Drama City by George Pelecanos is an absorbing crime novel because it focuses more on intricacies of character than it does on crime itself. Beyond that, it shines a bright light on two protagonists who are in the struggling phase of crime-blemished life where, from the beginning, one senses they may have an opportunity for modest redemption.The lack of strut, the accurate rendering of drug-dealers’ street-wise speech, the way Pelecanos begins the novel focusing on Lorenzo Brown, an animal protection officer, and Rachel Lopez, a probation officer, and only then tumbles into a well-prepared series of violent acts all make this an unusually intimate work of crime fiction, given the hard edges of its genre.In fact, Drama City is about sixty percent literary fiction and forty percent crime fiction. It is set, as I gather is true of most of Pelecanos’s novels, in a city I know well, Washington, D.C., because I have lived here for many decades. Early on in my residency here, I sometimes got lost in the neighborhoods Pelecanos describes. They are two-story, humble, ragged, lifeless-looking places where you would only go if you were temporarily (my case) or permanently (the case of Pelecanos’s cast of characters) lost.I’m long since expert in navigating Washington and know it’s a dual city. There is what I call the federal diamond, which is the northwest sector that hosts The White House and Georgetown and Dupont Circle, and then there are the other three quadrants, northeast, southeast, and southwest. These are not, generally, happy places, with a few exceptions, though Washington has changed dramatically during the last forty years and a process of gentrification, yuppification, and corporate-exploitation can be seen almost everywhere.The real question Drama City poses is not who killed whom or who will be caught and who will get away--although the twists and turns associated with these issues are expertly presented. No, what we want to know is whether Lorenzo is going to hold onto his new fragile self as a modest animal protection officer and whether Rachel is going to emerge from her nighttime bad habits of getting drunk and preying on transients in hotel bars.They each know and associate with bad characters, and there is always the threat that their pasts will catch up with them and bury them. Pelecanos does an excellent job of presenting his obviously intense research into how dogs and cats are treated in Washington, D.C. Nothing sexy about that, but if you like dogs and cats (and I do), you pull for him as he makes his rounds. Similarly, Rachel is portrayed well as a diligent parole officer with a plausible secret self. One thing that ties them together is participation in meetings for substance abusers. Again, Pelecanos fills his canvas with real people struggling against real demons. He makes them sound real, act real, and tell real stories.In many ways this novel could be set in Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Boston. (I’ve lived in all those places, too.) The key dimension, found all over America, in fact, is jurisdictional: my turf for peddling drugs versus yours, the arrangements between overlords, the roles of underlings, and the price paid for encroachment. There’s the world of law, in other words, and the world of coke, meth, heroin, and marijuana. They are parallel, aware of one another and cautious about intersecting. You leave me alone, I leave you alone. But then there are the poor souls trapped in the middle.Back in the seventies my brother took me into a nightmarish neighborhood in Philadelphia. This was a bad place. When we arrived at the address we were seeking, multiple locks were clicked and we were pulled in fast. What a surprise to find a house chock full of the latest, newest everything money could buy, more food than we could eat, liquor than we could drink, and friendliness than we could believe. My brother and I had both attended a boarding school on scholarship, you see, and he’d heard from an African-American coworker that she had a son who was just too bright to be left in the Philadelphia public school system. So my brother nominated him for a scholarship to our alma mater, I seconded the nomination, and the young man successfully graduated.When we left that night, we were watched from the front door by about eight pairs of eyes, making sure we got into our car and out of the neighborhood in safety. Then I’m sure the locks started clicking and the party went on.Pelecanos’s novel is written in this key. There’s some hope in it amidst the struggle.For more of my comments on contemporary writing, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).
The book Drama City is an aberration for George Pelecanos. One of the two main characters is actually a woman! Having a woman as a main player is almost unheard of for Pelecanos. Now we just have to see if there is any character development of Parole Officer Rachel Lopez. And what do you think? Are we going to find out some about her more than her body type and what she drinks! Eureka, yes we are! But, like I say, an aberration. But I’m going to enjoy it while I can. Hello, Rachel, good to know you.The book starts in a familiar neighborhood so we are comfortable in our surroundings immediately. However, there are some new Pelecanos characters in the hood. People particular to this book. Life can be rough in this part of DC but that is to be expected of Pelecanos. He doesn’t hang in nice, middle class neighborhoods. But there are many flashy, expensive cars, nicer than the houses they are parked in front of most of the time. The men work at low pay jobs, if they work at all, but they can still somehow afford those cars and expensive chains around their necks.Drama City features two people in law enforcement, but the kind of law enforcement without a gun. Rachel, as mentioned, is a parole officer. And Lorenzo is a Humane Society officer who breaks up organized dog fights and watches out for mistreated animals. Rachel deals with a lot of troubled people, Lorenzo with a lot of troubled animals.We find mistakes, misunderstandings and murder courtesy of George Pelecanos. Not justice as we might see it, but revenge. But at the end we find some good moralizing and satisfying action. And, as is often the case with Pelecanos, we see someone doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. We understand that people are not all good or all bad but often some of each. The Pelecanos world is a mixed bag. Going up Georgia Avenue, she saw single mothers moving their children along the sidewalks, young girls showing off their bodies, church women, men who went to work each day, men who did nothing at all, studious kids who were going to make it, stoop kids on the edge, kids already in the life, a man smoking a cigarette in the doorway of his barbershop, and the private detective with the big shoulders talking to a white dude on the sidewalk in front of his place, had the sign with the magnifying glass out front. It was a city of masks, the kind Nigel had said hung in theaters. Smiling faces and sad, and all kinds of faces in between. Drama City gets four stars from me just like most Pelecanos books. And I have now read them all as I wait for the new one about to come out. I hope there will be more strong women like Rachel in future Pelecanos books. Strong women deserve a place in metro DC, Mr. Pelecanos. Maybe we’ll find her in The Cut coming out at the end of August? I hope so.
