A Man Must Have a Code: Yesterday, local crime author George Pelecanos held an "IAmA" live chat on Reddit, where he fielded queries from fans for a while. Mostly, they want to know about his days writing for The Wire, as well as his current gig writing for Treme, though he also explains the inspiration behind his latest book: "What It Was is based on a real-life guy, Cadillac Smith, who went on a crime spree in the summer of '72 in D.C., when Watergate broke. Police and the Mob were involved in trying to bring him down. I took the seeds of his story, called him Red 'Fury' Jones, fictionalized the details, and threw Derek Strange and Frank Vaughn into the mix."

Acquisitions Corner: The National Gallery of Art has acquired an 1848 painting, "Still Life With Fruit and Nuts," by Robert Seldon Duncanson, reports The Style Blog. Duncanson is believed to be the first African-American artist "to receive international acclaim," Style Blog reports, and the work is one of less than a dozen still-lifes the artist made. It goes on permanent display beginning today. According to The New York Times, the seller is a private collector.

Today on Arts Desk: When go-go meets Bhangra.

What It Was

But go ahead and shell out: The book (Little, Brown; 256 pps.) is as smart, cooly efficient, and streetwise as any of Pelecanos’ best recent novels. Still, it’s an unusual entry in his oeuvre. Pelecanos’ previous book, The Cut, was promoted as a fresh start with a brand-new hero, Iraq War vet Spero Lucas, who navigates a revitalized, gentrifying D.C. that’s done reckoning with the ’68 riots and the crack years. When Spero takes a date to Busboys & Poets on 14th and V streets NW, he sees “all sorts of faces and types, the D.C. most folks had wanted for a long time.” Early in the book, Spero walks past the offices of investigator Derek Strange, the hero of four Pelecanos novels, and the scene seems to imply that the author himself was moving on. But here Strange is again, starring in What It Was, which is set in 1972.

So which direction does Pelecanos want to go in? He hasn’t written a book fully set in the ’70s since his 1997 breakthrough, King Suckerman. Since his 2005 novel, Drama City, he’s been committed to writing about the District as it’s lived in now; the past, when it appears, takes the form of cinematic flashback revealing some old mistake that requires correction. But read The Cut and What It Was alongside each other and it’s clear they actually both go the same way, despite the four-decade distance between their settings. The two novels represent a Pelecanos who’s increasingly optimistic about the District; he’s still fully aware of the city’s flaws, but he’s more interested in sorting out what kind of maturity (and manliness) is necessary to overcome it.

If “optimism” seems like an odd word to attach to a noirish writer, consider What It Was’ bad guy. The novel’s plot turns on Red “Fury” Jones, who spends the summer of ’72 on a crime spree, brazenly broadcasting his status in a nickname-inspiring red and white Plymouth Fury with his girlfriend’s name, Coco, stamped on the vanity plates. Working to nab him are Strange, an ex-cop who left the force after the riots, and his former MPD partner, Frank Vaughn. Without Red there’s no gunplay, but his vibe is more that of a folk hero than a civic menace. When Pelecanos enters Red’s mind, he finds a man who’s built himself up into blaxploitation film hero, complete with a “wacka-wacka-wacka-wak” soundtrack: “Jones could hear music and the lyrics, which went, ‘Red Fury, he’s the man/Try and stop him if you can.’”

As portraits of evil go, this won’t exactly make your blood run cold; inside the mind of every badass killer, apparently, is a shitty lyricist just aching to break free. Accenting Red’s narcissism instead of his brutality gives the novel a softer focus, and even the good guys think of him with an attitude not unlike tenderness. As they head to Burrville for their climactic confrontation with Red, Vaughn tells Strange that, if nothing else, Red’s motives have a certain logic: “The clock ticks. You get toward the finish line, you realize that what’s important is the name you leave behind. Red Jones gets it.”

