PUSHER MAN: PLUGGING PELECANOS IN PICCADILLY: THE WAY HOME INTERVIEW

I've interviewed George Pelecanos any number of times before, but this one was something special. On stage at BAFTA, before the gathered work force of the estimable Orion Books, I got to do for George what he used to do for ladies shoes: sell to an audience that seemed already eager to buy. As it turned out, my selling was so emphatic I'm not sure I left George much room to reply, or many gaps to fill in, but it was rewarding to be able to push an author to his own publisher. Not that George needs much pushing. As I said to the Orions, Pelecanos has the enviable status of someone who's gone from cult writer to best-seller without losing his cult status. And his profile has been raised immeasurably by his writing/producing for The Wire, which started the cult status thing all over again. It seems non-stop; on my way to meet him at his hotel, I was startled to see his face staring out at me from an underground poster for his latest novel, The Way Home, which wasn't surprising because the Channel Four TV Book Club has picked The Way Home in its launch books. And that wasn't surprising because The Way Home to me is the kind of book that would appear both to fans of crime fiction but also transcend to 'the mainstream' as well; its themes of work and family are strong, but the book also plays with the tropes of pulp fiction and, indeed, westerns as well. You can link to my original review of the novel here.

With so much going on, it was nice to be able to relax for a couple of hours at the Cork & Bottle wine bar, where I tried an Ernest Hemingway burger (somehow I can't see Papa getting down with mango relish, but you never know) and held myself to just one glass of wine before going onstage. George wears the trappings of fame easily; his books originally attracted some cult status because of their prominent use of music, not just as scene-setting background but also for insight into character. Pelecanos play-lists were soon appearing in rock magazines. Indeed, while he was visiting Britain, he appeared on Open Book, and asked to pick his book of the decade, chose Lean On Pete by Willy Vlautin, of the band Richmond Fontaine. Coincidentally (or not) he's going to see the band that very night at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, along with the crime writer Mark Billingham. Since it was Mark and Martyn Waites who converted me to Richmond Fontaine in the first place, that brings something full circle! George also chose Charles Portis' True Grit as his favourite book, and we spend a long time discussing both the book's subtleties, especially as it's narrated by an aged spinster Mattie Ross, whose recollections may well be suspect, and the upcoming remake of the John Wayne version by the Coen Brothers, with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin. 'People forget how strong the supporting cast was in the original,' George says. 'This is known as the Glen Campbell effect,' I say. 'But Robert Duvall, Jeff Corey and Dennis Hopper are all great.' 'And Hank Worden as the undertaker,' I say, and that, as they say, was that.

Over the rest of a conversation that raged from the joys of fatherhood to the tribulations of George's beloved Washington Redskins, I discovered that although he's done 16 novels in the past 18 years, he doesn't have a new one in the works. But I suggested that, as a writer who's done most of his books in contained series, his last three novels formed a trilogy, linked by the theme of fathers and sons (their predecessor, Drama City, shared important themes of work and family, but not directly fathers and sons.)

After just brief consideration George agrees, though he says it wasn't a conscious intention. He attributes the increasing focus on the microcosm of the family at least in part to The Wire. 'We did such a good job (with social issues of crime) I didn't have much left to say on those themes.' To me, it seems a natural progression, especially when you consider that Pelecanos is one of the few writers, in any genre, who's always concentrated not only on race but on issues of family and work – both keys to The Wire (series two, as you may recall, was themed around the disappearance of meaningful employment for the working classes of the city). Family and working values are the core of No Way Home, which John Harvey likened to a 'moral fable', (you can read about that discussion here) and which has elements of both westerns and 1970s exploitation films about it, points which appear to have got lost, in America at least, behind the fable. To me, it recalls Shoedog, still one of my favourite Pelecanos novels, and another book with pulpy fictions framing a story about men working.

'The Night Gardener was my biggest selling book in America,' George says, 'in fact, Clint Eastwood was interested in making a movie of it for a while, and he wrote me a very nice letter about it, which I will treasure, but it just didn't happen'. He's got other big-time fans too: Barak Obama gave George the same kind of moment Bill Clinton provided both Walter Mosely and Stephen Hunter, when he carried a copy of The Way Home with him as he left Air Force One.

