Stephanie Swilley

Author George P. Pelecanos has created his own niche as the "best kept secret in crime fiction." The critics love him, but after eight gritty urban novels, the Washington, D.C.-based writer has yet to crack the U.S. bestseller lists or achieve instant name recognition. And that's just fine with him.

"I don't think my books are for everybody," the soft-spoken author said when BookPage caught up with him at a recent ClubMed mystery writers conference. "I totally cooperate with everything [my publisher] asks me to do, and I want the book to succeed, but I've stopped having unreal expectations for any of my books. All I want to be able to do is write another book."

Just the kind of answer you might expect from the easygoing author. But with his growing cult following in the U.S., a thriving fan base overseas and plenty of cheerleaders inside the industry, his name might not stay a mystery for long. "He's the best," raves former touring partner Dennis Lehane. Along with Lehane, authors like Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly are heaping praise on Pelecanos' latest book, Right as Rain.

Like all of his previous novels, Rain is set in the working class suburbs of Washington, D.C., a side of the federal city that has nothing to do with politics. The story involves former cop Derek Strange, a Samuel L. Jackson-like character with cool confidence, who now heads his own P.I. firm, Strange Investigations. He's hired to investigate the death of an off-duty black D.C. cop who was gunned down by Terry Quinn, a white cop with the unpleasant combination of a quick temper and a chip on his shoulder. Although Quinn was cleared of any wrongdoing, he's tormented by the thought that race made him pull the trigger. He volunteers to help with Strange's case and the unlikely duo of killer and investigator create a unique partnership.

Pelecanos, a Greek-American, has created plenty of multi-ethnic characters in the past, but here he tackles the race issue head on. The racial tension is always just below the surface in his honest look at prejudice on both sides.

Describing his novel as an "urban western," Pelecanos says the story is based on actual events that were happening in Washington during the time he wrote the book. Several black officers had been shot by other policemen and the majority of those shootings were by white cops. Pelecanos researched the book by riding along on several midnight to dawn shifts to get a sense of their job.

"It's a real interesting shift," he says. "You really see what's going on. All the straights are in bed, and the people who shouldn't be are [the only ones] out there."

He also did what he has always loved — just "get out there and listen to people talk." Which might explain why dialogue comes so easy to him.

"I've been listening all my life," he says. Every summer as a kid in Washington, D.C., he would travel across town on the bus to work for his dad's lunch counter downtown. The various conversations he overheard on the bus fascinated him. "I was always interested in not just what they were saying, but the rhythms of their speech, the slang. Just a love of the language."

There are a few other things that Pelecanos is obsessed with, like basketball, cars, music, movies and ladies shoes. Each obsession has a history, and each of those elements finds its way into Pelecanos' books. He put himself through college selling shoes on straight commission ("the best job I ever had"), describes himself as a movie freak who, as a boy, dreamed of becoming a movie director, and admits he used to own a jacked-up Camaro. To him, the kind of car you drive and the music you listen to say a lot about your character. So can he explain the guy/car phenomenon?

"It's something about having a beer between your legs, the music up loud, a girl beside you," he struggles to explain. "Yeah, my books are for guys, I would say. It's another thing keeping me down," he laughs.

Even if you don't get the car thing, maybe you'll understand the vast and varied music references that punctuate his descriptions. It's been suggested that his books should come with a soundtrack, and it's not a bad idea.

"I do understand that I'm alienating a certain part of the audience that doesn't listen to that music. I don't expect people over the age of 60 — just to pick a random age — to know what I'm talking about," he says. "It's sort of like I can't help myself or something. The things that I write about, the settings I write about, people are listening to music. If you've got a book set in the kitchen of a restaurant, the radio is the most fought over appliance in the restaurant all day long. I know because I worked in plenty of kitchens. When people start talking about what they're listening to or why the other guy's music sucks, you start finding out about their characters."

Pelecanos knows all about blue collar jobs because he has amassed quite a resume over the past 30 years: bartender, truck driver, line cook, valet and don't forget shoe salesman. He was general manager of a $30 million company when he had what he calls an "early mid-life crisis."

"That's when it all fell apart for me," he says. "Because what I thought was going to happen was that I'd buy a company or own my own business, and I didn't want to do that. I just didn't want to get in my car every day and be like everyone else. In a way, you can say it's a personality flaw of a lot of writers — they can't really conform. They question everything, from authority to driving the same route everyday."