Set that depiction of crime and pop culture in the ’70s against King Suckerman’s, and you can see how much Pelecanos’ style and attitude have changed in the past decade and a half. The somber tone of that earlier novel is set by the fake blaxploitation film of its title, about a pimp whose fearsomeness (“one stone ugly motherfucker”) has none of Red’s funk and assertiveness. The end of the film in particular is pure bummer:

The last shot of the movie had King Suckerman in his cell, wasting away from tertiary syphilis. The camera zoomed into his eyes, the hollow eyes of any scared old man lying alone in the terminal ward, waiting for death. A freeze-frame appeared then, and a slower, bluesier version of the title song ran over the end credits. By then most of the patrons had walked out of the auditorium without comment.

Pelecanos doesn’t write like that anymore, in a number of ways. That passage’s level of description is almost Proustian compared to the hard-nosed, lean sentences of What It Was and The Cut. King Suckerman’s D.C. is also grimmer, more bongheaded, and more prone to youthful stupidity. Dimitri Karras, Suckerman’s hero, is an aimless 20-something small-time dealer whose understanding of the District is largely circumscribed by WHFS and whose lack of ambition leaves him with plenty of time on his hands.

And now? The clock ticks. Pelecanos couldn’t abide a hero so lacking in the having-together of shit: He signaled that in 2008’s The Turnaround, about a middle-aged man who was paying the price for an act of youthful, race-baiting lunkheadedness as a teen in 1972, the same year in which What It Was is set. The Cut’s Spero Lucas is young, but he has a steely concentration on his job and complete impatience with wasted conversation. “I’m not gonna sit around and have drinks with people who are, you know, ironic,” he tells his date.

War is the great irony-killer for Pelecanos—that ticking clock has been much more prominent in his fiction since the Iraq war began. Spero Lucas’ Iraq stint gives him discipline but also makes him an outsider in the District; at one point he heads to an American Legion hall “to be around people who understood.” There’s a similarly empathetic moment in What It Was, as Strange talks to a Vietnam vet who witnessed one of Red Jones’ murders: “This wasn’t any street person, or drunk, or junkie. The man was a veteran who’d been in it and come out torn on the other side.”

That emphasis on upright manliness—making it through war, making a living, doing what you can to be a decent citizen—makes the bad guys seem a little less relevant to the story, even a bit cartoonish. About a third of the way through What It Was, a pair of Italian mafia thugs drives in from New York, determined to recover some missing drug money. In Pelecanos novels, out-of-towners might as well be wearing sandwich boards reading, “I am a symbol of ignorance and hubris,” but rarely have they appeared as clownlike as they do here. As they settle into a hotel to exchange racist and misogynistic banter, Pelecanos openly mocks them, observing that the room became “heavy with smoke and the sound of their thoughtful conversation.”

All of which makes What It Was feel less intense than Pelecanos’ recent novels, more of a joyride than a work of two-fisted realism. Indeed, the whole story is run through a nostalgic filter, bookended by scenes in the present day where an aging Strange describes the Red Fury legend to an aging Nick Stefanos, another old-school Pelecanos hero. For Strange, D.C. in the pre-crack ’70s is a place where he can feel upbeat, an improvement over the “rough old ghetto” he knew in 1968: He’s living in a “thrilling, glorious time,” and feels “young and in the midst of something, a music, dress, and cultural revolution that was happening with his people, in his time.”

“Just a story,” Strange tells Stefanos at the end of the novel, as if he hadn’t just delivered a raft of moral messages. Strange’s heroism in 1972 comes from his belief that the most appropriate attitude to have about the past is that you move past it; old-school cops like Vaughn, he observes, “were about to be extinct.” Race is still Problem A in the District: Strange pokes some fun at white guilt, and the District’s black residents talk to Strange, a black ex-cop, differently than they do the white Vaughn. But the novel frames the District as a place where the getting-along work on race is happening and thought about. Even Vaughn is smart enough to know that movies like Buck and the Preacher are simplistic about race, “where all the black guys were heroes and studs and the whites were racists, trashmen, or queers.”

In some places Pelecanos’ cynicism remains harder to shake: In both novels somebody cracks wise about how awful the Redskins’ owner is, and, as ever, he reminds us that the Post gives postage-stamp coverage to murders of young blacks in the District. Far Northeast in What It Was is filled with “unhealthy food establishments” and usurious retailers, while in The Cut it’s filled with “the kind of place that kept folks unhealthy, broke, and low.”

