Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos: Hard-boiled Buddies

Dennis Lehane (left) and George Pelecanos met for a joint reading and book signing at the Mystery Bookshop in Bethesda, Md., in June 1999. (Photos by Ward Rinehart)

Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos write hard-boiled, noir mysteries set in their respective hometowns, Boston and Washington, D.C. Lehane’s Anthony and Shamus Award winning series follows private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela (Angie) Gennaro, who still live in the blue-collar Irish/Italian neighborhood where they grew up. Pelecanos’ main sleuth, TV and stereo salesman Nick Stefanos, acquired his detective’s license on a whim. But the real stars of Pelecanos’ novels are Washington, D.C., and the unsung blue-collar heroes who transformed the city from World War II boomtown to world capital.

Crescent Blues interviewed the pair following a joint reading and signing at the Mystery Bookshop in Bethesda, Md. NOTE: If you ever want to interview George Pelecanos, wear a pair of high-top “Connies,” the sneakers that he favors. Having done her homework, this reporter wore her red pair, and Pelecanos said, “Since you’re wearing ‘Chucks,’ I’ll do the interview.”

Crescent Blues: You two met in Pittsburgh for a book reading and signing?

Dennis Lehane: There were only the two of us; we just met. They bussed in a group of senior citizens to the signing, and that’s not, I would say, our core audience. So I think they were a little bit shocked as we read. Both of us knew it before we stood up that this was not going to be our core audience, and we could have backed away from reading the tougher stuff. We didn’t, so there you go.

Did any of them come up and talk to you afterwards?

George Pelecanos: There was a Q and A afterwards. It was fun.

Dennis Lehane: It was fine. We just think we unsettled them a little bit.

So was that how you found out about each other?

GP: Yeah, I’d probably read one of his books.

DL: I’d read King Suckerman in galleys.

GP: Generally, when I know I’m going to meet somebody in a situation like that, I’ll try and read their book. Usually you have to lie: “I loved it, man.” But I did love it. Then you meet somebody you love as a writer, but you don’t want to hang around with them. But we just hit it off.

How many of George’s books have you read by now?

DL: I’ve read them all. You go to mystery book stores, and sometimes there’s an author who’s hot. Everybody was talking about The Big Blowdown. I bought it and didn’t read it at the time. Then, just before we first signed together — this was a total fluke — I was in a used bookstore in Cambridge with a buddy of mine and I saw King Suckerman in galleys, just before the book was published. So I grabbed it, read it that day and then signed with him in Pittsburgh two, three weeks later. Afterwards I went back and read everything.

What was it about King Suckerman that grabbed you?

DL: Right off the bat I just loved it. One of the biggest influences on my work was Elmore Leonard’s books of the Seventies, the real mean, nitty-gritty totally noir books set in Detroit in the Seventies. The opening of King Suckerman immediately made me feel like I was back in the Seventies reading a Leonard book. I loved the set-up. I loved these two guys immediately — Cooper and Clagget. They start off with this crazy crime. Clagget kills a guy because he doesn’t like the way he smiles at him. You just knew King Suckerman was true noir. People are not acting out of these grand Colombo-type plans. They just do things on impulse and affect things. I love books like that. Then the Seventies’ stuff. That book has a soundtrack. You’re reading it and just kind of bobbing your head.

Which book do you like the best, now that you’ve read them all?

DL: Of George’s? I have my complete bias. I love The Sweet Forever far and away. My guess is that George’s favorites book is The Big Blowdown, and I can see why. The Sweet Forever spoke most to me because I came of age in the Eighties. He set that book at exactly one of the most pivotal years of my life, so it was completely vivid to me. Everything — cocaine, crack, the fear of gang violence, the treatment of the poor, corruption in government, and Lenny Bias [the University of Maryland basketball star who died from cocaine use in 1986]. And I was there. Whereas for King Suckerman I had to transpose myself to a time I remember as a 10- or 11-year-old, I was 20 years old in 1986. That was my time, everything he wrote about. I was thinking, “Damn, I wish I wrote this.”

