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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Someone, maybe me, should publish a Hollywood-homes-of-the-stars-type map of America's premier crime novelists, complete with oval-shaped portraits of the authors displayed above the areas they chronicle. James Ellroy and Walter Mosley would preside over Los Angeles. Jon A. Jackson would occupy Detroit. Miami would be crowded, with James W. Hall, Carl Hiaasen, Edna Buchanan, and perhaps even a small black-and-white of Charles Willeford, for old times' sake. And somewhere over Washington, D.C., there would be a large picture of George P. Pelecanos.
"Hell to Pay" (Little, Brown; $24.95) is his tenth crime novel in the past decade, and, like the rest, it's set in and around the District. But Pelecanos's Washington has little to do with murder on the Mall or dirty deeds in Foggy Bottom. It is a rough patch of urban real estate populated by guttersnipes, snitches, dealers, and rapists -- and by plenty of decent and hardworking citizens who have to stand by and watch as their neighborhoods go to hell.
Most of those citizens are African-American, like most of Washington. Many others are Greek-American, like Pelecanos. In the first phase of Pelecanos's career, back in the early nineties, the Greek community dominated his books; the early novels focussed on a young Greek-American detective named Nick Stefanos, who attempted to solve small-time crimes as he coped with alcoholism and...
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