'The Turnaround: A Novel' by George Pelecanos

A Novel

George Pelecanos

Little, Brown: 294 pp., $24.99

GEORGE PELECANOS' dozen-plus crime novels incorporate a heady brew of soul and rock music, movie-western morals and urban street life. They are also thoughtful examinations of race, ethnicity and manhood -- whether involving a Greek father's drive for revenge against the black man who murdered his son ("Shame the Devil") or the cycle of death and despair perpetrated by gullible, fatherless young men ("Soul Circus," a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner). Those themes are enlivened by not only Pelecanos' exquisitely evoked Washington, D.C., locations and characters, but also his own diverse working life -- bartending, selling shoes and stereos, delivering orders for his father's coffee shop, and more recently, writing and producing for television. "The Turnaround" is, in many ways, the culmination and maturing of these themes and influences, a novel told through the prism of a 1972 incident that had severe consequences some 35 years later.

Alex Pappas is a typical suburban teenager -- interested in girls, music. His anchor to reality is his delivery job at his father's coffee shop, Pappas and Sons, where "[w]ork was what men did. Not gambling or freeloading or screwing off. Work." But Alex is also impressionable and eager to hang out with loudmouthed Billy Cachoris, another Greek American, and lawyer's son Pete Whitten, an arrogant "Protestant white boy among ethnics."

Emboldened by weed, beer and raging hormones, Alex, Billy and Pete decide one night to drive through Heathrow Heights, an all-black, working-class enclave in suburban Montgomery County, Md. As they cruise by some black youths, Billy yells out a racial epithet and Pete hurls a cherry pie out the window. Hoping for a clean getaway, the three instead find themselves at a dead end, forced to turn around and face the young men they slurred.

In the hands of a lesser writer, those black youths would be one-dimensional victims or thugs, but Pelecanos paints a rich portrait of the three and their segregated community. There are brothers James and Raymond Monroe, whose parents keep them on the straight and narrow and lovingly maintain their modest home. James works as a mechanic at a white-owned service station, a first job that allows him to demonstrate the pride he feels in himself while countering the anger he feels at the slurs his mother endures from bigoted whites. Raymond idolizes his older brother but is equally swayed by the young men on the streets, most notably Charles Baker, a belligerent trash talker whose job seems to be drinking beer in front of a neighborhood market.