But The Way Home didn't do so well.' George explains that he thinks his audience wanted him to stick with cops, or private eyes, and their investigations. In Britain, however, The Way Home has been his most successful so far, which has encouraged Orion to push him even more. 'They've got it right from the start,' George says, and I'm not sure if he means his British publishers or the audience. 'Well, both,' he says, diplomatically. It gratifies him too, because the book grew out of his experiences working in a prison reading project. 'I started to wonder not only what its like for these kids, but what it's like for their parents,' he says. He also talks about his own lucky history. 'When I was 17, I accidentally shot a friend of mine in the face. With a different background, in different circumstances, my life could have taken a far different course,' he explains. And the theme reverberates throughout Pelecanos' work, the idea that one small moment can have consequences that change your life, that you can be powerless to stop. This is also one of the classic themes of noir.

Whether these family novels will end as a trilogy or whether there's something more to come Pelecanos can't say. He hasn't launched another novel, but not because because he hasn't been busy. He's been working on two TV series for HBO. One is Treme, named after a district of New Orleans, comes from David Simon and many of the team that did The Wire, dealing with the lives of musicians and others in the post-Katrina Big Easy. Not long after we met, Pelecanos' writing colleague on Treme (and The Wire), David Mills, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm (see the link to my obituary, and George's comment on Mills, here). The other is Pacific, a sequel of sorts to Band Of Brothers, set in the Pacific war, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Pelecanos is again a writer/producer, and it had deep resonance for him. 'My Dad was a Marine and served in the Pacific, so it's a subject very close to my own history, and it's something I admire.' There's a sense of regret, of a sort, in much of Pelecanos' work, that his father's generation grew up in the experience of a war they could believe in, as opposed to a generation faced with a war no one could believe in, and a generation tried to avoid if they could.

That's because George Pelecanos is very much about the things a man's gotta do, or that he used to think he had to do. Thus his fondness for muscle cars, for football, especially at the youth level, for the social world of bars, for the importance of work and its camaraderie. It's an old-fashioned attitude that returns social contact, personal relationships, 'man to man' as it were, to the fore. And that's what his books boil down to: the sense that by letting these simple values be sacrificed on the altar of economics, or leisure, or whatever, we've lost something important, and that crime and tragedy is often the result.

GEORGE PELECANOS BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nick Stefanos Novels:
A Firing Offense (1992), Nick's Trip (93), Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go (95)

Shoedog (1994)

The DC Quartet:
The Big Blowdown (1996), King Suckerman (97), The Sweet Forever (98), Shame The Devil (2000)

Derek Strange Novels:
Right As Rain (2001), Hell To Pay (02), Soul Circus (03), Hard Revolution (04)

Drama City (2005)

Fathers & Sons
Night Gardener (2006), The Turnaround (08), The Way Home (09)

MICHAEL CONNELLY: THE SCARECROW INTERVIEW

Although Michael Connelly is a successful crime novelist, with a string of best-sellers and an appearance as a Richard & Judy finalist, he remains, at heart, a reporter. So when the plight of the newspaper business touched off the idea for his latest novel, he already had the book's main character waiting. The Scarecrow brings back Jack McAvoy, hero of The Poet. His early novels, featuring LAPD detective Hieronymous 'Harry' Bosch, had earned him cult status among crime-fiction fans, garnering great reviews and respectable, but disappointing sales, before The Poet, in which reporter McAvoy faced the eponymous serial killer, broke into the best-seller charts, and launched Connelly as something more than a crime writer, almost a brand-name. The book opens with McAvoy about to lose his job at the Los Angeles Times, as old-school reporters become redundant, replaced by younger, cheaper, J-school grads adept at twittering, blogging, and all the electronics required of mobile journalists, or mojos. Connelly had to do a number of rewrites, as former colleagues read the proofs and updated him on how newspapers had changed since his days on them; he had to call back the galleys for a rewrite when The Rocky Mountain News, which figures in the story, actually went out of business. As he explained to me in publication week, while visiting Britain to promote the book, the printing process was so far along he had to make sure the new lines actually fit the spaces of the old ones, even needing to end each page with the same word. 'But even so, one review, in Los Angeles, jumped on the fact that the Rocky was in the book, even though it was only in the proof. They said 'evidently Mr Connelly doesn't know the paper is dead', and when I wrote them I began with 'evidently'.