George, what was the first book you read of Dennis’?

GP: It was his first book, A Drink Before The War. It blew me away. There’s points in that book where I was, like, “This guy’s got it,” and it doesn’t happen like that much anymore. I started reading his other books. Now I just wait for them to get published. Gone, Baby, Gone I think is a flat-out classic. That book’s going to be around in a hundred years. Prayers for Rain is phenomenal, too.

What is it about the books that really blows you away?

GP: The first is the quality of the writing, the characters and the humor, but that’s not what separates him from everybody else. I think it’s because the books are all about something. He’s not afraid to make them about something. He’s not afraid to make these characters extremely flawed, like most people are. He doesn’t put them into some kind of politically correct box and packaging to aim for mass readers. It’s a very honest writing, which you don’t find in crime writing for the most part. That’s why I keep coming back to the books. Then, of course, they deliver on the genre level as well, absolutely.

What do you think about Bubba (the arms dealer in the Patrick Kenzie/Angie Gennaro series)?

GP: I try not to think about him.

What did you think about Bubba’s turning romantic in Prayers for Rain?

GP [laughing]: There’s a sensitive side of Bubba.

DL: Bubba gets some!

GP: It’s kind of like watching a dog lick his balls — I don’t know why.

Let me bring up a topic that everyone’s talking about: violence. Noir and hardboiled mysteries are, by definition, violent. Do either of you find this genre trademark disturbing, given recent shootings like the one in Columbine, Colo.?

DL: I think that you have to read — that sounds patently obvious — but you have to read a book. My books are not written so they’re necessarily the easiest, fastest books to get into. Any 16-year-old who can read through Gone, Baby, Gone and come of that thinking it’d be good to shoot somebody was disturbed in the first place. I don’t want to just push away these things. I feel some sense of culpability because I’m caught up in a violent genre, certainly, but it’s like I saw a comic recently saying, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. But guns have something to do with it.”

What happened yesterday in Washington, D.C., is a disgrace [the House defeated a gun control bill]. Congress pushed away the issue — guns. What gets passed, instead? Posting the Ten Commandments in schools. Yeah, that’s going to help. That’s really going to help. “It has nothing to do with guns; we need the Ten Commandments in schools. Juvenile crime? Let’s crack down on juveniles. Let’s not figure out a way to get them help. Let’s not figure out what’s going wrong in their life and fix it. No, let’s just crack down on them so they can be in a hole, a bigger hole.”

I know that sounds like a liberal artist’s way of pushing away from his own responsibility. I have to rethink, to some extent, the use of guns in my novels, and I will do that, but they’re novels. It’s not a film; it’s not instant. Reading is not a passive environment. You have to invest yourself. Your mind has to work to read a book. So in this case, I do feel the blood is not on our hands. I do think the entertainment industry has to look at itself to some extent. [Violence] is an issue, certainly. But let’s deal with issue number one first — there’s no excuse for a Tech-9 being a legal weapon.

What do you think, George?

GP: Dennis has pretty much said it all. I would add that it’s not a problem with violence in books. No, there’s a problem of violence in society. I would gladly never write another book with any kind of violence in it if it wasn’t reflecting what’s going on out there.

Both of you write about places where violence has occurred for a long time, including violence against kids. Would you agree there was really no uproar about violence against children until violence started occurring in white, upper middle class schools?

GP: Yes, I would.

How do you feel about that?

GP: I have a problem with it — not to dishonor those kids killed at Columbine. There’s been three to four hundred gun deaths in the District [of Columbia] every year for the last ten years. The majority of the victims are kids, if you count people in their early 20s as well. OK, so why the uproar now?

You’re talking about kids?

GP: Right. Nobody cared up until that time, because they let it go on. If [Columbine] brings about some kind of change…. But it doesn’t seem like it’s going to, in light of what just went down yesterday in Congress. What more needs to happen?