Despite the fact that he'd never tried to write anything before, he quit his job and started his first book. He finished the largely autobiographical A Firing Offense a year later.

"You've got to remember, I was just a guy saying, 'I want to write a book.' I didn't have any formal training. I never took a writing class, so I'm sure the people around me that loved me were thinking, 'He's gonna fail.' And how would they know, and how would I know, that I could write a book? I just thought that I could. I just had the idea that I could," he says.

And whether or not Right as Rain is a huge hit, Pelecanos will be content as long as he can keep writing seven days a week and churning out one book a year.

"I'm always one book ahead," he explains. "I can write another book before the next one comes out, and I don't have to worry about what people said about that one. I just put something else in the hopper and keep the cycle going."

It’s 16 down and 10 to go. Sue Grafton is working her way through the alphabet with the mystery series featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone, and this month she follows O is for Outlaw with her latest release, P is for Peril. Coming up with plenty of title possibilities for the letter "P" was not a problem for this prolific author.

" ‘O’ was tricky," Grafton explains, "but when you come to ‘P,’ you’ve got poison, pistol, peril, persecute, prosecute, prison, police, whatever — you can go on and on."

Just don’t ask her what the book is about, because she candidly admits in a phone interview from her home in Louisville, Kentucky (where she was born and raised) that she’s "already forgotten it."

"I’m on to the next one," she says, "and my only survival skill is to delete from my brain anything that doesn’t exactly pertain to the book I’m working on."

More on Q is for . . . to come, but right now we’ll give the rough cut for Peril. At the center of the mystery are Dow and Crystal Purcell, a quintessential California couple: he, elderly and wealthy; she, cute, tanned and curvaceous, not to mention 40-odd years his junior. When Dow goes missing under mysterious and sinister circumstances, Kinsey Millhone is called in to investigate . . . by Dow’s ex-wife, no less.

Grafton’s latest possesses all the humor, charm and attitude that have compelled readers to show their devotion to the feisty P.I. by naming their daughters in her honor. "Originally they were naming their dogs and cats Kinsey, so I think I’m moving up the food chain," she laughs.

Grafton admits she based her character on herself. "Kinsey Millhone is my alter ego," Grafton says. "She is the person I might have been had I not married young and had children, so it is fun that I get to live her life and mine."

For several years, Grafton was living a life neither she nor Kinsey would have wanted. Grafton had moved to Hollywood after college and for 12 years she made her career in TV writing. The only problem was, she hated it.

"I knew I had to get myself out of Hollywood because it just did not fit me at all," she says. So she took the advice of her father, an attorney who wrote mysteries on the side, and started plugging away at A is for Alibi. Five years later, she finished it and four months before it was published, her father died.

"I never got to sit down and ask him about plotting and how to come up with good premises. He was a whiz at it, but we never got to talk shop," Grafton says. And since Grafton is determined not to repeat herself in any of her storylines it would have been nice to have some help on the road to Z is for Zero.

"I thought they’d get easier; I thought after eight or 10 letters I’d get the hang of it. But I am convinced there are 26 things to say about homicide," she says determinedly.

We promised to get back to "Q," and while Grafton won’t give away any plot secrets ("never talk about a work in progress"), she will say that she has chosen Q is for Quarry as the title, "both the sense of rock quarry and in the sense of hunted," she explains.

When he was just out of law school, Brad Meltzer quickly joined the ranks of John Grisham and Scott Turow with his nail-biting debut thriller, The Tenth Justice. Four bestsellers later, he’s still reveling in a job that gives him inside access to the Supreme Court and the White House.

"I love digging around for the details. They are the most fun," Meltzer says from his home in Washington, D.C. "Hollywood lies so much to us that when you take the time to get it right, it becomes amazing." He researched his latest thriller, The Millionaires, for more than two years, but the topics he explores couldn’t be timelier. Crafting a story of two brothers on the run for stealing way more than they intended, Meltzer dove into subjects now on everyone’s mind: how people can change their identity and just disappear, and how the super-rich keep their millions hidden.