Those persistent problems, though, don’t make nearly as much noise as two young heroes’ efforts to transcend them. In the new District, be it the one circa 1972 or circa 2012, Pelecanos’ best advice is to live in the moment and get to work.

The organizers of the National Book Festival, now in its 11th year, know how to draw a crowd early. The fest has typically slated the biggest names for the opening slots, and on Saturday tents filled at 10 a.m. for PBS anchor/novelist Jim Lehrer, longtime Post columnist Eugene Robinson, and Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison, who took part in a spirited discussion with critic Michael Dirda before an overflow crowd. Asked whether she had ever taught her own work to students, she laughed, aghast. "[Teaching my work] defeats the whole purpose of being a critical reader," she said. "I'd be saying, 'No, I'm right, and you're wrong.'" (That got a big laugh. The picture above shows Morrison after the session, the golf cart ferrying her to the signing tent slowed by surrounding fans.)

Morrison's comment is representative of a particular kind of noise that authors often make when they're in a public forum like the National Book Festival. Writers are supposed to project a cultivated modesty regarding their work when they talk about it—they don't foist it on students, don't say the work is easy, and don't make it all about them. Russell Banks quoted one of his early mentors, Nelson Algren, who told him, "A writer who knows what he's doing doesn't know very much." Rightfully much-decorated novelist Jennifer Egan shared a few war stories about writing her awful first novel ("I literally couldn't save a word") and eagerly getting out of her own environment to write. "The worst advice I ever got was, 'Write what you know,'" she said. "I don't like to write about myself or the people I know." Before reading a few pages from his novel in progress, Dave Eggers mentioned it was only the second time he'd read it in public. "It won't sound very polished, but we're in a tent," he quipped.

The syndrome isn't unique to novelists. Asked how she decides what to write books about, Sarah Vowell smirkingly responded, "First the idea has to sound terrible." Longtime Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, discussing his book on rereading, Second Reading, copped to his own early ineptitude; his first assignment as a reviewer was Saul Bellow's Herzog, "which of course I didn't understand a word of."

That's not to say that the collective modesty was false, or that the authors were engaged in literary humblebragging. But there was a dearth of writers eager to talk a lot about themselves—among the various genres represented across the fest's six tents, memoir was absent. (Another overflow crowd showed up at the Contemporary Life tent for Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but that book is a memoir of the most pragmatic sort, praising tough parenting instead of mining a rough childhood for humor or pathos.) So it was refreshing to see Baltimore crime writer Laura Lippman deliver a no-nonsense, assured talk about her writing process that was free of self-effacing gestures. She recalled a writer's conference where she was left fuming at a Famous Author who delivered awful advice, and how she bore down at that moment to come up with the idea for her next book. Waiting for one's muse to show up? Nuts to that. "If I waited for my muse to show up, I don't think I would've finished my first novel."

Questions for Lippman inevitably turned a couple of times to her husband, journalist and TV writer-producer David Simon. Asked which Baltimore writers' work she admired—besides him, of course—she joked, "You're presuming I like my husband's?" Well, she must: She later mentioned that she's collaborating with him and D.C. crime novelist George Pelecanos on a project that she's not yet at liberty to discuss, but which is "not anything you can possibly imagine."

Readers of a less writerly bent will likely experience a similar "jacking up": Carpenter's terse, overtly masculine prose, precise vernacular, and above all the unsentimental yearners who populate his book constitute a plausible, troubling world—one from which it's hard to emerge without a bit of a head rush. The novel follows Jack Levitt, an orphan who bounces around the Pacific Northwest—between an orphanage, pool halls, reform school, dank hotels, and prisons—before marrying and siring an heir in San Francisco. It's a volume fairly dripping with testosterone—the women get a fair shake, sure, but exclusively through the eyes of the men who sympathize, or try to; not for nothing is the book's most intense relationship between Jack and Billy Lancing, a light-skinned black pool prodigy from Seattle who rematerializes next to Jack in San Quentin.

