Dennis Lehane makes a point about class and racial divisions in Miami and Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Ward Rinehart)

…enacting legislation prohibiting bumper stickers on rental cars saying "rental car." Then they changed the signs coming out of Miami airport so everybody knew not to go down on 12th Avenue. That's what they did. The city left that same hellhole there as long as the white people could drive over it. I believe all race warfare is class warfare, and right now the underclass in this country is certainly blacks and Hispanics. How do you keep the underclass down? You ignore them. 

Crescent Blues: There was a time when the Irish were looked upon the same way. 

Dennis Lehane: Into the early 1900s, in the cities, the Irish and the Italians, particularly. You can read documentation, editorials published in major, respectable newspapers, that describe Irish and Italian immigrants -- no matter where you were, Boston, Chicago, or what time, 1910, 1920 -- that describe them as shiftless, lazy, impossible to educate, impossible to socialize and primitive in their religious culture. So gee, what does that sound like? This has been going on for centuries, but we're supposed to be a little evolved beyond that, I hope. 

Crescent Blues: Did you ever experience any discrimination, George, because you are Greek? 

George Pelecanos: Sure. 

Crescent Blues: What type of discrimination? I'm talking about in Washington, D.C. 

George Pelecanos: I don't really want to elevate it to what other people have gone through. It's more subtle. 

Crescent Blues: Sometimes it's the subtle kind that really hurts. 

George Pelecanos: Yeah, I mean, you can't get into people's heads. You will not know what people really think when they see the name ends with an "S." It's there, but not what other people have had to overcome. 

Crescent Blues: Correct me if I'm wrong. It doesn't seem you beat up on people of the upper class in your books. 

Noir writer George Pelecanos addresses violence as a genre theme.  (Photo by Ward Rinehart)

George Pelecanos: They don't rally exist in my books. A friend of mine who taught at Howard called me and said he read Nick's Trip, and "you made us all out to be dishwashers and warehouse guys."  

I said, "Hey, man, read the book." There's no lawyers or doctors in these books of any color." It's just not the world that I write about. It's not that I relegated Blacks to the role of dishwasher, but the book's set in the kitchen. I'm trying to show another side of life. Frankly, I don't know the upper class side. I think the work would suffer if I tried to write anything about a doctor. 

Crescent Blues: Now, Dennis, you've written about upper class people in your books. How have you treated them?  

Dennis Lehane: I think it's a noir tradition. Noir comes out of the underclass; it comes out of the underground. I think there's a tradition: if there's a rich person in your book, an alarm bell should go off to the reader about how much you should trust him or her.  

The alarm bells should go off when the private detective is hired -- period. Whoever hires them, the alarm bells should go off. It's a big tradition in the private eye genre that the person who hires the detective is the last person you trust. What the P.I.'s hired for is never what the P.I. is truly hired for.  

I don't want to be completely pejorative across the board about the wealthy, but, having grown up very working class, I certainly have a mistrust of people who got their money too easily. It's the Balzac line, "Behind every great fortune there's a crime."  

What bothers me is not the crime, it's the hypocrisy afterwards, several generations later, as if this money was bequeathed through hard work, when usually it was a crime. I think wealthy people in my books don't always come off all that great. I don't deal with them too much because, like George, I'm not really comfortable. They tend to be genre images when I write about them, because it's not a world I grew up in, and I don't truly understand it. 

Crescent Blues: How did you come up with Patrick's love of cars? In Prayers for Rain he has to ruin the perpetrator's car. To him it's like desecrating a holy object. 

Dennis Lehane: Well, it is. It's such a beautiful car. 

Crescent Blues: Does it come from your own interest in cars? 

