s the sixties of civil rights, anger and riots. It’s a big subject but one that’s filtered as ever through the personal:

 

“To go back to the beginning, when my parents sent me down to work with my dad, it was right after the riots in 68. The riots happened in April, they sent me down to work with him in June. I took the bus down Georgia Ave every day and everything had gone, there was just rubble and smoke, the scene of the riots was still a mess.

 

“I had seen Dr King speak four days before his death. And you know all my life I’d been wondering what really happened that weekend he was murdered. Because things changed after that – black people on the bus were standing pretty tall, they were wearing louder clothes than before. And down at my father’s place - remember this is the south we’re  talking about, and people had been very subservient up to that point - it was never going to be like that any more. There was a woman called Ida who worked for my dad. That summer, after the riots, a woman called her a dumb nigger. Ida told her off in front of everybody, the all-white customers. If that had happened before someone would have complained. Not any more. My father started to let the employees listen to whatever they wanted when they were working – soul stations. That gave me a lifetime love of that music. That book is a culmination of all that.”

 

Alongside the last few books George has also been heavily involved in screenwriting, At first, and unsurprisingly given his background in movie production, he looked towards the big screen and wrote several movie scripts that haven’t quite got off the blocks. Latterly, though, his involvement with the small screen has been rather more productive. In particular he has been wring and co-producing The Wire. This is a Baltimore-set cop show, developed by David Simon, of Homicide fame, and undoubtedly the most challenging series of its kind ever made. It has scores of characters and dialogue that’s so street as to be unintelligible for the first several episodes. Then your ear tunes into what they’re saying and the characters come into faces and  - if you're me at least – you’re hooked. I asked George how his involvement with the show came about:

 

“David Simon approached me after his girlfriend, Laura Lippman, turned him on to my books.  He saw the similarities in what we were doing and pitched the series to me as a social crime novel for television.  I ended up as a producer and story editor.  The experience was good, and I'm very proud to have been a part of the show, but the time devoted to it encroached on my novel-writing, so I have pulled back to being a writer without on-set responsibilities.”

 

Watching The Wire it has struck me that whereas once upon a time novels were complex and TV shows for dummies, these days that was starting to be reversed. The Wire is far more psychologically subtle, and complex in its plotting, than any contemporary serial killer novel or by the numbers police procedural. I wondered what George thought about that, doing my best to make it clear that I was excepting him from any charge of dumbing down: “In twelve hours of television you can veer off track in ways you cannot in a novel, which by definition has to be much tighter, ‘ he told me. “ But I think my books are pretty broad in that way to begin with.  I try to create a city of characters and give equal weight to all...a fictional world that reflects the real world, in varying perspectives.  You're correct in pointing out that most bestselling fiction does to attempt to do this. The formula is usually to concentrate on a protagonist who faces challenges and then wins in the end.  A murder is solved and the world is righted, put back in order, again.  I tend to reject that notion in my books. The Wire walks the same kind of territory.  It was a good fit for me. “

 

And on that note our food comes and we eat and get out of there and head over to the high school in middle of nowhere much, where it turns out that the game had been postponed for four hours. So I don’t get to see Pelecanos Jr play football. Instead we head back into the city where George drops me at my hotel and we say our goodbyes.

 

I decide to head back up to Shaw, have another look around. Oh, okay, and another chili dog from Ben’s, but just the one this time. I had just eaten lunch.

 

And after that I feel in need of a cup of coffee, so I stop at a place a little way along U Street called the Love Café, which is a big smart boho café, with an array of fine looking cakes baked on site, and is clearly doing a decent job of taking on Starbucks at its own game, and is a black owned and operated concern with a racially mixed clientele.

 

It feels like progress, in a ‘modern capitalism is the system we live in, so get with the program’ kind of way. It feels like a place where people are coming together. And it makes me think of something Pelecanos wrote me in an email a while back and is worth bearing in mind alongside the justified bleakness of much of his fiction: “Sometimes I look at the young folks in this country, who generally don't seem to have the hang-ups we adults have regarding race, and I think, maybe it's just time that this country needs. That when we die out and the new generations come up, this problem will just fade. It's sad, isn't it, that it can't seem to get fixed any other way.”

 

It seems like just maybe that the fixing is already underway. Let’s hope so.