How do you feel about that, Dennis?

DL: Yeah, I agree. Richard Pryor used to have a great line, “The white people driving through the ghetto see the black kids standing on the street smoking or shooting up, and they say, ‘Oh, that’s sad, what a crisis.’ Then they get home and they find their own kid doing it and they go, “It’s an epidemic!’” I think that’s certainly true.

When I lived in Miami, one of the most dangerous cities in the country, those were crazy days. They were killing tourists left and right in Liberty City, where I taught poetry in the schools. When they finally turned into animals — I’m not going to say anything about who created those animals — two animals ran a German tourist over six, seven times in front of a child in the car, when they were jacking the car. This incident caused a massive outrage. What did Miami do? Did they deal with this horrendous neighborhood where it was completely hopeless, where it looked like an armed camp?

No, they came up with a “wonderful” solution enacting legislation prohibiting bumper stickers on rental cars saying “rental car.” Then they changed the signs coming out of Miami airport so everybody knew not to go down on 12th Avenue. That’s what they did. The city left that same hellhole there as long as the white people could drive over it. I believe all race warfare is class warfare, and right now the underclass in this country is certainly blacks and Hispanics. How do you keep the underclass down? You ignore them.

There was a time when the Irish were looked upon the same way.

DL: Into the early 1900s, in the cities, the Irish and the Italians, particularly. You can read documentation, editorials published in major, respectable newspapers, that describe Irish and Italian immigrants — no matter where you were, Boston, Chicago, or what time, 1910, 1920 — that describe them as shiftless, lazy, impossible to educate, impossible to socialize and primitive in their religious culture. So gee, what does that sound like? This has been going on for centuries, but we’re supposed to be a little evolved beyond that, I hope.

Did you ever experience any discrimination, George, because you are Greek?

GP: Sure.

What type of discrimination? I’m talking about in Washington, D.C.

GP: I don’t really want to elevate it to what other people have gone through. It’s more subtle.

Sometimes it’s the subtle kind that really hurts.

GP: Yeah, I mean, you can’t get into people’s heads. You will not know what people really think when they see the name ends with an “S.” It’s there, but not what other people have had to overcome.

Correct me if I’m wrong. It doesn’t seem you beat up on people of the upper class in your books.

GP: They don’t really exist in my books. A friend of mine who taught at Howard called me and said he read Nick’s Trip, and “you made us all out to be dishwashers and warehouse guys.”

I said, “Hey, man, read the book.” There’s no lawyers or doctors in these books of any color.” It’s just not the world that I write about. It’s not that I relegated Blacks to the role of dishwasher, but the book’s set in the kitchen. I’m trying to show another side of life. Frankly, I don’t know the upper class side. I think the work would suffer if I tried to write anything about a doctor.

Now, Dennis, you’ve written about upper class people in your books. How have you treated them?

DL: I think it’s a noir tradition. Noir comes out of the underclass; it comes out of the underground. I think there’s a tradition: if there’s a rich person in your book, an alarm bell should go off to the reader about how much you should trust him or her.

The alarm bells should go off when the private detective is hired — period. Whoever hires them, the alarm bells should go off. It’s a big tradition in the private eye genre that the person who hires the detective is the last person you trust. What the P.I.’s hired for is never what the P.I. is truly hired for.

I don’t want to be completely pejorative across the board about the wealthy, but, having grown up very working class, I certainly have a mistrust of people who got their money too easily. It’s the Balzac line, “Behind every great fortune there’s a crime.”

What bothers me is not the crime, it’s the hypocrisy afterwards, several generations later, as if this money was bequeathed through hard work, when usually it was a crime. I think wealthy people in my books don’t always come off all that great. I don’t deal with them too much because, like George, I’m not really comfortable. They tend to be genre images when I write about them, because it’s not a world I grew up in, and I don’t truly understand it.

How did you come up with Patrick’s love of cars? In Prayers for Rain he has to ruin the perpetrator’s car. To him it’s like desecrating a holy object.