I orignally met up with him in February, in Tampa, Florida, to which he's relocated from Los Angeles. I was there to broadcast America's biggest sporting event, the Super Bowl, for the BBC, so it surprised me when Connelly suggested we meet in the press center, where security is tight and credentials are checked. 'Don't worry,' he reassured me, 'I can get a pass.' And he could, because not only is he a local celebrity, but he's also become a cult figure within the world of American football. Veteran TV commentator Dick Stockton has been passing his books on to the ex-coaches and players he works with, meaning Connelly now has a bigger fan base within the football world than some star players. They all want Stockton to introduce them to his writer friend. But Connelly takes it all in with a modest shrug. As we slip into the anonymity of a corner booth in a nearby sports bar, he talks about the next day's Super Bowl, but with even more enthusiasm about his daughter's school basketball game, that afternoon.

Although he started his career as a reporter in Florida, and is now happily settled in a house with a view across the harbour to the bright lights of Tampa, his work remains anchored to Los Angeles, and he explains that it was the situation at his former paper, the Los Angeles Times, that inspired The Scarecrow.

'Technology is killing newspapers,' he says. 'It fascinates me, because there's a real clash in the newspaper world between the old and the new. Lots of people I worked with were losing their jobs, and the business is in a downward spiral. And I still have friends at the LA Times who have survived the purges, and tell me about the change. So I wanted this book to focus on that conflict between the old and the new, and use the struggles of the business as background. I didn't want a diatribe, I wanted a thriller. So it occurred to me that a killer could take advantage of this same new technology to identify, and stalk, his victims; that it would be easy. Putting the two together, I decided to bring Jack McEvoy back. He's being replaced at the paper by a youngster, just out of journalism school. He wants to show that his skills as a crime reporter, learned the old-fashioned way, on the street, are still relevant. So he wants to go with one big story, and he latches on to one he intends to exploit, and it turns into something different.'

It's also unusual that much of the book is told from the killer's point of view. 'I think it's a creepy sort of story,' he says, 'and it's easier to do creepy from that point of view. I've only done it twice before, but one of those was The Poet. It also works because of the way the killer uses the dark side of internet technology, the cornerstone of everyday life, to stalk his victims and McEvoy.'

McEvoy was the character who propelled Connelly to best-seller status, but there's a surprising amount of cross-over in Connelly's books. Terry McCaleb, the hero of Blood Work (which was made into a movie by Clint Eastwood) later appeared with Harry Bosch, and Rachel Walling, the FBI agent introduced in The Poet, later had an affair with Bosch. The hero of The Lincoln Lawyer, Connelly's Richard and Judy Book Club breakthrough in the UK , turns out to have a closer connection to Bosch than anyone could imagine. So I ask if it's right to say that, although these characters have been the stars of his more successful novels, it still seems Bosch is at the center of Connelly's fictional universe.

'Most definitely my creative world revolves around Harry. Even when I am writing a book like The Scarecrow that he isn't even in, I am thinking about how the book fits into the overall mosaic of my writing, which is essentially a portrait of Bosch. And I am thinking about the next book that he'll be in. ' That Rachel Walling, the FBI agent from The Poet, could be involved with both Bosch and McEvoy may seem, on the surface, a bit of authorial incestuousness, but it also points out another key to Bosch's, and Connelly's, universe. 'My books aren't full of good relationships or happy romances,' he says. 'They're about conflicts, and so are relationships.'

And I wonder if it's odd to him that it's the success of his non-Bosch books which has boosted his long-running series. He thinks about it, then says, 'there has been a history of the so-called stand alone thrillers increasing my sales. This hasn't happened every time but when it does it is to great effect because usually the Harry Bosch novel that follows meets that new sales watermark or passes it. The books where this happened were The Poet, Blood Work and The Lincoln Lawyer. Each recorded a sizable jump in sales over the previous book and the Bosch book that followed jumped as well. The two where this did not happen were Void Moon and Chasing the Dime. There's no way to know why this is and it may just come down to what each book offers. But I think one of the things that happens is that it is easier to interest a new reader in a new character and stand alone novel then it is to entice them into jumping into a Harry Bosch novel that is 10 or 12 books down the line in the series. So they read the book with no prior attachments. If they like it, they try the Bosch. It's an inexact science for sure, but that's the best I can come up with.'