Dennis Lehane: I don't have a particular interest in cars except in a very general sense. I know what I like. I have this weird perspective that I don't like many new things. It's very hard for me even to work with a computer. I'm not built that way. I like old things, and cars come down to -- I haven't seen a car produced in the last 20 years that I think compares to the great cars of the Fifties and Sixties. It's an aesthetic thing, and I think the '68 Shelly is the most beautiful car I've ever seen. So Patrick, by extension, thinks it's the most beautiful car he's ever seen, even though he owns a '63 Porche, which, as I understand, is a very nice-looking car. Patrick's car was a tip to the genre, too. It's like Travis McGee's Busted Flush [the houseboat McGee won in a card game and lived on in Ft. Lauderdale]. 

Crescent Blues: You have the character Angie, who's very much the modern woman detective. Were you influenced by any of the women writers and their characters when you decided to include her in the series? 

Dennis Lehane: No. I always wrote best as a short story writer about women. I wrote about women better than I did men, for whatever reason. This was something I realized. Angie had shown up in several incarnations in previous short stories, so when I introduced Patrick in the first book, in Chapter One, he goes up to his office, opens the door, and there's -- Bang! -- that incarnation who'd been in previous short stories, as his partner. Women, particularly that type of woman, interest me. 

Crescent Blues: Why did you have her married to a wife batterer? 

Dennis Lehane: The book was turned down by several publishers when it went out in manuscript. They all said the same thing -- they would publish it if I took that aspect out, because they found it unrealistic. My agent and I would say consistently, "What planet are they living on?"  

Usually, battered women tend to be on the outside very tough. They're not usually these sweet little Pollyannas. They've been beat around, and that makes them tough, just like an abused child who grows up tough. So I found it an interesting paradox.  

One of the things I underscored in the first book was the inability to do something about violence. Patrick, at the age that he can hurt his father, doesn't, and that haunts him more than anything else in his life. He takes his violence out on the world, but he never took it out on the man who hurt him the most. So that issue became a fascination for me, and it dovetailed nicely into what the book was about -- racism as being almost an institutionalized form of child abuse.  

Crescent Blues: George, your main characters have always been men. Do you think you'll ever have a strong woman character like Angie in any of your books? 

George Pelecanos: I have some strong women in my books, I think, but not as protagonists. 

Crescent Blues: Like the wife of the record store owner in King Suckerman? 

George Pelecanos: Right, she's pretty strong. She's kind of keeping him where he is, where he should be. Maybe I don't have the talent to include a woman's voice throughout the book. I haven't attempted it yet. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. 

Crescent Blues: Do you have any favorite mystery writers and/or sleuths that are women? 

George Pelecanos: I don't know about that specifically, but some of the women writing noir produce some of the best novels out there. For example, I liked In the Cut by Susanna Moore very much. 

Dennis Lehane: Nicole Griffiths wrote a lesbian noir. It's outstanding -- The Blue Place. 

George Pelecanos: Also, S.J. Rozan's a really good writer. I read her pretty religiously whenever she publishes a book. I think women are writing some of the best noir novels out there. It's interesting to see [the genre] from their perspective, too. 

Crescent Blues: In what way? 

George Pelecanos: It's more exotic for me as a male reader, and I get inside their heads. Jim Harrison wrote Dalva, a first-person novel through the eyes of a woman. Harrison's a great writer, but to me it read like a man who just happened to have a woman's name. Although he attributed all these characteristics to her, really it seemed like it was Jim Harrison. 

Dennis Lehane: Martin Amis did the same thing with Night Train.  

Crescent Blues: Dennis, you're teaching a course right now. 

Dennis Lehane: Tufts University. [The course is] American Crime Fiction. 

Crescent Blues: What are you teaching? 

Dennis Lehane: The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley, which I think is the best private eye novel ever written; Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell; Black Dahlia by James Ellroy; King Suckerman. I'm also teaching Bob Franklin's film One False Move and a short story called "Killings." I'm wrapping up with a book that isn't technically noir, Players by Don DeLillo, which I think is a case of post modern genre bending. I wanted them to see how far this thing can be pushed. And I think that book pushes it as far as it can. 

Crescent Blues: What's the age of your students? 

Dennis Lehane: Most of them are 21 or 22. 

Crescent Blues: How are they reacting to these books? 

Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos - Continued