DL: Well, it is. It’s such a beautiful car.

Does it come from your own interest in cars?

DL: I don’t have a particular interest in cars except in a very general sense. I know what I like. I have this weird perspective that I don’t like many new things. It’s very hard for me even to work with a computer. I’m not built that way. I like old things, and cars come down to — I haven’t seen a car produced in the last 20 years that I think compares to the great cars of the Fifties and Sixties. It’s an aesthetic thing, and I think the ’68 Shelly is the most beautiful car I’ve ever seen. So Patrick, by extension, thinks it’s the most beautiful car he’s ever seen, even though he owns a ’63 Porche, which, as I understand, is a very nice-looking car. Patrick’s car was a tip to the genre, too. It’s like Travis McGee’s Busted Flush [the houseboat McGee won in a card game and lived on in Ft. Lauderdale].

You have the character Angie, who’s very much the modern woman detective. Were you influenced by any of the women writers and their characters when you decided to include her in the series?

DL: No. I always wrote best as a short story writer about women. I wrote about women better than I did men, for whatever reason. This was something I realized. Angie had shown up in several incarnations in previous short stories, so when I introduced Patrick in the first book, in Chapter One, he goes up to his office, opens the door, and there’s — Bang! — that incarnation who’d been in previous short stories, as his partner. Women, particularly that type of woman, interest me.

Why did you have her married to a wife batterer?

DL: The book was turned down by several publishers when it went out in manuscript. They all said the same thing — they would publish it if I took that aspect out, because they found it unrealistic. My agent and I would say consistently, “What planet are they living on?”

Usually, battered women tend to be on the outside very tough. They’re not usually these sweet little Pollyannas. They’ve been beat around, and that makes them tough, just like an abused child who grows up tough. So I found it an interesting paradox.

One of the things I underscored in the first book was the inability to do something about violence. Patrick, at the age that he can hurt his father, doesn’t, and that haunts him more than anything else in his life. He takes his violence out on the world, but he never took it out on the man who hurt him the most. So that issue became a fascination for me, and it dovetailed nicely into what the book was about — racism as being almost an institutionalized form of child abuse.

George, your main characters have always been men. Do you think you’ll ever have a strong woman character like Angie in any of your books?

GP: I have some strong women in my books, I think, but not as protagonists.

Like the wife of the record store owner in King Suckerman?

GP: Right, she’s pretty strong. She’s kind of keeping him where he is, where he should be. Maybe I don’t have the talent to include a woman’s voice throughout the book. I haven’t attempted it yet. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.

Do you have any favorite mystery writers and/or sleuths that are women?

GP: I don’t know about that specifically, but some of the women writing noir produce some of the best novels out there. For example, I liked In the Cut by Susanna Moore very much.

DL: Nicole Griffiths wrote a lesbian noir. It’s outstanding — The Blue Place.

GP: Also, S.J. Rozan’s a really good writer. I read her pretty religiously whenever she publishes a book. I think women are writing some of the best noir novels out there. It’s interesting to see [the genre] from their perspective, too.

In what way?

GP: It’s more exotic for me as a male reader, and I get inside their heads. Jim Harrison wrote Dalva, a first-person novel through the eyes of a woman. Harrison’s a great writer, but to me it read like a man who just happened to have a woman’s name. Although he attributed all these characteristics to her, really it seemed like it was Jim Harrison.

DL: Martin Amis did the same thing with Night Train.

Dennis, you’re teaching a course right now.

DL: Tufts University. [The course is] American Crime Fiction.

What are you teaching?

DL: The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley, which I think is the best private eye novel ever written; Mallory’s Oracle by Carol O’Connell; Black Dahlia by James Ellroy; King Suckerman. I’m also teaching Bob Franklin’s film One False Moveand a short story called “Killings.” I’m wrapping up with a book that isn’t technically noir, Players by Don DeLillo, which I think is a case of post modern genre bending. I wanted them to see how far this thing can be pushed. And I think that book pushes it as far as it can.