I point out to him that, since his first book appeared in 1993, he has published 20 novels, and The Scarecrow will be his 21st. 'I get asked about that a lot,' he says. 'Mostly by people who equate speed with lack of quality. I point out to them that I was a reporter, and used to writing quickly, on deadline. And I find the books I write fastest tend to be my better ones, because I know where I'm going. The Scarecrow came very quickly, because I was writing about something I know, journalism, and that speeds up the process'. In fact, he's already laid the ground work for the next Bosch novel, Nine Dragons, in which Harry will travel to Hong Kong, where his ex-wife and daughter are living. 'It will be set about two-thirds in Los Angeles, and one-third in Hong Kong'. It is due out in October. But sometimes, as noted above, speed is a matter of necessity. 'Newspapers are dropping like flies,' he explains. 'I wanted to get the book out before too much happened. The LA Times filed for bankrupcy while I was doing the last ten days of writing, so I wanted the book out while that news was fresh.'

Some of the best moments of the Bosch books came when Harry was feuding with authority, whether his police superiors, the FBI or the Bureau of Homeland Security, and likewise, some of the best moments of The Scarecrow lie in the internal conflicts and politics of the newspaper. 'There was the sense, when I joined the Times in 1988, that you were made for life,' he says. 'It was called “The Velvet Coffin”. As a journalist, I'd reached the pinnacle. But I was out of touch with the business; I had to rewrite a lot because a lot had changed, but again, the relationships, with indifferent bosses and ambitious colleagues, don't change.' I mention the fifth series of the The Wire, a programme Connelly introduced me to years ago, and the way it's also centered in a newsroom in trouble. 'Oh, the influence is direct. I was inspired by the last series of The Wire, which was set inside the Baltimore Sun newsroom, where David Simon (creator of the television series) had worked. He wrote it from what he knew, but like me, he hadn't worked in a newsroom in years, and he was behind on all the blogging and the twittering that's required now. But the dynamic of the newsroom, like the police station, creates its own conflicts. And the sense that, for profit, newspapers have abrogated their responsibility.'

Blood Work was filmed by Clint Eastwood, and since then Connelly has flirted with film and TV; he was approached by his friend George Pelecanos to work on The Wire, but had to turn the invitation down. He did write a script for a movie revival of the TV show The Equalizer, but he laughs and says 'my script would have cost $150 million to make'. He also, years ago, wrote a screenplay for his novel Void Moon. 'I sold the film rights on the condition I could write the screenplay. I'd never seen a script that had captured Harry, but I was naïve. I just didn't realise then how hard it is.' Now there's a film of The Lincoln Lawyer in the works. 'It's somewhere north of hell in development,' Connelly says. The producer who owns the rights, Billy Gerber, I first met when he was working with Clint on Blood Work. He bought the rights to do as an independent, and now, since he worked with Clint again on Gran Torino, he's back in play. Tim Van Patten, who directed episodes of The Sopranos and The Wire would do it as his first film, but it's not an A list $100 million picture. Like I said, there's no one I see as Bosch, but they showed me a list of actors to play Mickey Haller and one was Matthew McConaghey. At the last minute I saw Tropic Thunder and thought he could do it.' But he shrugs. 'If it happens, it happens'. In the meantime, he has his daughter's basketball game to get to, a Super Bowl to watch, and another Harry Bosch novel to finish. Presumably in that order.

HOMAGE TO THE WIRE, SERIES FOUR

I've just finished watching the fourth series of The Wire on DVD, and while it might seem a bit belated, remember that the UK has been far behind on the show, and even then it had aired only on a small satellite channel before the BBC began a run of daily late-night showings of the first series a couple of weeks ago (and interestingly, on Wednesdays, let that re-run show bump Mad Men to an after-midnight time slot). But it occurs to me that, although we take it as a commonplace by now that The Wire is the best TV show any of us have seen, this fourth series marks a particular high point. It also occurs to me that this may well be the programme that makes watching on TV redundant. Although a daily run is a good idea, the ideal way to watch The Wire is via box set, in which you can move at your own pace, go back and rewatch bits to exercise your curiosity, in fact, watch it almost exactly the way you would read a novel.

Although the ensemble cast and multiple plot lines are nothing new to serial TV (in fact, one of the best things about Homicide was the underlying plot thread of corruption which ran throughout the series), I'm not going to stop and praise individual writers or actors--the standard has been incredibly high throughout. The Wire has been able to eschew completely the need for resolution in any one episode; it's been able to build its storylines on its own terms, and it's been able to do away with most of the distinctions between heroes and villains, especially in terms of its police story. The beauty of the fourth series is that all these factors have been allowed to move front and centre for two reasons. First was the withdrawal of Jimmy McNulty out of the main plot lines. If anyone had been the center of the show, it was him, and his personal demons could sometimes overshadow other stories; not that this was bad, but without him, the rest of the stories take on more meaning. In fact, as the series builds toward the re-construction of the original Wire 'team' of cops, we find their own positions more interesting, and more relevant, to the general story lines.

