Acclaimed writer and television producer George Pelecanos writes about the United States by crafting dramas of people and cities. He is the author of more than twenty novels and story collections, all set in greater Washington, DC, including Owning Up, The Turnaround, and Hard Revolution. At once grounded and outsized, his novels create a vivid portrait of DC’s long twentieth century and mark him as the city’s unofficial Noir Laureate. Described by Stephen King as “perhaps the greatest living American crime writer,” Pelecanos has been awarded the International Association of Crime Writers’ Hammett Prize, the Raymond Chandler Award in Italy, and France’s Grand Prix du Roman Noir. His novels Hell to Pay and Soul Circus both won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and GQ, among other publications.

Pelecanos brings the same interplay of imagination and verité to his television work. As screenwriter, showrunner, and producer on such series as The Wire, Treme, The Deuce, and We Own This City, he extends his canvas to cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and New York. As a writer and co-producer for the mini-series The Pacific, he turns his historical imagination to World War II. His series have received numerous Emmy, Peabody, and Writers Guild nominations and awards, and he received an Emmy nomination for his work on The Wire. On the cusp of America’s 250th year, Adriane Lentz-Smith interviewed the writer about his novel, King Suckerman, DC as an exemplary city, and how he approaches American stories.

You have set several of your novels and stories during such epochal moments as the nation’s bicentennial, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the racial pogroms of the Red Summer of 1919. What do you find interesting or useful about situating stories in the American past?

The short answer is that I’m interested in how past events reflect upon our present. When I wrote Knickerbocker, the novella about the race war (not a riot) here in 1919, the BLM uprisings were happening around the country. History is on a continuum. Years ago, I was in France, on a book tour, when a journalist shouted at me out of a crowd, accusing me of “fabricating” racism in America to sell books, when in fact, he said, racism no longer existed in America (yeah, France has their own right-wing press, too). The truth is, I was one of those naïve people who thought we had, at least, tamped down racism after the success of the Civil Rights Movement. But now we see that racism has reared its ugly head again and in fact it was never really defeated. So, it’s kind of important to talk about it in fiction, because fiction can engage and move people in a way that journalism often cannot. It illustrates where we’ve been and where we are.

The book Hard Revolution, about the 1968 riots in the wake of the King assassination, was a more personal project for me. I had always wanted to write about it and after 12 novels I finally felt like I had the chops to handle it. In 1968, when I was 11, my parents told me I needed to go to work at my dad’s diner downtown. I took the DC Transit bus down Georgia Avenue every day to get there, just a couple of months after the riots. Seventh Street (lower Georgia Ave.) had burned down, but the Black Washingtonians on the bus, some of whom lived in the decimated riot corridors, did not seem depressed about it. In fact, in terms of appearance, they appeared to be liberated. A rain had come and cleaned the streets. And then, in my father’s diner, on one side of the lunch counter were my father and myself (Greek Americans) and his employees, all of whom were Black. On the other side of the counter were the customers, mostly white professionals wearing ties. I sensed instinctively that the counter represented a divide, and I knew what side of the counter I was on.

I’m not telling you that I’m an honorary Black man. Just saying that I tend to take the side of people who are marginalized, whether it’s by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity. My parents weren’t marchers. But my dad always said, “Live and let live.” Some people might think that’s a corny expression, but I think it’s a pretty good way to live your life.

Until she retired, one of my colleagues taught a course called “Crime and the City: From Dickens to The Wire .” And in my “History of Inequality” class, I usually quote Frank Sabotka to open a conversation about neoliberalism: “We used to make [stuff] in this country… Now we just put our hands in the next guy’s pocket.” Are you surprised by how academics interpret and think through The Wire ?

I’m not really privy to what is said about The Wire in college classes, and I haven’t watched the show since it was broadcast over twenty years ago. But I think we succeeded in showing people how things actually work, and why the system is set up to fail those who have the least.

All my life I’ve heard people say, “Why don’t those kids in those low-income neighborhoods just work hard if they want to get out?” We showed you why. I don’t know how “important” the show was, or if we moved the needle of national discussion. But I have met people who are better than I am, who told me they were inspired to become teachers or community volunteers after watching the show. If there is a legacy for The Wire, that’s a good one.