"It is so pathetically easy to change your identity in this country that it’s not funny," he says. "I thought it was going to be hard, [requiring] masterful, evil villain thinking, and it’s not. It’s simple. And that’s what’s truly scary." The Millionaires centers on Oliver, a rising young associate at a swank private bank in New York, who discovers that his boss is sabotaging his plans to get into a top MBA school. In a fit of anger, he agrees to his brother Charlie’s plan to steal $3 million from an inactive account about to be turned over to the government. To Charlie and Oliver’s thinking, no one will ever miss the money since the owner is dead. But it turns out quite a few people want the money, and the two boys are soon on the run as they try to figure out who’s chasing them, and how $3 million turned into $313 million.

Meltzer threw himself into his research and in no time learned how to get a fake Social Security number and passport. He discovered the art of garbage reading and the wonders of Nice N Easy hair color to create a new appearance. "Sometimes the dumb things and the easy things are the most effective" when trying to disappear, he says.

Meltzer even hired a private eye to put him under investigation. With just his name, he told the detective to find out everything she could on him. For an author who admits he’s paranoid, the results were scary.

"Within two minutes, she had everything," he says. "She had my Social Security number, my address, my former addresses. She had all of my relatives and my neighbors. She had my phone number, and once she gets your bank info, she can get your credit cards. In no time at all, she had my entire life laid out in front of her." But to Meltzer, The Millionaires is about more than stealing money and finding privacy in a world where everyone can see you.

"It’s about what we dream of as dreamers," he says. "It’s about what you think you want from life and realizing that sometimes it’s OK not to get it."

The journey for Meltzer’s characters inevitably hits close to home. "Every book that I write, I finish it and say, That’s the most personal character I’ve written." Meltzer sees part of himself in the serious, hardworking Oliver who struggles with money and class issues in a world of wealthy entitlement. "Our backgrounds are very similar," he says. "It’s always been the thorn I step on."

At 13, Meltzer was suddenly uprooted from Brooklyn when his father lost his job and did a "do-over of life" by moving the family to Florida with just $1,200. His parents lied about their address so Meltzer could attend the rich kid’s public school, and suddenly he was surrounded by families with more than one car and kids planning to go to college.

"In terms of feeling like you’re the outsider looking in on the rich person’s life, I felt like that was my entire life when we moved to Florida," Meltzer says, adding "That’s what Oliver was based on the kid who wants more."

Now 31, Meltzer still populates his thrillers with young protagonists with grand plans and plenty of idealism. Usually in their 20s, the wannabe lawyers and bankers have their lives all planned out, until, invariably, everything goes wrong.

"It’s just a magic time. I think it’s the best time to write about. And maybe this is just my belief in how power really works," Meltzer says. Meaning that without the "little people" to drive the cars, send the faxes and work the computers, the big shots would be up a creek. "I feel like in some ways I’m forever trapped there in the low part of the totem pole," he admits, "but thankfully so."

Meltzer, like one of his young, eager characters, thought he had his future mapped out. With one year to go before starting law school at Columbia University, he took a job in Boston at Games magazine. And like one of his twisting, turning thrillers, nothing went as planned. The job turned out to be awful, and Meltzer remembers thinking, I have one year and I can either watch a lot of television, or I can try and write a novel. "I know it sounds insane," he says now, "but it just seemed like the most logical thing to me."

Maybe his plan was crazy, because Meltzer eventually received 24 rejection letters for his literary novel Fraternity. But he fell in love with the process of writing and early into his first year of law school, the idea came to him for The Tenth Justice. Being a paranoid person, Meltzer says, writing thrillers came naturally; he had found his niche. The Tenth Justice was so successful that after finishing law school, he devoted himself to writing full-time and never practiced law.

Although he made his mark by writing about lawyers, Meltzer wanted to take a new direction with The Millionaires. "I did not want to forever rely on the big Washington power structure to scare the reader," he says. So he moved the action to New York, left out the lawyers and tinkered with the thriller structure.

"Usually you always know who the villain is and why the character is in danger. And in this book, I said, Let’s know neither of these things. Let’s see what happens when the character doesn’t even know why he’s in trouble, if he can figure his way out of it," Meltzer explains.

He charged into unknown territory, but didn’t lose an ounce of the Meltzer magic. The 482 pages fly by with pulse-pounding suspense, and the unraveling secrets chase you to the end. Joey, the female insurance agent in The Millionaires who’s smarter than both the bad guys and the good guys, sums Meltzer’s style up best: "The best games always keep moving."