Cruising the district’s dark streets

A reporter of life in parts of Washington, D.C., that attracted no attention until he came along, George Pelecanos is a social historian who uses crime fiction to construct a record of our racially challenged capital and its everyday folk. Not pols, not bureaucrats, not anchors or name-recognition champs.

“My life’s work,” Pelecanos has said in interviews, “is to give a voice to the people who exist outside the federal city.” None to this day has done it better than the 47-year-old D.C. native, whose first urban shocker was published in 1992 and whose 12th book, the accomplished and unflinching “Hard Revolution,” appears this month.

Son of a Greek immigrant who ran a D.C. diner, Pelecanos was 11 when he started work as a delivery boy for his father, right after the April 1968 riots that followed the Memphis shooting of Martin Luther King. The rioting and looting of those days fill the ending chapters of “Hard Revolution.” But there’s more to our author’s perspective than racial conflict. Fooling around when he was 16 with a .38 Special that was in the house, he shot a friend and blew off a piece of his face. The friend survived. Pelecanos learned that death is real, and that experience inspired his first book, “A Firing Offense,” and continues to inspire the graphic violence that hurtles through his pages.

Working half a dozen jobs, he put himself through college. He sold shoes (“I got to talk to girls all day long. I got to touch their feet”); he sold electronic equipment, wrote and produced independent films, inhaled pop music, movies and crime novels. Finally, he moved from Chandler and Hammett to Elmore Leonard and became the Balzac, as the Legal Times has called him, of blue-collar Washington. But a Balzac au noir, staging mostly bleak characters in mostly bleak locations where, as he puts it, “kids walk through dangerous blocks to go to lousy schools, come home to single-parent houses [and] go to bed hungry.”

He is married now, raising three children not far from the neighborhood where he grew up. Inevitably, the lives of the destructive and self-destructive young (and not so young) weigh on his mind. Hence the gritty settings, the hard-bitten dialogue, the vivid, pungent detail and the focus on the district’s compassion-free zones and its rampant violent, drug, gang subculture. Hence, too, the enduring obsessions: music and movies and kids, but also guns and drugs and the havoc they bring.

What he writes (and he writes in longhand) is contemporary Washington history. Real neighborhoods, real people. Good guys and bad guys driving cars, listening to tapes, talking their talk, striding or blundering, ambling, shambling or walking tall through the mean streets of a city riven by in-your-face racial divides and confrontations (“Racism is as American as McDonald’s”). His first hero was a Greek. His present one, more positive, less flawed, is strapping African American detective Derek Strange, once a policeman, now a private eye, whose partner and friend is white and who is as dedicated to saving kids by sports, discipline and self-discipline as he is to solving cases.

Engaging as ever, Strange loomed large in last year’s “Soul Circus” and is back in “Hard Revolution,” a prequel to Pelecanos’ multilayered chronicle of urban decay, poverty and race, where readers of his previous novels will find that little has changed except the music. But Pelecanos doesn’t want to write the same book over and over; so this time the future private eye begins as a boy attending junior high in the Washington of 1959, where transit buses are just replacing streetcars, thoroughfares will soon be paved in asphalt, Brylcreem and pompadours rule male locks, women save S&H; green stamps, beer costs $2.50 a case and black maids, still described as “colored,” make $10 a day.

Material and social details are central to the narrative. It’s pretty much a man’s world. Everyone smokes, everyone drinks beer. There are sports, television, films, cars and, above all, music featured on every page, identifying characters and generations, marking moods, changing with the times from 1959 to 1968. When not picking fights or horsing around, characters listen to music or to what is being called music. Relations with sound systems are closer and last longer than relations with humans, and when not listening to Sinatra, Xavier Cugat or rock ‘n’ roll, people will gab about them.

“Hard Revolution” also brims with local topography and color that should fascinate Washington D.C. devotees. Driving his Impala down the big hill alongside Cardozo High and on to the intersection of 14th and U in the wake of the April riots, Strange passes “hustlers, pimps, whores, men dressed as women, pushers and addicts, workers who had gotten off buses” and kids out too late for their own good cruising the sidewalks.

That’s the novelist as social reporter, the moralist for whom crime is the least interesting part of the story, while the waste a criminal ambience creates is crucial; the pointillist who tells us that, when Strange joins the police, his fellows regard it as a form of betrayal; the memorialist recording community reaction to community crime: “Young black men out here, killin’ each other. Someday we gonna focus our anger in the right direction.”

The angry explosion, meanwhile, has come and gone: raging rioters destroying their neighborhood, their neighbors’ belongings and sometimes their own, cutting off black noses to spite white faces. Invested in interracial peace, Pelecanos can’t help but suggest the foolishness of self-destruction. Most of the time, though, he avoids intervention. He sets out problems but offers no answers. He presents descriptions but no tidily wrapped issues. Just complexity, confusion and, sometimes as in Strange’s case, goodwill.

“It’s all about character,” Pelecanos has explained. Meaning, I suppose, character as minted in the rapids of life. Maybe it is all about character. Maybe it is all about luck. Or, when facing insoluble conundrums, maybe it is about small-scale personal resolutions and solutions only.

And just as there are no solutions to big problems, the thrills are also few and suspense is slight. “Hard Revolution” is not the thriller its publisher claims it is, but a prelude to the thrillers he has written: a patchwork quilt of scenes that, put together, provide precisely what Pelecanos claimed -- a lurid, incandescent light to shine on a sliver of Washington’s working class, on its unfolding predicaments and on the quandaries the author yearns to overcome.