When you set your writing in the present, be it in novels or for shows like Treme , how do you still have the past in mind?

The present does not exist in a vacuum. Those Baltimore neighborhoods you saw in The Wire, with rows of houses bearing plywood in their windows, were locations, not sets, and they did not deteriorate overnight. The people in power allowed them to deteriorate. In New Orleans, the folks who got wiped out by Katrina lived in the shadow of faulty levees for years. There’s something called geographic divination, which means that the upper classes live on the high ground, where it’s cooler, more bug free, and protected from the elements. Here in Washington, it’s called Upper Northwest, which is the area above the Piedmont Plateau, shielded on the east by the natural barrier of Rock Creek Park. The people on the other side and below tend to live tougher lives.

Two decades out from Hurricane Katrina, do you think we have anything to learn from New Orleans’ past and future?

With Treme, what we were trying to say, essentially, was that New Orleans is a city worth saving. There is no question in my mind that if New Orleans were not a majority-Black city the response to the floods would have been more immediate and more substantive. Michael Connelly’s fictional character Harry Bosch lives by a quote that I love: “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

During a previous Q&A for this journal, the historian and documentary filmmaker Malinda Maynor Lowery described herself as a “place-based historian.” In many ways, you also strike me as a place-based social documentarian. Does that feel accurate? Is Washington, DC, your place? If so, what does DC capture about America writ large and what remains unique to the District?

Over time it became my life’s work to write about this city. In the beginning, I just wanted to write one book. Starting with The Big Blowdown (1996), my fifth novel, with a story that runs from 1933 to 1959, I began to envision, big picture, what I wanted to do, which was to chronicle the actual history and social history of the living city through fiction. When I say “living city,” I’m talking about the people who have lived here for generations. I’m not interested in the politicians who come and go or the machinations of the federal government, and I’ll never write about those things.

Washingtonians have their own culture, their own music (Go-Go and Positive Force punk), their own cuisine, their own way of speaking and dressing. We are south of the Mason–Dixon line, so we are at the top of the South, with Southern attributes (politeness), and less of the baggage. When White Nationalist Richard Spencer came to DC in 2016, he was punched in the face by a Washingtonian, on camera (Spencer cried). The message was, yeah, we recognize the concept of free speech, but if you talk that kind of hateful shit here, you are going to get stole in the face.

The citizens of Washington are taxed but have no representation in Congress, which is unconstitutional. Meanwhile, the Feds control the purse strings, and politicians lie their sorry asses off about DC being some kind of violent hellhole. But the people here are resilient. It’s a very interesting place in which to base a body of work.

With a book like King Suckerman , the sites, sounds and soundtrack, and cultural touchstones get so precise and fine-grained that it feels like you are writing out of memory. But, of course, memory is rarely so fine-grained and some of your work reaches too far back to be mistaken for your own experiences. What kind of research do you do? Do you have favorite authors or sources? What kind of research or preparation does not help?

King Suckerman was a relatively easy book for me to write because, as you suggest, it came from my memory. I was a teenager in the mid-seventies and I remember everything. I remember exactly what we were wearing, what the street language was, what we were listening to, the cars we drove… everything. The research portion came from morgue material I printed out, largely from the Washington Post. You study the movie listings, the display advertisements, the classifieds, and, to a lesser degree, the news stories, and you begin to build a world.

I used the same strategy in all of those historical novels I wrote in the nineties, and I’m glad that I had no internet to lean on, because I feel that internet research, though useful, is no substitute for getting out there conversing with people, walking through neighborhoods, or just sitting in a bar listening to people talk. When I wrote The Cut (2011), I did all of my location research from the saddle of my bike, in the cockpit of my kayak, in my 2000 Jeep Cherokee, or on foot, at night, just like the protagonist, Spero Lucas. King Suckerman was not just fact based; it was an outsized take on the seventies, blown up. The people in the book are very consciously living in their own Blaxploitation/Exploitation movie. The key is the scene where the young white kid is in a bathroom stall, thrillingly witnessing a violent confrontation between two men at a sink. He’s watching them through a crack in the door that is very much like the aspect ratio of a film. The book builds to a climax during the Bicentennial night, which was a massive party here. I like a ticking clock.