The other factor is the over-lying theme. Each series has tended to have one moral arch; the most effective previously had been the question of work in series two, the way the lack of opportunity to do real work affects a city, and that theme permeated all the story lines. Series four is about education, and by using four school kids as its focus, four kids who hadn't been part of the story before, it delivered a damning and depressing indictment of the state of our society—as well as powerful drama. The plot lines inter-twine: there is a mayoral election, the dirty politics will have its impact on the schools; the police are being asked to massage statistics, exactly the way the school system does to 'leave no child behind'. Bunny, forced to leave the police after his experiment to 'Hamsterdam' the drug trade in Baltimore ran afoul of the 'anti-drug' message, winds up working on a similar programme, to isolate problem children from classrooms, try to 'socialise' them, while allowing others to learn. Meanwhile, of course, Marlo is leaving more and more hidden corpses as he rises to the top of the drug business.

I said, the brilliant thing is that there are no heroes or villains, or perhaps it is that they are not the people you expect them to be. The heroic figures are those plugging away against a relentlessly uncaring system. We are drawn to think of Omar, who rips off drug dealers, as a hero of sorts; he and Bodie, who's grown since the first series, are true their codes. Bunny is, of course, a hero.

But many of the villains are simply playing their games as they know how. Crooked politicians and politicially inclined police chiefs have their roles, they are part of the system, not really creating the problems as profiting from them. Proposition Joe is their equivalent in the drug trade, corrupt, but in effect playing by the bent rules. But young uns like the brilliantly cold Marlo and his killers Chris and Snoop, don't have a code, which makes him a real villain, and his corruption of Michael is the closest the series comes to having a devil. But there is an equivalent kind of cold in the bureaucrats who insist the schools teach for the test, who spout sociological cant in the face of reality, and who use test scores to lie about progress. The saddest moment in the series may be when homeless Duquan receives a 'social promotion' to high school; leaving Prezbo and his class behind will guarantee his education comes to an end. But, in one sense, the real villain of series four is Herc, the otherwise likeable cop, simply because he doesn't do his job well enough, doesn't understand its responsibilities enough, and his lackadaisical self-interest winds up hurting the wonderfully sympathetic Bubbles and young Randy, one of the four kids.

Their fates are never going to be positive, and to some extent the transformation of Michael's character is the hardest to accept, in fact, it's delineated well only if you remember that he is the smartest of the four, the one who's best able to make the practical decision about what it will take to survive. That he takes DuQuan with him simply shows that there is nothing the system, even someone as caring as ex-cop Prezbylewski, can do. And interesting, rather than pull the melodramatic strings with any of the four, the show instead surprises you, by sacrificing Bodie, the most likeable of all the slingers, but not before referring us back to the first season, and the brilliant translation of the chess board into street analogy. Those little elements make watching in sequence particularly rewarding. Deputy Ops Chief Rawls was shown briefly in a gay bar in an earlier series, in this one there is a single piece of graffiti, in the womens room at the police station, that keeps that plot element alive. Will it be used in series five? It's the long game the writers are playing, what creator David Simon has referred to in interviews as a 'visual novel'.

The final episode is double the usual length, and even so is forced to use a coda to draw the elements together. Much remains unresolved, not least the ultimate fates of the four boys. But Marlo now has Prop Joe in his sights; the major crimes unit will be chasing Marlo and his killers; Omar is a marked man, and Michael now has a corner. I realised how attached I had become to The Wire as I watched the final episode, and realised I did not want it to end, the way you sometimes slow down when you're reading a particularly good book. Now the fifth season looms out there, and I feel the way I did when I started reading The Dain Curse, knowing once I'd finished, I'd never have another Dashiell Hammett novel to read.

WIRE TO WIRE: DAVID SIMON'S HOMICIDE

My review of David Simon's excellent 1991 book Homicide is in the current issue of the Spectator, you can follow this link to it. They also sent along a curiously old-fashioned novel by Stanley Reynolds, which made for an odd pairing and a difficult segue, but it was great to be able to praise the Simon book, which I'd read sometime in the mid-90s, and it's the real deal: this first-ever British edition, as well as being about twice as large, adds an interesting afterword by Simon himself...