City Paper article

[excerpt from 9/15 City Paper cover article]

George Pelecanos has set his gritty tales of murder and mayhem in neighborhoods across the city. But there's no area Pelecanos has shown himself to be more fond of than the middle-class Northwest neighborhoods east of the park. Places like Brightwood, Park View, Petworth, Manor Park - it's in these spots, up and down Georgia Avenue NW, that Pelecanos' DC is most real, a place with tight families and tidy houses alongside dingy bars and the occasional pit-bull fight.

It's home to decent yet flawed characters like Derek Strange, the black, Ennio Morricone–lovin', one-time cop who grew up in Petworth and stayed there, opening a private-eye business on 9th between Kansas and Upshur. He coaches his stepson's pee-wee football team on the field behind Roosevelt Senior High, and he's not above the occasional trip to a neighborhood massage parlor for a happy ending. In Pelecanos' latest, The Night Gardener, upstanding homicide detective Gus Ramone makes his home in a yellow colonial on Rittenhouse Street NW. He does his best to raise his son right, though he makes sure young Diego's well-versed in the code of the streets, growing up half-white in tough Manor Park.

Pelecanos' fictional turf is also where Adrian Fenty built his political career, in no small part by promising to rid Georgia Avenue of its liquor stores, massage parlors, and all the other gritty details Pelecanos so treasures. And, yes, the novelist has noticed - as one junkie informant muses in The Night Gardener, "Now you had politicians, like that ambitious light-skinned dude, councilman for that area up top of Georgia, trying to make laws about loitering and stopping cats from buying single cans of beer… The light-skinned dude, he didn't really care about folks hanging out, and he didn't care if a man wanted to enjoy himself one beer on a summer night. But he was running for mayor, so there it was."

And now he will be mayor, so there it is. You can bet Fenty will make redeveloping Georgia Avenue one of the cornerstones of his mayoral legacy. Condos are already going up next to the Petworth Metro, complete with a Mocha Hut below. It's only a matter of time before Ward 4 goes the Starbucks-infested way of "Silver Sprung," a development Silver Spring resident Pelecanos has long hated. And once that happens, it won't be too long before the Ennio Morricone–lovin' private dicks get priced right out of the neighborhood.

Full article

Comments

[Toby]

I love George Pelecanos' books and have them all. Can't wait to read the new one. I was so excited to read some books back that fictional PI Derek Strange's office is located near where we live in Petworth. Pelecanos'books are a tribute to the DC that isn't the Federal City, but what I call the real DC, yet a city has many realities.

[reuben jackson]

I've long admired Pelecanos's ability to write about "the other D.C." in such an deft, unpatronizing fashion. It is (or was?) indeed a world few Caucasians knew much about after what a former neighbor once called "the great white flight of the late 1950s".
Maybe some rising author will set his or her fiction in the Petworth (et al) to come.. You know, stopping for a latte before arriving at the scene of the crime. Stay tuned.