Opera of the streets

George P Pelecanos brings unusual complexity and a vivid sense of place to his genre in Soul Circus, says Mark Lawson
Soul Circus by George P Pelecanos

Soul Circus
by George P Pelecanos
343pp, Orion, £12.99

Though George P Pelecanos has clearly learned about hard-boiled crime fiction from the daddy of the form, Raymond Chandler, he has moved the genre to Washington DC, with three interlinked series of books. Starting out close to his Greek-American roots with stories featuring private eye Nick Stefanos, he later added the pivotal characters Marcus Clay and Derek Strange, a middle-aged black private investigator. Soul Circus is the third case for Strange, though Stefanos also gets a walk-on in a little scene which adds to the sense - always strong in Pelecanos's fiction - of a city and characters that live beyond these pages.

The organising metaphor of the novel is killings, legal and illegal. Strange is seeking evidence that may save a jailed drug lord, Granville Oliver, from lethal injection in the penitentiary. But his search for a witness takes him down into the lawless zone of northeast Washington, where black men are killing one another with a speed and efficiency that would delight the most fanatical klansman.

Pelecanos's plot cleverly parallels these two murder systems - death row, which the US government runs, and northeast Washington, which it has abandoned - so that, in trying to prevent an execution by the state, Strange and his white, spoiled-cop sidekick Terry Quinn are inadvertently responsible for another unlicensed killing on the street.

It seemed that all possible arguments for or against the death penalty had already been rehearsed in fact and fiction, but Pelecanos has found a fresh angle for those opposed in the irony that a black man who somehow manages to avoid death on the streets of the capital might then be finished off by a white judge and jury. Such moral anger and complexity are part of the special quality Pelecanos brings to hard-boiled fiction, but he's also highly efficient in the traditional skills.

This form is dialogue-driven and, even more specifically, anchored in slang. In Soul Circus, drug-dealers selling "chronic" are at risk of being shot with "straws" (illegal weapons) in a "street beef" if they fail to get to their "whips" and drive away in time.

The characters' speech is frequently barbwired with italics, showing exactly where the stress falls; Pelecanos is really hearing the voices. And, fittingly for a novelist who routinely specifies what his protagonists are listening to on the car radio - soul music is described as America's "own opera" - the exchanges often become song-like, as in this three-line chat with its accidental rhyme: "And I drink the bad-dude's brew." "Gonna make beaver-boy happy." "He's gonna get some change back, too."

As with Eminem, who also adopted black rhythms for his own purposes, Pelecanos is at risk of looking like a Wasp actor sooted up to play Othello. But his pastiche patois has been passed by more qualified ears than mine, and it always seems clear in these books that his ventriloquism is cultural realism - a desire to write accurately about Washington - rather than satire.

Occasionally, you do see the writer through the disguise. One of the young black gun-boys reflects that "he knew more about business, instinctively, than those who went to those kind of schools had ivy growing up the walls". In this instance, Pelecanos seems to be steering rather self-consciously around the concept of the Ivy League, and the voice sounds external rather than internal.

Generally, though, he can talk the talk better than most crime novelists. He also has the other crucial ability for this form: to walk the walk. Sense of place is vital to crime fiction, and Pelecanos's chosen locale of Washington - a strange, stateless city where the US supreme court sits within a short distance of police no-go zones - is original territory.

He specifies coordinates with the precision of a military mapper. A car is "parked on MLK, between W and V in Southeast". The drug barons are found in "a duplex on Atlantic Avenue in Washington Heights, near 6th". In that rancid hang-out, gang-members are encouraged to shit and piss in a bath filled with the illicit "chronic". The gangsters gamble that cops will be reluctant to inspect this cesspit. When the drugs need selling, the gang lords let "some young boy with ambition fish out the product". One of many Pelecanos scenes that make you grateful that scratch-and-sniff technology has not yet reached fiction, this sequence is typical of his ability to give readers vivid admittance to places they would never go.

· Mark Lawson's novel Going Out Live is published by Picador.

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