Renowned Crime Novelist Returns to the Scene

George Pelecanos’ UMD student ID

“In this building I made films and found my tribe and wanted to come to school every day,” he said. His crime fiction class, along with his film theory coursework, caused “a lightbulb to go off, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

Pelecanos is known for his authentic portrayals of hard-boiled cops and tough but often sympathetic criminals, along unflinching explorations of urban inequalities. He has been hailed by Esquire as “the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world” and described by Stephen King as “perhaps the greatest living crime writer.”

A frequent collaborator with fellow Terp David Simon '83, Pelecanos co-produced HBO crime series including "The Wire," "Treme," "The Deuce" and "We Own This City." The latter was based on the book by then-Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton ’05, detailing corruption in the Baltimore Police Department’s former Gun Task Trace Force.

The UMD event was sponsored by the Jiménez-Porter Writers' House living-learning program and moderated by its director, Ross Angelella. Following are four takeaways:

The tensions of 1960s and ’70s Washington shaped Pelecanos’ writing
Starting when he was 11, Pelecanos took the bus downtown to deliver food from his father’s Greek diner to customers, spending hours observing the city’s interplay of races and cultures. Washington was nearly three-fourths Black, and his neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant was largely Puerto Rican. His father’s diner had a segregated counter, and in 1968 he heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at the National Cathedral four days before he was assassinated, sparking local riots. “The city changed overnight,” Pelecanos recalled. “I could see it bearing on people’s faces. There were a lot of things going on that I didn’t understand intellectually, but they were something I carried my whole life.”

He's sensitive to the challenges of writing about Black characters
Critiqued by some for writing as a white author about troubled Black characters, Pelecanos underpins his writing with deep in-person research. He frequently spends time in majority-Black neighborhoods, just listening to residents. For two decades he’s taught classes at the Washington, D.C., jail, which also gives him material about real people affected by the justice system.

“My process is to show respect to people,” he said. “There’s no such thing as ‘a’ Black voice. There are 100 Black voices.”

Police stations don't look—or smell—like they're portrayed on TV
At this point in his career, rank-and-file officers want to talk to him; it helps “to flash his HBO badge,” he admitted. He laughs at TV portrayals of police stations showcasing state-of-the-art digital technology on the walls. “It’s a dump, man,” he said. “It's so spartan and dirty, and the walls are ripped down, and suspects have urinated on the floor. But that’s fodder for me.”

To develop his law enforcement characters, Pelecanos embedded with a local homicide squad, rolling up to murder scenes and watching interrogations. For “We Own This City,” he was proud of injecting authentic voices into the script. One of his memorable lines: “Show me a cop who doesn’t have any brutality complaints, and I’ll show you a cop who doesn’t get out of his car.”

He has two pieces of advice for writers
The first is to read voraciously. Since the time he was able, Pelecanos fell into the habit of reading The Washington Post “every day, every section,” he said, teaching him how to organize his thoughts on the page.

The second is to live a full life. Pelecanos spent a decade between college and his first book toiling in odd jobs including line cook, bartender and women’s shoe salesman. He partied when he could. That social interaction became “a bedrock” for his career, he said. “It’s essential. You’ve got to have something to write about.”