Third Person Limited chatted with legendary crime fiction author George Pelecanos about his new novel The Blue Flame, his love for Dashiell Hammett, and his reputation for killing off beloved characters writing for The Wire and other television shows.
Nathan Pensky
Your new novel The Blue Flame, and many of your other novels, deal with race and class, often with white police officers going into black communities. On some level, this discussion of social issues is just a part of every American story. But do you think there’s something about crime fiction specifically that encourages taking these issues on? Why does crime fiction seem to be such an appropriate vehicle for discussing race and class?
George Pelecanos
It always has been for me. I mean, it’s been the bedrock of what I’ve done from the beginning. Living in the Washington area, it’s in your face every day. Especially with having the government here.
But this leads into a broader discussion of crime fiction and Dashiell Hammett. Because, you know, what was famously said about Hammett was that he took murder out of the parlor and put it into the alley where it belonged.
And as one of the original famous crime novelists, he was the most proletariat-minded. Even in his early books, there’s always a scene not even relevant to the story, where he comes across a working-class guy, and they have a half-page conversation. And he might just light the guy’s cigarette or something like that, but you can see that he admires those people.
It’s the whole reason I write crime fiction. The crime part of it is the least interesting thing for me. It’s about going into the neighborhoods and writing about people that hardly ever get written about in mainstream American fiction.
American fiction is usually about winners. But my characters don’t always win. They might just be, you know, a dishwasher who goes to work every day. And to me, that’s heroic. So it gave me an opportunity to talk about the things that I always wanted to write in fiction. And the crime part of it is an engine, a narrative engine that I personally need to get from A to B.
Nathan Pensky
Can you talk more about Hammett and what he means to you and your writing?
George Pelecanos
The first crime novel I ever read was Red Harvest. I wasn’t much of a reader growing up. I was more of a movie freak. And I took this class in crime fiction at the University of Maryland my senior year as an elective. And I had this teacher, Professor Charles Mish, and the very first book on the syllabus was Red Harvest.
So that was my introduction to crime fiction. And I’ve still got the vintage paperback edition from 1972 that I read. And of course, Red Harvest is a classic in the genre. It uses the “divide and conquer” method. It’s been made into a movie so many times, without being called Red Harvest, starting with Kurosawa, and then Sergio Leone and the Coen brothers. Miller’s Crossing is half Red Harvest and half The Glass Key.
The one thing I do want to mention about Hammett is that his life was as interesting as his books. People know that he was a target of Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt in the early 1950s. And one of my very favorite Hammett quotes is when he was under questioning, and he was asked if people should be given the books of a communist sympathizer, such as him. And he replied, “If I were fighting communism, I don’t think I would give people any books at all.”
Mason Stockstill
Pretty accurate.
George Pelecanos
And remember, this guy served in World War One and in World War Two. He was in the Aleutian Islands through World War Two. He was a patriot.
Mason Stockstill
And I think he went out of his way to get in in World War Two, because, you know, it looked like he was too old. But he had to put a little effort in and kind of sneak in, if I remember correctly.
George Pelecanos
Absolutely. Not only old, but he was in bad health. Alcohol really wrecked him for a long time. But yeah, he’s an important figure in history. There were other guys writing around the same time for Black Mask, but he was the best by far.
Nathan Pensky
Another observation that we’ve made is that Hammett changed mystery stories from the Sherlock Holmes model to something more human. He’s less focused on the evidence and more on human behavior and on human motivation, which is a distinction that we’ve already sort of noted in your own fiction. Do you feel an affinity with Hammett in that way?
George Pelecanos
Yeah. My favorite book of his is The Glass Key, which is barely a crime novel. It’s a story about the relationship between these two guys. Friendship, betrayal, all these things that anybody can relate to, you know? I just think that’s an excellent book. I have reread it many times.
Mason Stockstill
I read that when I was much younger and it made no impression on me because I was expecting another Maltese Falcon with really stylized characters and intrigue and a very clear, “Here’s the plot of this crime,” and such. And that novel doesn’t go there at all.
George Pelecanos
Yeah, it doesn’t deliver on crime fiction. But it’s where he was. I think it’s where he was headed. He did have ambition to be a literary writer. Of course, the contradiction there is that he already was.
Nathan Pensky
Oh, totally. That’s something we’ve talked about a lot, is that while his ambitions were to take on more serious fiction, his fiction was already great. But how do you feel about The Maltese Falcon and its highly stylized characters? Because it has these larger-than-life characters and you tend to draw characters much truer to life.
George Pelecanos
I think Maltese Falcon is really the only time that he went there and the other books are closer to what I’m doing. He might have had his eye on the screen with that one because it was such an easy adaptation to film.
Mason Stockstill
That’s a great point. And he did go in that direction both there and then with The Thin Man. And he was asked to do the stories for The Thin Man sequels, even though there was no novel for them. Dare I ask, are you ever thinking about film adaptation when you’re writing a novel?
George Pelecanos
No, I never think about it. And sometimes people say, “Well, do you have an actor in mind when you’re writing a book?” Absolutely not. You shouldn’t even dream like that, because it’s never going to happen.
I do get from the movies my sense of structure and pacing. And I listen to soundtracks while I’m writing, such as Murakami, Elmer Bernstein, Lalo Schifrin, all these people. Because it helps me pace what I’m doing. In my head, I’m seeing a movie that’s about us. That’s the connection.
Nathan Pensky
Do you think that one of Hammett’s classic noir characters could survive in your Washington, DC? How do you think, say, Sam Spade would function as a detective there?
George Pelecanos
Most detective work is done behind a laptop now. Spade would probably be sitting at a desk somewhere and, you know, you want to find a missing person, you get a program for it.
Mason Stockstill
The last thing, I want to give you a chance to defend yourself, because as I understand it, you wrote the script for the episode of The Wire where they killed Wallace. And that’s one of the most heartbreaking moments in TV history that I’m aware of. So any defense of yourself, sir?
George Pelecanos
None whatsoever. It actually was good for me because that was the first script I wrote for The Wire. It gave me a lot of notoriety. The people on set were very upset because they loved this kid, Michael B. Jordan. He was 14 years old, and he was a really good young man. And of course, the policy on those shows was we never told the actors when they were going to get killed.
They only learned it when the script dropped. But for me personally, it set me up to be the guy who got all the great scenes in The Wire. You know, like anytime there was a big murder, I was given those scripts, and I was given the penultimate script every season, which is where everything kind of happens, right?
And even when I did Treme, I killed Steve Earle. And there were people who had made up t-shirts with my name and a pen with blood dripping off it. I had a reputation for it. Yeah. But I say, it’s not like Michael Jordan was out of a job for long, you know?
Same with Idris Elba. I wrote the episode where he was killed, and he became a huge movie star. I told him that he was going to be huge when he left the show. And he is.
But, you know, back to Mike Jordan. I’m happy to report that I had lunch with him in the last few years. I went up to Philly when he was making Creed, and I was trying to get him interested in something and he’s as good a man as he was when he was younger. He’s a really good person. So I didn’t kill him.
Mason Stockstill
All right. You’re off the hook.
