In Washington, but not playing politics

“This is where it started; right here,” says George Pelecanos. “There was a People’s Drugstore here; that’s the first window that got broken. Then a fire started and it went all the way up Park Road. Everything was totally destroyed.”

We’re cruising past the recently gentrified corner of 14th and U streets, the 12 cylinders of Pelecanos’ 1988 BMW purring happily, as Washington, D.C.’s most famous crime writer points out the site of the 1968 race riots, which are prominently featured in the beautifully realized climax of “Hard Revolution,” the 47-year-old author’s latest book. For the past hour, Pelecanos has been showing a visitor around his Washington, a city that is not often memorialized in movies or touted by the local tourist bureau.

It’s a city that’s mostly black and working class, where the fault lines separating class and race are all too visible. Far from Capitol Hill and glittering Georgetown parties, people get up and go to work every day, trying to maintain normality in a world all too frequently run by guns, drugs and violence.

Pelecanos’ route has followed a zigzag course down Georgia Avenue, home to Howard University and black neighborhoods that run the gamut from middle class to desperately poor. The side streets are filled with row homes of tidy brick or faux Georgian style in varying stages of upkeep. It’s the kind of area where one block is beautifully preserved, while the next one over will have boarded-up homes dotting its streets with mounds of trash in their front yards.

More often than not, though, the tour is a tale of decline: the Howard Theater, once a major stop for traveling R&B; shows, is now an abandoned hulk; Princeton Place N.W., where one of Pelecanos’ characters lives, is filled with small houses with steel bars on their windows.

It’s this crumbling infrastructure that is at the heart of Pelecanos’ critically acclaimed and bestselling novels. Books such as “Right as Rain,” “Soul Circus” and “Hell to Pay” feature a middle-aged black private eye named Derek Strange who loves ‘70s soul music and spaghetti westerns. With his younger, more hot-tempered white partner, Terry Quinn, Strange prowls Washington’s mean streets, tracking down killers, drug dealers and runaway witnesses.

He’s the kind of guy who operates in all sorts of cultural worlds and is not averse to cutting moral and ethical corners to get justice. Along the way, Pelecanos’ rich, densely plotted books also take a hard look at the issue of black-white relations in the Federal City.

“It’s the central issue you deal with every day in Washington,” says Pelecanos, who grew up across the district line in Silver Spring, Md. “If you’re going to live here, you have to confront it and understand it.”

Pelecanos says he first became aware of this divide in the summer of 1968, when, at age 11, he was sent to work at his father’s Washington coffee shop. The riots, which followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, had occurred only two months before, and going downtown on the bus, Pelecanos noticed the burned-out buildings. But he also saw how people on the streets were “standing straighter, wearing louder clothes, there was none of that subservience.”

Arriving at his dad’s place, however, Pelecanos found that nothing had really changed: The owner was still Greek American, the staff was black, and the clientele mostly white lawyers from a large firm down the block.

“Everything kind of hit me at once,” Pelecanos says. “But the biggest thing was the race and class thing in the wake of the riots that I’ve been trying to suss out my entire career.”

“Hard Revolution” is the culmination of that search. It’s a prequel to the other Strange books, following the detective in two eras: 1959, when he’s a preteen who has a life-altering experience, and 1968, as a rookie cop in Washington distrusted by many fellow blacks.

The race-fueled story line concerns some white punks who plan a bank heist after they’ve run over a black teenager for sport, and a black gang plotting to rob a neighborhood grocery. The action culminates during the riots, where a key plot development convinces Strange he has to leave the force.

“Hard Revolution,” says Publishers Weekly, “is a brilliant study of a society tearing apart.”

“I’ve been wanting to write this book a long time,” Pelecanos says of “Revolution,” “because I finally figured out that everything I’ve done comes out of that summer of ’68.”

Like the book itself, Pelecanos’ career has had a long gestation. After graduating with a film degree from the University of Maryland, he held down a series of restaurant, warehouse, bartending and retail sales jobs. By the end of the 1980s he was an executive with a small chain of appliance stores but hated what he was doing.

Always interested in writing, he whipped off a crime novel about retail salesmen and their hustles, then sent it cold to a publisher. A year later, after Pelecanos had quit his retail job, the publisher called him, said they’d picked his novel out of the slush pile and wanted to release it. “A Firing Offense” was published in 1992.

From that point, Pelecanos’ rise has been what he calls “a real slow thing. The last few books have hit the bestseller lists, but not on the level of a Grisham or a Clancy. And I don’t think I ever will. My books are not for everybody.”

It’s easy to see why. Pelecanos’ novels are beautifully written and sociologically astute, but the dialogue is profane and the atmosphere too ghetto for some readers (he’s written 12 novels, four featuring Derek Strange). Their subject matter, however, has made Pelecanos a relatively hot property in the film and TV business.

He’s now a writer-producer on the gritty HBO series “The Wire,” which is to Baltimore what Pelecanos’ books are to Washington. And screenwriter David Benioff (“The 25th Hour”) is currently working on an adaptation of “Right as Rain,” which is set to be directed by “L.A. Confidential’s” Curtis Hanson.

“What George brings to the party is the absolute command of these voices in this world,” says David Simon, producer of “The Wire.” “And in his TV writing is this social commitment that I find really compelling. It’s someone who’s looking at the city in practical terms. He has a strong social-political agenda. You can’t read a Pelecanos book and not come away with a strong feeling about what we’ve done in our cities, and what’s been won and what’s been lost.”

There’s no doubt Pelecanos’ novels also work because they’re a vivid depiction of a certain urban reality; a fact reflected in Pelecanos’ tour of Derek Strange’s Washington.

Over here are the Park Morton projects, a rabbit-warren-like haven for working folks and the drug dealers who prey on them, an area Pelecanos used to wander in search of colorful tidbits for his books. “I was trying not to linger too long and just listen,” he says. “But it was dumb. Now I’m usually doing research riding with police or detectives.”

Passing rundown Parkview Elementary School, Pelecanos mentions the bodies often found outside in the morning. “This is the neighborhood I always write about.” Later, in the working class Petworth neighborhood, he points out a well-maintained brick home once owned by his grandfather that he now refers to as “Strange’s house.” And on 9th and Upshur streets N.W., we pass through the block where Pelecanos imagines Strange has his storefront office. It’s a bustling but crumbling little street packed with a Spanish restaurant, funeral home, barbershop and variety store.

“There’s a bunch of small businesses on that street obviously run by African Americans,” says Pelecanos, explaining why he chose this particular stretch as Strange’s neighborhood. “It’s a nice little compact shot of people who are making it in their own small way. It’s important for Strange to be visible there.

“He likes that the kids can see a black man turning the key to his office every morning.”

Pelecanos, who still lives in Silver Spring with his wife and three children, likes this quotidian stuff. Yet he gets at some deeper truths in his own way.

Asked if all crime writers are chasing the tail of the master, Raymond Chandler, he says, “Chandler kind of floated above everybody. He and Marlowe were up here [he raises his hand from the steering wheel], commenting on people down here [a lowering of the hand]. And what I’m doing is, I’m down here too.

“My intention was always to give life to working-class people and explore their lives.”