What do You think about Drama City (2005)?
This is another excellent novel from George Pelecanos who demonstrates once again that he knows the seamier side of Washington, D.C. inside and out and can portray it better than anyone else. Even better are the characters who populate this novel--some good, some bad, some still making up their minds, but virtually all of them struggling in one way or another.The main protagonist, Lorenzo Brown, once ran with a rough gang headed by his best boyhood friend. But after serving eight years in prison on a drug charge, Lorenzo is back on the street, determined to stay on the straight and narrow and make a new life for himself. He finds a job as a "dog man," working for the Humane Society, attempting to rescue mistreated dogs.Lorenzo must report periodically to his parole officer, an attractive but troubled woman named Rachel Lopez. By day, Rachel is very conscientious and does her job well. But by night, she drinks too much and picks up strangers in hotel bars for rough sex. Outside of their scheduled sessions, Lorenzo and Rachel also occasionally run into each other at a mid-day meeting of a Narcotics Anonymous chapter.Lorenzo is doing well, content in his humble job and steering clear of his former bad associates, when a simple mistake by a stupid gang banger threatens to set off a conflict between two of D.C.'s major drug lords, one of whom is still Lorenzo's friend. The incident threatens both Lorenzo and Rachel and forces Lorenzo to make an agonizing choice.These characters are beautifully drawn and their story pulls you in from the first page. These are real people in a setting that is totally believable and flawed or not, you can't help but sympathize with virtually all of them. Certainly you won't soon forget them.
—James Thane
A fast read. Be warned though, this book does have some unflinchingly brutal dog-fight passages, and that kind of thing can be a lotta no fun. But luckily Pelecanos takes some satisfying shots at the culture, calling out posers who think of a scary dog as a status symbol, as well as the idiotic ‘90s dog fighting boom, where everyone who wasn’t fighting a pit bull certainly wanted you to think they were. In fact, even though this book was published in 2005, it feels very grounded in the ‘90s, full of that era’s music, sometimes in flashbacks, sometimes not. The main characters are memorable, too. The two major players, slow burning ex-con Lorenzo and Rachel (day and night versions), are both introduced efficiently and effectively, and the author does wonders with Lorenzo early on by having the reader ride along on his thankless day job for the Humane Society, as he works to convince deadbeat dog owners to improve their beasts’ low standard of living. The plight of the canines in the book mirrors the humans, of course (“You can’t save every animal”), and even though the main plot regarding a childhood friend’s drug dealing empire circling the drain and the young, hot-headed psycho all headed for a showdown is well-worn territory, I still stuck around for the finale. As far as the prose, it's suitably rough, slang-ridden, and unpolished but never distracting, although there was that unintentionally hilarious metonymy where the author kept referring to a particular body part as a woman's "sex." But it is a confident book, so much so that you may get the feeling Pelecanos wrote it one-handed. Quickly devoured.
—David Keaton
Lorenzo Brown, dog catcher and ex-con, struggles to keep from falling back into his old ways, while his parole officer, Rachel Lopez, has some problems of her own. What will happen when two drug factions get into a dispute and Brown and Lopez find themselves caught in the crossfire?Drama City is a throwback to George Pelecanos DC Quartet. While it's a crime book, it's also a story of life in Washington, DC. In this case, it's the story of a black man trying not to fall back into a life of dealing drugs and a parole officer trying not to let her life go up in flames due to her addictions to sex and booze.Brown and Lopez are both deeply conflicted characters. It could be that Brown's love of animals and feels toward the young woman and her little girl that he sees every day while walking his dog are all the keeps him from his old life of violence. Lopez has never been in an equal relationship and the idea of one scares her. Brown's friend from his youth, Nigel Johnson, is a fairly powerful drug dealer. After a minor turf dispute with a rival dealer's thugs, things begin building and Lorenzo is pulled in when he breaks up a dog fighting ring. Melvin Lee, one of the thugs he runs across, shares his parole officer.Father figures and growing up without a father play important roles in Drama City. Rico Miller, psychopath that he is, sees Melvin as a father figure, and therein is the source of much of the drama that happens in the story. Nigel Johnson sees himself as a father figure to Michael Butler, and when Michael winds up dead, things quickly escalate.There isn't a lot of action in Drama City. Most of the events are of the emotional sort, but when the violence comes, it is brutal. I love the twist at the end with Nigel and Lorenzo.Most of Pelecanos' books have a cinematic feel but Drama City felt the most like a movie to me so far. Like something that would probably be nominated but not win an Academy Award.As with all Pelecanos books, there are a lot of music references and a fair amount of car talk. Derek Strange and his dog make an uncredited cameo appearance early on. Well, Greco is named but not Strange. One thing I noticed is that Pelecanos doesn't often point out skin color to describe characters so you might not realize someone is or isn't white right away.Like I said earlier, Drama City feels like a throwback to the DC Quartet to me. Four out of five stars.
—Dan Schwent
