Series detective fiction
makes for steady work and a loyal fan base, but it's exciting to see a writer
of particular talent stretch his wings beyond those conventions and try
something new, especially when the new builds so carefully on the strengths of
the old. George Pelecanos made his name with the Nick Stefanos private-eye
novels and other series set in Washington DC. But after a stint on the
production staff of The Wire, he's expanded his scope
beyond signature characters. In a series, readers want to know how familiar
characters will respond to new situations. But in The Night
Gardener
and his latest, The Turnaround, Pelecanos wants to
explore how an explosive event creates characters, and how it will continue to
shape them for years to come.
Set in Pelecanos' familiar
DC environs, The Turnaround introduces Alex Pappas,
the teenage son of a Greek lunch-stand owner, a good kid with unfortunate taste
in friends. One fateful day, Alex is in the back seat when his pals Billy and
Peter decide to drive across the tracks to the black part of town and raise
some hell. But they get stuck in a dead end with three toughs in their
way—one of whom, tired of white boys flinging racial epithets at his mom
while joyriding through the neighborhood, recently got himself a gun.
The first section of the
book ends with a vicious beating and a gunshot. Then Pelecanos picks the story
up decades later; Alex, one eye permanently drooping from his injuries, has
taken over the diner. Raymond, one of the black kids who assaulted the trio,
works at Walter Reed, rehabilitating Iraq veterans. Just as the two make wary
contact, one of the other assailants plots to blackmail the white boys whose
testimony once put him in jail.
The Turnaround tells its stories
masterfully, constricting the characters' lives into a white-hot singularity of
violence, then observing them as they either struggle to break free of its
gravitational pull, or give in to its delineation of their orbit. As he always
does, Pelecanos builds these characters out of tiny, perfectly observed
details: food, geography, basketball, music. The Turnaround isn't an oddity in the
author's stellar career—it's just another intimate, suspenseful, gritty,
hopeful slice of life—but it does indicate that Pelecanos can chart his
own course through the crime genre and beyond.