Tough guy who's soft on the inside Tough guy who's soft on the inside

George Pelecanos used to produce films for the Coen brothers, now he's a thriller writer with attitude. In London to launch his ninth novel The Sweet Forever, he talks to ROGER CLARKE

WHAT'S Greek for hardboiled?

Pelecanos.

George P Pelecanos is the 42-year-old, ex-Coen brothers' producer who these days writes private-dick thrillers set in his native downtown Washington DC.

THIS IS Evening Standard Though he's partly left the film world now, it has returned to haunt him: Puff Daddy has lately secured a deal with Miramax to develop a Seventies-style blaxploita-tion version of Pelecanos's novel King Suckerman, with Puffy starring as a good-hearted Vietnam veteran who crosses swords with a fake white Superfly crook over a sackload of money.

When I met Pelecanos here he had that clean-living cool of someone who had done it all and wasn't going to do it again.

He was promoting his new, cocaine-fuelled sequel to King Suckerman called The Sweet Forever, patiently telling audiences that no, he didn't discover the Coen brothers, he just worked on Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing, and no, he didn't discover John Woo but he did bring him to America when he first got a job at Circle Films (having spent his footloose twenties working in bars and warehouses before achieving the final "I'm outta here" horror of being a successful salesman).

Pelecanos is a DC native born and bred.

He looks fit and exhibits clear, unambiguous mannerisms, as you would expect with a seasoned practitioner of the hardboiled.

He has salt-and-pepper hair and always speaks his complete sentences in a don't-mess-with-me monotone. His eyes fix you like a staple-gun, and he doesn't so much talk sleaze and noir and people getting whacked by hoods as decent common-sense morality and the lack of Greek-American role models. It was a little - how can I say it? - disappointing. He's clearly a good man and a tad earnest. And how hardboiled is he? He's adopted mixed-race children from Brazil, hates guns after a childhood accident, hangs out with cops, is overtly pro- welfare and discreetly pro-gay and won't diss anyone (except the National Rifle Association and its president Charlton Heston).

Interesting rsum for a tough guy: for a hardboiled hombre he can sometimes appear to be soft-boiled. Really, it's all about masculinity, masculinity as strangled by postmodernism and PCism. The honest-to-goodness old-fashioned hard case may have pretty well vanished from Hollywood, but he's apparently alive and well in hardboiled American fiction if Pelecanos is anything to go by, tending bars in dives and generally doing the best he can ("I looked at my beer bottle and saw a thousand more like it on a hundred more dark afternoons," muses the author's alter-ego, private dick turned barkeep Nick Ste-fanos in Nick's Trip).

But - no surprise here these whiskey-hosed tough guys can be soft as watered silk. After all, those Marlboro man writers, the Sam Shepherds and Joe Lansdales of this world, have certainly perfected the finger-to-the-Stetson style of being so masculine it's almost slightly feminine. You can always just imagine them raising a family in some Montana log cabin, the cowboy coffee bubbling on the stove, teaching junior to respect the animals he's shooting.

But for city boys like Pele-canos, the only thing to drink is Jack Daniel's, and the only thing to teach junior is how to avoid the animals that are shooting him. For Pelecanos has a social conscience the size of the murder rate in DC, and he's mightily preoccupied with the indigent youth of his crime-ridden hometown. The nine books he has written since 1989 are full of heel-kicking teens who may or may not get straightened out.

"I'm obsessed with the kid thing," he says. "Sometimes when I'm out with the cops patrolling the Projects, which I do maybe three times a year, there are all these kids out at 3am. And you think: what are they doing? Where are their parents? I can't argue with the curfew returning. Crack-cocaine is going away and heroin is making a comeback, but drugs are just the MacGuffin.

The real issue is poverty. I'm set on gettin' the word out. These kids have been betrayed. The money is there but they spend it on stupid things like the Space Shuttle and cracker-barrel politics."

Not so much Get Shorty as Get Shirty. Especially on the subject of guns.

He's hated them since he accidentally shot a friend in the face with a .38 Special when he was "a dumb kid". The friend survived but his brief love-affair with guns didn't. "What kind of a person wouldn't give up his handgun if it didn't save just one life?" he exclaims, furrowing his brows.

"I just don't get it." And don't mention CharIton Heston. "I don't know why anyone cares what Heston says," he remarks, still in that iron monotone.

"He's just a bad movie actor.

When he goes on about his flintlock pistols belonging to Thomas Jefferson and how he would never give them up, I say well, fine, you can keep your little toys, this isn't about that."

He wants guns off the streets, and drugs, except "pot" which he doesn't consider "a drug". No hardboiled drugs then, only soft-boiled ones. And when he tells me the entirely laudable tale of how he and his wife spent three months in a dusty, one-horse Brazilian town dutifully attending court to adopt their second boy (until one kind soul told them whose palm to grease) and flips open his wallet to show me a picture of his multiracial family, I can't help thinking that despite his liking for "guy stuff" in the movies he's just a big softie. Is he? "I get Greek every now and again," he chuckles.

After all, there's a vacancy for a chronicler of the Greek- American experience, and Pelecanos seems to be the man to do it. With ambitions to direct a film version of his own book The Big Blowdown, based on the lives of Greek immigrants from between the wars, perhaps we'll see something of that close-knit world more familiar to non-US audiences weaned on the Jewish and Italian stories of men like Scorsese and Leone. And if it all fails he can just go back to bartending. "I can still make a mean margarita," he assures me with his best hardboiled smile.

The Sweet Forever is published by Serpent's Tail on Friday, price GBP 9.99.

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.