What’s the age of your students?

DL: Most of them are 21 or 22.

How are they reacting to these books?

DL: They’re reacting really well. It’s surprising. None of them had ever read a mystery, no American crime fiction, except for one student who read a few Ellroy’s, some Hammet, Chandler. For the most part they’re novices.

The class is becoming very much about the Seventies and Eighties. So many of the books are very much about the Seventies, when everything went wrong with the peace movement and the counterculture just ran out of gas. Ellroy’s Black Dahlia is about the Forties, but you can tie it to the time it was written [1988]. So it’s very much about the 80s — downsizing, corporate takeovers, corporations in bed with politicians, who are in bed with the media, who are in bed with the police, in a country run by a former actor. I set the bar pretty high by starting out with The Last Good Kiss, a book which easily can take six hours to teach and plumb the depths of. So they’ve run with it since then.

Are you going to give them a final, or let them write a paper?

DL: They have a paper based on a pre-approved list of books which they did not study in class.

What does that list include?

DL: It includes certain authors. They could read any books by Mike Connelly, James Lee Burke, S.J. Rozan, Ellroy, Patsy Cornwell, Hammet, Chandler. I also gave them selections from authors as diverse as Elmore Leonard, Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers — which I think is one of the best novels flat out of the Nineties — and Don DeLillo, Vicki Hendricks, Susanna Moore’s In the Cut. There’s a whole list of books that they can choose from, but if they go off that list they have to talk to me first.

George, you’re also involved in movies and, given our talk about violence, it seems both of you were making distinctions between books and movies with violence in them. Am I stating correctly what you both said?

DL: I think there is a difference. There’s a difference in the form of entertainment.

GP: That’s right. It’s also like pornography, you know it when you read it. You sort of know when you watch a movie what the intent was. I mean, I will defend Oliver Stone’s right to make Natural Born Killersbecause of the ripple effect that happens when you don’t defend it, but that’s a movie made with one purpose — the exploitation of violence. You can call it a satire, a black comedy or anything you want to, but that’s what it was.

What movies with violence would pass the test that the violence is not just for violence’s sake, but for the story’s sake?

GP: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver.

DL: I recently saw a film set in Boston, among gangsters in Charlestown. It’s a very violent film. If anybody walks out of that film thinking violence is good, they’re nuts.

What did you both think of Trainspotting? During the last election Bob Dole condemned it as a way of luring kids into drugs.

DL: I saw it in England before it before it came out in America. I was in London, and it’s all they were talking about. This is two months before it came out in the States. We went and saw it, and it was absolutely electric. That was a watershed film for me of the Nineties, made me feel like a kid again seeing a film. I felt just so exhilarated walking out of there.

But this is a film in which a baby is smothered, is found dead; a film in which the DTs are shown to be one of the most horrific things in the world; in which a guy climbs into the shittiest toilet in Scotland; one guy dies of AIDS. How do you look at that, unless you’re a complete moron, and say, “Boy, I’d like to do heroin.”

GP: How does that inspire you to…? I don’t think Dole ever saw that movie, come on!

DL: There’s a big difference between movies like The Basketball Diaries or Rush, movies which just don’t get it. What Trainspotting showed was both sides of the coin. Movies about heroin usually show it as this really depressing, nod-off thing, which just makes people curious, because they’re thinking that’s not the real deal, or everybody wouldn’t be doing it. Trainspotting shows you this stuff is fantastic and it’s also not fantastic, it’s horrible, but the movie showed at least the rush of heroin. That was, to me, honest artistically.

Did you see it, George?

GP: Yes.

What did you think about the film?

GP: I liked the film. It made me sick about drugs, but I still loved the film. Let’s put it this way, I’d let my kids see it in a heartbeat and not worry at all about how it would affect them. I know it would affect them negatively in a way I want them to be negatively affected. There’s no romanticism at all about doing drugs in that picture.

