D.C. Confidential

Image credit: Hell to Pay Photograph by Anthony Verde

The release of ''The Big Blowdown'' in 1996 was the turning point. Set in Chinatown in the postwar 1940s and the first in a series known as the DC Quartet -- a James Ellroy-derived label that Pelecanos dislikes -- the novel followed the struggles of Greek immigrants and their bloody clashes with the Mob. ''It was a very conscious effort to swing for the bleachers,'' he says over coffee in his Silver Spring home. Suddenly it became cool to know George Pelecanos. The three books that followed -- each taking place during a different period in contemporary Washington history and marked just as much by hard-bitten dialogue and explosive violence -- played to a steadily growing audience.

''The thing I like about his writing is that it's true noir. It's concerned with people who live outside the margins,'' says Lehane. ''Take 'The Sweet Forever'.... That book was a more precise evocation of what was going on in cities in the 1980s than 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' could ever hope to be. I remember thinking: Why the f--- isn't anyone else writing this?''

Money started rolling in. Sean ''P. Diddy'' Combs optioned the second book in the series -- ''King Suckerman'' -- and Michael Imperioli (''The Sopranos'') helped write the screenplay. (The property was recently returned to him by Dimension Films.) Suddenly, Pelecanos was getting Hollywood offers; he's just completed uncredited writing work on ''Paid in Full,'' a drama produced by Jay-Z, and is finishing a movie about the American Basketball Association for HBO Films.

Now, he's facing the mainstream. ''After Springsteen wrote 'Born to Run' he lost his old fans,'' Pelecanos says. ''But to stay in this game, you got to make the publishers happy.... All I want to do is shine a light on the working-class people of this city.... The racial divide here is in your face. And that interests me, because I have three mixed-race kids. I worry about them. And I don't like the way the country is heading.''

He swirls the dregs of his coffee and looks around his warm, cluttered house.

''In the neighborhood that you just went through, kids walk through dangerous blocks to go to lousy schools and come home at night to single-parent houses. They go to bed hungry. And it's not right, man.'' He pauses for breath. ''And hell, if I can work it into my books? So much the better.''