Speaking of sounds and soundtracks, could you talk a bit about how you use music to ground the reader in time, place, or character? And to steal a question from the record store guys in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity : do you have a top-five desert island playlist?

Music has always been a big part of my life and so naturally it is important to my characters. I like to use source music in my books and television shows, which is to say I use music when it is heard coming from car radios, juke boxes, or snippets from cars passing on the street. I try not to just name-check music or artists I like, but rather identify what the characters like, even when it’s whack.

If I give you my desert island discs, it will sound like I’m stuck in my teenage years, when in fact I listen to new music constantly, and it will seem that I’m ignoring punk, ska, and other genres that have meant a lot to me. But it’s true that the music that stays with you is the music from your youth or, more specifically, whenever your hormones kicked in. So here are a few that I’d take to that island. They seem to elicit the most emotions in me to this day. The Isley Brothers’ 3 + 3; Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly; Al Green’s Call Me; Led Zeppelin II; Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs; Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby; Barry White’s Let the Music Play (don’t laugh; Barry was no joke); Gregory Isaacs’s More Gregory; Otis Redding’s Otis Blue; Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks; Elvis Costello’s Get Happy. That’s more than five, I know. I could have given you twenty-five.

Race is omnipresent in your work, but it is never all-encompassing. How did you come to think about race? Do you have any strategies for writing about race without being reductionist or didactic?

In the Washington area, you think about race and racism every day, because it’s a part of life here. My wife and I raised two Black sons and a Latina daughter, and needless to say I had a front-row seat to the occasional discrimination perpetrated on my loved ones. I already mentioned how Washingtonians are treated by the federal government. Now we see Brown people arrested and locked up for deportation on a daily basis, and no, they are not murderers, rapists, or drug dealers, another damnable, slanderous lie. No-knock warrants continue to result in the death of innocent citizens, mostly minorities, and also result in the needless death of police. Police shootings of Black citizens have not decreased, despite high-profile cases and protests. You can and should get angry about it, but the trick as an author is to not stand on a soapbox. Try to leave your personal opinions out of it. Create the characters and then let the characters speak with honesty. I haven’t always taken my own advice, but I’ve been saved by some good editors.

Is race—and racism—a constitutive part of the American story? Is there even such a thing as “the American story”?

It is one element of the American story, but it is not the defining element. Let’s just call it American history. Think of how we helped defeat worldwide fascism in World War II. Or the Peace Corps. To cite two examples that have recently been in the news, we fed and clothed people around the world through USAID and gave oppressed people a lifeline and hope via Voice of America. Pulling slavery and racism out of the history books or forbidding that part of our history to be taught in schools does not erase the reality of it, nor does it tarnish the many good accomplishments of this country. When politicians start to write the history books, we are in deep trouble. The good news is, people know the truth. Reconciliation starts with honest discussion.

Do you have any novels, television shows, or academic books that, in your view, discuss history, cities, or the nation well? Any that are just straight-up great stories?

I like the proletariat novelists (my term) that came out of the Depression. Steinbeck, disliked by academics because of his uncomplicated prose, is a favorite. To be read by everyday people is a personal goal of mine, and Steinbeck succeeded in spades. I conduct reading and writing workshops in prisons and jails and it’s a badge of honor that my books are very popular in prison libraries. If I see a young person in my neighborhood walking down the street, his head in one of my paperbacks, I feel like I’ve done something right.

John Fante is another good one from Steinbeck’s generation. Horace McCoy. A. I. Bezzerides. Off the top of my head, a few novels worth mentioning: Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling is a classic. Joyce Carol Oates’s Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City. Of today’s novelists, Rachel Kushner and Willy Vlautin are standouts. For entertainment and to remind myself how it’s done, I reread Elmore Leonard. Swag is my favorite Leonard crime novel. Valdez is Coming is a top-shelf Western. To understand my hometown, read Chocolate City, the non-fiction, complete history of Washington, by Chris Asch and George Musgrove. Dream City, by Tom Sherwood and Harry Jaffee, chronicles Home Rule and the Marion Barry years.

Is there anything else you wish I had asked?

I think we covered the waterfront. Thank you.