The Martini Shot by George Pelecanos

I’ve been waiting for months for my name to come up on the wait list for the latest from one of my power rotation authors.

“the martini shot”. (n). Hollywood term for the last shot of the day, because the next shot is out of a glass.

For the uninitiated, George Pelecanos is a Washington, DC based mystery writer of 19 previous books, all based in Washington, DC (my home through high school) over different eras in the 20^th century. He is also an Emmy-nominated writer/producer for HBO’s magnificent Baltimore-based The Wire. If you are familiar with IMDB, you know just how persnickety the readers are when it comes to rating movies and television shows. The average viewer rating for The Wire is a whopping 9.4 out of 10. That’s #4 on IMDB’s list of the top 250 TV series (behind Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and The World at War; I know you were wondering). He has written and produced for HBO’s New Orleans-based Treme. This guy delivers the goods . . . consistently.

And I think he graduated from my high school in suburban Maryland. I know his older sister did.

His latest effort contains 7 short stories and a novella. Pelecanos is known for his gritty street stories of crime in DC with nary a mention of the US government. Better than anyone I’ve ever read, he captures the rhythm of the time, the people, and especially, the dialogue. For some, me included, the first taste of his books can be challenging because of the street dialect, language, and the in-the-gutter stories of drugs, crime, and both the humanity and inhumanity that exists in neighborhoods many of us avoid.

And in The Martini Shot, he delivers again . . . a couple of days in the life of a confidential informant . . . the problems between a good playground high school basketball player, with a chance to escape the neighborhood, and some street punks he helped whip in a pick-up game . . . just over the DC line millennials looking for drugs.

But Pelcanos takes us elsewhere, too, well out of his comfort zone that readers expect . . . a sweet tale of a Greek immigrant, his wife, their natural born child, and their three African-American adoptees . . . a Miami-based insurance investigator tracking an insurance scam in Recife, Brazil . . . an off-the-boat Greek immigrant trying to make it in DC between the wars.

The novella that gives the book its title appears to draw from his time working on Treme. It, too, is based in Louisiana (unstated, but seems obvious) on the set of a TV mystery where he gives us a behind the scenes look at the day-to-day, and after hours, goings on of the show.

As I said, every story delivers. And while the locales change and some seem almost cherubic in comparison with his novels, death still lurks. Pelecanos is not one of the mainstream, grocery store rack writers who frequent the couches of the talk shows. Check out some interviews or his readings on YouTube.  Even after watching some, I suspect that some might still be on the sideline, unsure about attempting one of his street-smart novels. If so, this would be a good place to sort of ease in. I suspect that those who choose this as their first Pelecanos title will want to jump right in to his novels.

ECD