George, the company that you work for, Circle Releasing, put out the Coen brothers’ films…

GP: We produced three of their films.

Which ones?

GP: Raising Arizona, Noah’s Crossing and Barton Fink.

How do you think of their films in terms of violence?

GP: I don’t think of their films as being particularly violent. They’re so stylized. Again, you’d have to be a pretty stupid person to take it the wrong way.

I distributed John Woo’s The Killer. There’re more guns going off in that movie, with the exception of The Wild Bunch, than in any movie ever made. The Killer, however, is like a comic book. Because it’s film, the beauty is in the way it’s shot and its presentation. It’s almost poetic. That’s not going to influence anybody to do anything wrong. And if I can speak for Dennis, I think if either one of us thought we were involved in anything that would get that kind of reaction, we wouldn’t touch it.

DL: Recently, and this is very strange, my wife and I watched Babe, Pig in the City. I heard that this film was a titanic bomb, almost sank a studio, cost a lot of people jobs, because it was just too dark for children. We were sitting there watching it, going, “My God, who would show this to their kid?” This movie is so twisted and dark and depressing. It’s very Dickensian; it is Oliver Twist to the nth degree.

I was thinking about the movie for days; it totally rooted in my head for days. It’s an incredibly dark picture, and I was just thinking about the shock of it. Then it occurred to me, when I was four I saw Oliver Twist, the movie version, and I still remember Oliver Reed as being one of the scariest [characters]. He played Bill. He murdered Sally, the prostitute, and that was a horrific scene. It’s Dickens. You’re talking about a poor child — an orphan — who’s wandering this horrid, ugly metropolis that’s always dark. Nobody loves him, everybody treats him like crap, and I thought, wait a minute, that film didn’t adversely affect me.

Babe, Pig in the City, is going to be the first film my kids see. I want them to understand the world is this way. One of the reasons Babe, Pig in the City was so disturbing was that when a dog, for example, falls over a bridge and he’s tied to something, he almost drowns. You get the full effect in the sense this dog this going to drown — this movie can go anywhere, and it’s horrific. If more kids saw how horrific violence is and were brought into it as a point of true pain, I think there’d be less of it.

What’s worrisome is not movies like Mean Streets, which are very disturbing in their depiction of violence. What’s disturbing is movies like Schwarzenegger’s, where he kills 70 people. It’s like shooting targets and no big deal. They die — so what, ha ha! It didn’t seem all that painful, and the hero’s fine. It teaches kids you can walk through a room with 70 people shooting automatic weapons at you and you kill all 70 people without getting touched yourself. The 70 people don’t matter because they’re not human beings. Nobody’s human.

I’d rather see a film like Good Fellows, which opens up with a guy getting stabbed and shot in a car. This is horrific and nobody’s going to be sitting there going, “Ha ha, that’s funny. That’s a cartoon.” No, that’s horrific, that guy’s being stabbed with butcher knives in the back of a car. That to me is real violence.

They talk about [violence] in the wake of Columbine. Well, Japan has the single most violent programming in the world — far more violent than America’s. They take all our imports, plus their cartoons, which are horrifically violent, plus their video games, and they saturate their TV airwaves with it, so they’re getting the same stuff. The difference is that they watch it with their families, and their families explain it to them. I think that matters.

You don’t see Japanese kids — well, A) they don’t have guns and B) their society’s structured so they still respect their elders. There’s a family unit around them, and I think that has a lot to do with it.

Did either of you see Old Yeller when you were kids?

Both: Yeah.

How did the end of that movie affect you?

GP: Poor fellow! Made me sad. Made me sad.

DL: I didn’t cry though. I was a man.

Lynn I. Miller

When not practicing public interest law in Washington, D.C., Lynn I. Miller reviews books and movies for Crescent Blues. She lives with her husband and two cats, “Q” and Gracie, and enjoys a symbiotic relationship with her donor heart.