by Zoë Pollock
Weston Cutter interviews crime fiction writer George Pelecanos about whether his work is "dark":
I’m saying, I believe that it’s a long life, and we have the capacity to change. … I’ve been in trouble myself. Among the many knucklehead moves I’ve made, I shot someone when I was a teenager, and if people had given up on me, I wouldn’t have come through to the other side. So the redemption thing in my books is more than a plot device. It’s me.
Michael Bourne reviews Pelecanos' newest, The Cut:
For as long as I’ve been reading him, Pelecanos has been principally concerned with two issues, race as it is lived in Washington DC, and manhood as it is lived by working-class guys in DC and the world over. The first of these themes is overt, and in his earlier books Pelecanos tended to run at the mouth a bit, letting his plots and his characters get preachy on the myriad ways black and white people find to be evil to one another. The second of these themes strikes me as entirely unwilled, Pelecanos’ obsession with what it means to be a good man spilling out of him as naturally, and nearly as copiously, as his music and pulp fiction references and his encyclopedic knowledge of DC’s neighborhoods.
The Dish 