Saturday, September 3, 2011
Books George Pelecanos, Gregg Hurwitz steal Decatur Book Festival
Posted by Curt Holman @Curt_Holman on Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 5:44 PM
- Little, Brown
- GEORGE PELECANOS. Not pictured: Gregg Hurwitz, Curt Holman, Decatur
This morning at the Decatur Book Festival I moderated an event with Pelecanos and Hurwitz, “The Lengths People Go To.” The festival proposed the theme, which fit Hurwitz’s work better than Pelecanos', so we didn’t stick with it for the entire Q&A.
Hurwitz pointed out that his most recent books all stem from a choice to focus on Everyman characters thrust into terrifying situations comparable to Alfred Hitchcock’s stories of innocent men wrongfully pursued. You may detect a theme in his recent titles — Trust No One, They’re Watching and his latest, You’re Next. I didn’t ask if his next volume would be called There’s a Spider on Your Back!
Pelecanos explained that a big part of his motivation is to capture his hometown of Washington D.C. at different points in time. He said that if readers of the far future were to pick up his books (God willing), he hoped they’d discover accurate, almost journalistic accounts of the life of the city. With all of his settings based on real places, he discussed how he’d “case” actual houses to make breaking-and-entering strategies for his characters. (I wish I'd asked him if he agreed with David Simon's apparent contempt for critics who praise the show's "Dickensian aspect.")
Pelecanos may be most famous for being a screenwriter for HBO’s “The Wire” and “Treme.” I asked why he nearly always does the penultimate episode of David Simon’s shows. He explained that in the first season, they ask him to write the episode building up to a major character’s murder, and it went so well that they had him write other character deaths on each of “The Wire’s” seasons (as well as on “Treme”). He said they’d joke that if the audiences saw Pelecanos’ name on a script, that would signal a characters’ imminent death.
I was able to read both of their new novels before the event, and was pleased to find them both terrific reads. Pelecanos’ The Cut introduces a new protagonist, Spero Lucas, a Iraq war veteran who works as an investigator for defense attorneys and has a side career recovering people’s stolen merchandise for a 40% cut. I asked Pelecanos if this was his bid to reimagine John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee for the early 21st century, and Pelecanos said yes and that the first Travis McGee book, The Deep Blue Goodbye, was the first crime novel he’d ever read. He also wanted to write a book from the point of view of a contemporary war veteran adjusting to civilian life.
Hurwitz’ You’re Next began with the author imagining a scene in which a father drops his son off at a playground and never comes back to pick him up. That became the opening scene in a page-turner about Mike Wingate, who grows from a persecuted foster-home boy to a successful developer of “green” residences. Wingate and his family find themselves inexplicably stalked by hateful thugs, while the police only treat them with suspicion. In a good way, You’re Next reads like a film screenplay: Hurwitz keeps his heroes on the move, regularly building to suspense scenes, and it’s easy to cast the book with A-list actors. Hurwitz also explained that it gave him a chance to explore a male friendship, as he feels that male relationships (with other men) go underserved by male writers than their female counterparts.
Pelecanos said that McNulty was one of his favorite roles on “The Wire” because of his arc on the show. The troubled cop ended up a better man than he was at “The Wire’s” beginning, and Pelecanos always appreciated the positive elements of the often downbeat program. Hurwitz mentioned how fun it is to write famous comic book characters like Wolverine, whom he called “a samurai with swords in his body.” He mentioned that one of his stories depicted a two-bit thug stalked by Wolverine, who has an almost ghostly presence in the story. It makes sense that the authors who single out those characters: Wolverine is the McNulty of the X-Men, and McNulty is the Wolverine of the Wire detail.
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