Author of the week: George Pelecanos

last updated 8 January 2015

George Pelecanos is growing tired of writing crime fiction, said Carlo Rotella in The Washington Post. Acknowledged by better-known peers as one of the genre’s reigning masters, the 51-year-old D.C. native hit the best-seller list for the first time last year with his 14th novel, The Night Gardener. Yet his follow-up, Turnaround, shows him once again bending genre formulas to suit his evolving artistic interests. “I’ve been struggling with that,” he says. “You want to deliver the genre goods, but in the last few books, I’ve been delivering them more sheepishly.” Pelecanos opens Turnaround with a fictionalized account of a racial shooting that shook 1972 Washington. But the story is not a hunt for justice. “It’s about forgiveness,” he says.

Good television is sapping the author of some of his old energy. “Sometimes I think The Wire said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels,” he says, referring to the award-winning HBO series that he helped write and produce. Underlying much of his fiction, though, is a question—What makes a good man?—that he already seems to be considering in new ways. “One thing I didn’t realize about this business when I started was that it could be my job to write a novel a year,” he says, “but it’s also my job to take a walk and think.”