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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Bestselling author George Pelecanos explains to Salon what lured him to the mysterious world of "The Wire," and what makes the show different from the formulaic -- and sometimes racist -- offerings on network TV.
Jul 12, 2003 | It still seems like a bit of a mystery to David Simon, the creator of HBO's "The Wire," why George Pelecanos agreed to be a writer for his show this season. "He didn't need the gig," Simon says. "Though I'm certainly glad he said yes."
Pelecanos enjoys a level of success writers dream of. He's virtually guaranteed that what he writes will be published and read, and by lots of people. He has broken out of the bookseller's "thriller" genre ghetto to become a bona fide fiction star, a bestseller critics swoon over. (Salon's Charles Taylor calls Pelecanos' novels the "the sharpest and smartest urban thrillers around," saying "he's also holding up the tradition of novelist as social reporter.")
Yet this latest writing job seems somehow inevitable. Everyone enjoys describing "The Wire" as "novelistic" (including Simon, Pelecanos and many critics) and that's apt, with its layered story lines and characters -- including a steady stream of supporting roles -- so fully formed they seem sprung from a viewer's psyche. The Washington underworld of Pelecanos' fiction is not only geographically close to Simon's Baltimore, but explored similarly; both have heavily researched the urban problems that animate their characters. As a result, Pelecanos' recent novel "Soul Circus" isn't just a face-off between an ex-cop gun dealer and Derek Strange, the African-American private eye who stars in Pelecanos' last three books, it's a searing examination of gun culture. Simon, meanwhile, a former crime journalist, is a social reporter by training, and the cops and drug dealers on "The Wire" dramatize nothing greater than the futility of the war on drugs.
With this season -- which has just passed its halfway point (Episode No. 7 of 12 premiered on Sunday) -- Pelecanos has helped Simon explore a dizzying array of Baltimore dockworkers, the drug-dealing Barksdale family and cops whose motivations can seem as blurry as their Baltimore accents, all revolving around Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), the exiled homicide detective who tries to do good but often makes a mess of things. The results have been mesmerizing.
And Simon is grateful for Pelecanos' contribution. "George doesn't need it. It's cool. And it just makes me feel like I can justify any arrogance now," says Simon. It also gave him the confidence, he says, to lean on Pelecanos to try and recruit the novelist Richard Price, a hero of Simon's, to pen a few episodes next season. They're still leaning, though they did convince Price to appear in a brief cameo as a prison librarian. ("That's what you call homage," Simon says.)
Pelecanos, meanwhile, says he wants to keep writing for "The Wire," fitting the show in between his novels. He spoke to Salon by phone.
Your books are big critical, and now financial, successes. What's the allure of doing TV?
You know, no matter how many books you sell, you never reach the amount of people you do on a television show. And you know, the goal is to be read. If your balls are big enough and you think you're pretty good, you want a lot of people to read you.
But are TV viewers absorbing the writing the same way a reader is? Is it really as gratifying?
Well, I don't think most viewers, when they're watching a television show, are thinking about a writer. What they're saying is, "This is a good show," or "I like that actor." You're not really doing it for your ego. It's a new challenge. And quite frankly, it's pretty cool to see somebody say your words up on screen.
Before your career as a novelist, you wrote and produced a lot of independent films, so this wasn't completely new to you. But, of course, you stopped doing it. What was it about Simon's pitch that made this appealing?
Simon sold it to me as, we're going to be attempting to write a novel for television, and in a way that you can stretch out your characters. Not everything had to be on point, or had to advance the plot.
The other part that appealed to me was his own history, both the books, "The Corner" and "Homicide" [which was adapted into the NBC series] and the television adaptation to "The Corner," which I thought was the best thing I'd ever seen on television. So I knew I wasn't going to get embarrassed. My name now means something, I think. But I didn't get scared at all about that part of it.
