You can’t judge a book by its cover, but how about what’s written on it? Since “The Way Home” (2009), George Pelecanos’ jackets have promoted him not as Washington’s premier crime novelist, but as someone who helped make a TV show about Baltimore: He is the award-winning writer/producer of “The Wire.” (The most prestigious trophy on his mantel, arguably, is a shared Edgar for his writing on that show.) The tag makes good business sense, given the show’s commercial and critical success, but it diminishes his status as a novelist in favor of his role as a cog in a collaborative product.
“The Martini Shot,” the bracing and witty novella that closes Pelecanos’ first collection of stories, is a sly consideration of this mud-wrestling match between art and commerce. Its narrator, Victor, is a writer-producer on a cable-TV cop show set in Louisiana, “a state that offered significant tax credits to film productions.” (Pelecanos was a producer on the HBO show “Treme,” set in New Orleans.)
Victor sees his life on the set as a never-ending, soul-wearying parade of moral and creative compromises. Whiny actors agitate to get their lines increased or improved, producers tinker with the show’s integrity to improve ratings, and relationships, like the one Victor pursues with the show’s art director, are hopelessly arbitrary. All of which has made Victor cynical: “The network execs had asked for [a] scene in their script notes to make our show more ‘socially relevant and responsible’ (read: They were hoping for an Emmy nomination).”
What Pelecanos ingeniously understands about this milieu is that it’s perfect for noir: A film set is an in-between state between reality and fantasy, where shady things happen and get resolved outside the usual rules of justice and morality. In this case, the shady thing is the killing of a crew member whose sideline as the on-set pot dealer got him in over his head. That crime yanks Victor out of his ad-hoc existence, but he uses everything he has learned as a professional liar to bring closure to the case. When a pair of detectives show up to interview Victor, Pelecanos renders their exchange as screenplay dialogue, the better to show just how much Victor is fibbing to protect his interests.
“The Martini Shot” is such an inventive study of deception and fakery — one of Pelecanos’ best works, at any length — that you’d be forgiven for skipping straight to it. It has taken Pelecanos nearly two decades to produce enough short stories to fill a slim collection, and on the evidence of the seven other stories, he treats the form more as a sketchbook for ideas than as a destination in itself. “Chosen,” for instance, a lagniappe added to the e-book of “The Cut” (2011), isn’t much more than a background story about Spero Lucas, the Iraq-vet hero of his most recent novels. (It’s not dissimilar, actually, from the “bibles” that TV writers use to define a show’s characters.)
FICTION: CRIME
The Martini Shot: A Novella and Stories
by George Pelecanos ( Little, Brown)