Without relying on the "postwar" handle, it's fair to say the book is structured as a noir cogitation on escaping the system—and it's also a more sophisticated man vs. authority narrative than Cuckoo's Nest. Carpenter's stronger in the pool-hall/prison grit milieu than in the stumbling-towards-family passages, though in each case the narrative boils down to Jack's earnest struggle and chronic inability to buy into an inherited schema—whether he's down and out or marrying up. The author reserves his deftest portraiture for dissolute vagrants and the idle rich, both sets wrestling with the same period listlessness, the same incompatibility whereby their raw desire outstrips all potential targets: Money, sex, adventure, family—none of these are commensurate with the gaping, wordless need of each individual.

I spoke with Edwin Frank, editor of the NYRB classics series, to discuss his decision to reissue the novel.

How'd you settle on reissuing Hard Rain among this year's selections?

EF: I'd been hearing about it for some years, and at a certain point it reached a kind of critical mass. I knew Jonathan Lethem was a big fan, and then Richard Price got in touch [about a year ago] saying he just thought it was a great book. Turns out he had heard about it from Pelecanos. It's a remarkable book, and it seemed to make sense.

What sold you on it?

EF: It's just remarkable on a sentence-by-scene level—you take the first sentence of the book about the motorcycles, you're already pulled in. And there are so many stories going on in the book. The scenes are vivid, the prison reformatory scenes especially—extraordinarily vivid scenes. And there's a kind of reach and ambition of trying to cover every base. One of the appealing things is it's a book about the trials and tribulations of manhood. People don't write about that any more. In its day it wasn't an unusual subject—think Mailer—but I think another issue there...there's a certain kind of macho writing that became unpopular. And this book is interesting partly because it deals with homosexuality, something that was ruled out in the old manhood stuff.

The Times' obit described Carpenter as "a novelist and sometime screenwriter whose unflinching examinations of disheveled lives won more critical acclaim than popular favor." Which is, obviously, true. Why do people tend to gloss over Carpenter when discussing, say, writers like Nelson Algren?

EF: I don't really know enough about his career to say. The fact is that a lot of good writers don't—he was writing, living around San Francisco, which was not—you know, there's a certain tyranny to New York.

How long had it been out of print?

EF: I think since the early '80s. I think it was available from Playboy Press in a kind of mass-market paperback edition. I'm pretty sure that was the last time it was available.

How did Pelecanos get involved?

EF: Richard Price told us that Pelecanos had told him about the book—I think I knew already, Pelecanos had written about it as a book that he thought was unjustly neglected and he thought was great.

When making selections for the NYRB Classics series, how much emphasis do you put on profit and how much on posterity? 'Cuz this is a book that ought to be read...but it's not going to sell a million units.

EF: Right. We have the basic mission—which is not, I hope, incompatible with financial viability—to get books that are good books. They should be good books that also are news now. There are a lot of good books that people want back in print, and I know it's a worthy book, one that posterity should know about, but there's not any obvious way that, apart from the people who already value the book, it'll get a new audience. So I tend to think that these books not only have proven themselves, but can also get a new audience.

"News now"—that's interesting. What makes Hard Rain news now?

EF: Well, it speaks very interestingly of the pathologies of being a man, and an American man in particular. It's a subject of interest to at least half of the population. And I think it does it in an unusual way. There's also another thing going on, complementary to the first: I think people are interested in thinking about the different kinds of things novels can do. So there's a little bit of looking back and just seeing the lay of the land and all these interesting exceptional things put out in the past as opposed to the latest greatest books.

Photograph of Don Carpenter courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

As previously reported here, the latest issue of the Chicago-based cultural magazine Stop Smiling is all about D.C., with Backyard Band's Anwan Glover featured on the cover. The D.C. release party for the issue on Nov. 13 has a pretty impressive lineup: Glover and George Pelecanos are guests of honor, with DJs Ian Svenonius and Kevin Coombe spinning.

Info: Nov. 13, 7-10 p.m., Civilian Art Projects, 706 7th St. NW. $5 donation requested (included copy of the magazine). RSVP to rsvp@stopsmilingonline.com.