George Pelecanos always intended to return to Derek Strange, the private investigator at the heart of five novels he wrote between 2001 and 2012.
But since the last one, “Right as Rain,” Pelecanos has been a bit busy: There have been two other crime novels, short stories, a collection of novellas and even a piece about a dog named Buster.
And, then, of course, there’s his TV career: Pelecanos was brought on by David Simon as a writer on “The Wire,” and after that landmark series and Simon’s “Treme,” Pelecanos became a partner, co-creating both “The Deuce” and “We Own This City” with Simon.
But now, Pelecanos is back with his first novel in eight years, and it features the detective Strange, now in his 70s, but still a fixture in his Washington, D.C. community.
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In “The Blue Flame,” Strange gets hired by a shady lawyer to help find evidence to acquit a low-level dealer who has been accused of murdering one of his oldest friends.
Strange puts in the work, with some help from his younger, extremely capable colleague, Grace Lopez, but he makes a misstep that haunts him and draws him in deeper. The book is vintage Pelecanos, a slow burn that focuses on character as much as action, with one of the main characters being his hometown of Washington.
Pelecanos recently spoke by video from D.C. about the book and writing in general. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What brought you back to writing a novel after so many years?
I’ve been doing a lot of television, and that entails not just production, but pitching and writing things and waiting around to get notes. I have to be really focused when I write a novel. I write two shifts a day, seven days a week, and I need to be in that creative tunnel to do it properly.
I’ve worked on a lot of shows, but my IMDb page doesn’t speak to how many don’t get made even if I worked on them for a long time. In 2024, I spent the better part of a year working on a television project that fell apart. I got myself embedded with the Homicide Division in D.C. I went to murder trials, rode with detectives, watched them interview subjects.
Then it fell apart. You can’t brood about this because it’s the nature of the business, but it can be soul-crushing doing this work and no one ever sees it. So I just really didn’t want to do television or movies for a while. I wanted to use what I dug up that I knew would get published, so rather than get blue, I started writing this book.
In fact, last year I did something that I’ve never done before. I wrote two novels.
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The next one’s coming out a year from now. It’s called “Tell Chuck Berry the News,” which is a reference from a Mott the Hoople song that’s referencing “Roll Over Beethoven,” saying we’re the new generation. That book starts in the ’70s with these kids. You meet them coming back from a Led Zeppelin concert at the Baltimore Civic Center, and then you follow their lives all the way into when they’re 70 years old. It’s a big, sprawling novel.
But it was always my intention to come back to Derek Strange. I really liked the character and always wanted to describe his life from childhood to nearing the end. In “Hard Revolution,” you meet him when he’s 12 years old, and now he’s well into his 70s. I think I’ve left him in a good place at the end of this, even though the book is kind of tragic for a lot of the characters.
Q. How conscious are you of aging alongside him?
I’m not so bad yet. I’m close to ten years younger than him. But I definitely relate to what he’s going through. He’s still physically robust, relatively speaking, but he’s lost a step mentally, and he makes mistakes in this book.
The narrator never says he made a mistake, but you see it and you know, and it has significant implications for the other characters in the novel. So I do address aging in an oblique way. I don’t judge him from the outside. I feel like I’m walking around in his body and in his head.
Q. Has his worldview changed as he has gotten older? Has yours?
There aren’t many good things about getting older, but one is that you have more wisdom. And he’s not a cynic at all, but he and I concur on one thing – don’t delude yourself that there’s anything such as closure in these situations. He’s not trying to uncover the source of these murders to give anybody closure, because he doesn’t believe in it. And neither do I. Many writers say, “I set the world back up upright at the end of the book so my readers will feel good about things.” It’s comfort food so they give closure.
I don’t think the homicide detectives believe in closure, either. They want to do a good job, and they want to make an arrest. That’s it.
Q. There are some great secondary characters, Grace Lopez and the homicide cops like Angela Marinelli and Claudine Brown. Do they have a future?
Marinelli and her squad take up a lot of real estate in the book – I didn’t know they were going to because I don’t outline, but as I was writing her I started liking her and the cops she works with. I could see another book with just them.
And I’ve met women like Grace who were in the National Guard in the Middle East wars. Right now there’s an anti-woman bias in the military, but these women fought fiercely and didn’t get a lot of credit. So I wanted to get that in there. I’d gladly spend more time with her, too.
Over 24 novels set in Washington, I’ve created this fictional town that’s very real to me, and these characters are still walking through it even if it’s not their book.
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Q. The city is always a major character. How has it changed since the earlier Strange novels?
When I was growing up, the city was 75% Black and now it’s less than 50% Black, but to me, it will always be a Black city in terms of culture.
The earlier books reflected the violent nature of the city at the time. What I want to be clear about in this book is that while there are murders, it’s not a violent town like it was.
That’s especially important because of the lies being told about Washington, that it’s some kind of hellhole. In reality, homicides are less than half than they were in the early ’90s, and street robberies and carjackings are way down. There’s crime here like in any city, but it’s a lie that this city is violent. People should know that they can come here and enjoy it. It’s a beautiful town, and you’ll be welcomed.