Three Great Novels

Nick Stefanos #1-3

by George P. Pelecanos

A FIRING OFFENSE - Nick Stefanos, an aging salesman for Nutty Nathan's electronics, risks his already shaky position at work to locate the stockboy who has suddenly been declared missing. NICK'S TRIP - An old high-school friend drags Nick Stefanos into a complex and deadly conspiracy involving drugs, theft, intrigue, and murder. DOWN BY THE RIVER WHERE THE DEAD MEN GO - Sleeping off a night of drinking in a public park, Nick Stefanos is awakened by a dull plopping sound and a quiet splash that turn out to be the murder of Calvin Jetter, and the beginning of a grim investigation.

Genres: Crime

640 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

George Pelecanos was born in Washington, D.C., in 1957. He worked as a line cook, dishwasher, bartender, and woman's shoe salesman before publishing his first novel in 1992.

Pelecanos is the author of eighteen novels set in and around Washington, D.C.: A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, Shoedog, Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, The Big Blowdown, King Suckerman, The Sweet Forever, Shame the Devil, Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, Soul Circus, Hard Revolution, Drama City, The Night Gardener, The Turnaround, The Way Home, The Cut, and What It Was. He has been the recipient of the Raymond Chandler award in Italy, the Falcon award in Japan, and the Grand Prix du Roman Noir in France. Hell to Pay and Soul Circus were awarded the 2003 and 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, and the collections Unusual Suspects, Best American Mystery Stories of 1997, Measures of Poison, Best American Mystery Stories of 2002, Men from Boys, and Murder at the Foul Line. He served as editor on the collections D.C. Noir and D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, as well as The Best Mystery Stories of 2008. He is an award-winning essayist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Sight and Sound, Uncut, Mojo, and numerous other publications. Esquire called him "the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world." In Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King wrote that Pelecanos is "perhaps the greatest living American crime writer." Pelecanos would like to note that Mr. King used the qualifier "perhaps."

Pelecanos served as producer on the feature films Caught (Robert M. Young, 1996), Whatever, (Susan Skoog, 1998) and BlackMale (George and Mike Baluzy, 1999), and was the U.S. distributor of John Woo's cult classic, The Killer and Richard Bugajski's Interrogation. Most recently, he was a producer, writer, and story editor for the acclaimed HBO dramatic series, The Wire, winner of the Peabody Award and the AFI Award. He was nominated for an Emmy for his writing on that show. He was a writer and co-producer on the World War II miniseries The Pacific, and is currently at work as an executive producer and writer on David Simon's HBO dramatic series Treme, shot in New Orleans.

Pelecanos lives with his family in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Reviews

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

A FIRING OFFENSE

A Firing Offense A Five Star Title was originally published in 1992 and was Pelecanos’ first published book. It is gathered here by Orion Books Ltd. of London in 2002 as the first book in the Nick Stefanos trilogy. It seems that my collected works is even an autographed copy! I will bet I could sell it for good money on eBay! But I might just keep it on my shelf and let it appreciate over the coming years.

Nick Stefanos is 30 years old as the trilogy begins and is a part of the world of sex, drugs and rock & roll. He might argue with the R&R part since he would consider his musical tastes at a higher level than mere R&R. He knows a lot about music of the 70s and 80s and that is a fun part of the book if you know about the music of that era.

Stafanos is a drunk to boot. I have a hard time imagining how he could get a character reference. But since he is about to go into business for himself as a private investigator, licensed by the District of Columbia, he is not concerned about references. He has a part time job as a bartender to stay close to his beer and bourbon.

I thought A Firing Offense might just turn out to be a trip on the wild side on the eastern shore of North Carolina. It was more than three-quarters of the way through the short novel before a key factor in the story comes into play and the action really heats up. Everything up until then had been, in my opinion, rather ho-hum. Well, sure there was a good deal of violence and drinking and drugs along with a fair helping of sex, but it was ho-hum violence and drinking and drugs and sex. It was not clear to me that there was a point to it all. Maybe that was the point.

A stock boy from an electronics super-store was missing, Nick agreed to try to locate him and he and a friend go off to look. They find a dead guy and a drugged out girl and head back to DC because Nick’s friend has to go to work. So, the dead guy is a sure sign to them that something is up. The real story is packed into the last 40 pages. Sure, a light bulb will pop on occasionally ‘Oh, that’s what was going on back there in the book.’ I guess that is called foreshadowing or red herrings or something. Anyway, I got the idea the Pelecanos might turn out to be a pretty good writer; I have read most of his later books and that gave me a clue as well.

For more background on Pelecanos check out this online.
DC Confidential: George Pelecanos
Article and interview
Nov 21, 2008
http://stopsmilingonline.com/story_de...

NICK’S TRIP

It is probably time to get on with the second book in the trio. Nick’s Tripwas originally published in 1993. It is Pelecanos’ second published book. You will note that my links are leading you to the individual books on GR rather than the collected book Three Great Novels Down By The River A Firing Offense Nick's Trip that I am reading. Most people will read the individual books. I hope they read them in the right order!

I thought that this second book in the trio is much better than the first. I found it to be a page-turner. There was plenty of cocaine snorted in A Firing Offense A Five Star Title but in “Nick’s Trip” the drug frequency is less and the drug of choice was more likely to be marijuana. But there continues to be plenty of beer and bourbon, much of the beer consumed in bars and while driving. In fact, Nick is a bartender in this book as well as a newly licensed DC private investigator. Sex is still pretty common, past and present. And you wouldn’t say Nick has a steady girlfriend. In fact, as a rule there are rarely any women in significant rolls. Sex is about it for the women. Not that Nick doesn’t like women.

Lyla watched me think things over. When I looked up, she was looking into my eyes, and her mouth was open, just a little. I felt something happen between us, but I moved on.
….
After that we sat without speaking. Her homemade tape was playing Richard Thompson’s Gypsy Love Songs. The time went by like that, and the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. I liked her looks, and her honesty, and her intelligence. I liked everything about her.

You see the marks of Pelecanos right off in his books. Pick some of them out here:

The details of those years are unimportant and certainly not unusual. Billy had a ’69 Camaro (the last year that car made any difference) with a 327 under the hood and Hi-Jackers in the rear. There was a Pioneer eight-track mounted under the AM radio and two Superthruster speakers on the rear panel. On weekend nights we drank Schlitz from cans and raced that car up and down University Boulevard and Colesville Road, trolling for girls and parties. On the nights when we got too drunk the cops would pull us over and, in those days, simply tell us to get on home. Our friends enacted roughly the same ritual, and amazingly none of us died.

Only thing missing in that paragraph is the naming of a tune or two that would have played on that eight-track. And this was Nick recalling his life as a teenager. But all of those things are part of the usual milieu in a Pelecanos novel. He loves the ‘70s when he was a teenager himself: the music, the cars, the life in DC.

Other Pelecanos staples are violence and smoking. Nick is never in a bar or home long without a lit cigarette. Pelecanos has nothing to say negative about smoking and only a bit of side criticism about alcohol. It is hard to see how Nick could be functional in real life with the amount of alcohol he consumes. AA doesn’t happen in Pelecanos. Nick stops drinking regularly but only briefly.

It is interesting to note that another human necessity that is rarely in books, going to the bathroom, is relatively common in Pelecanos. With all the drinking the men have to pee regularly. So they do just about wherever they are: side of the road, middle of the street, in front of the bar, in an alley. And then, of course, there are the mandatory bathroom fights that you commonly find in books with drinking. Some bathroom activities are off limits. Women don’t pee and nobody poops, except the occasional man after being fatally shot or scared shitless, so to speak.

Drinking and smoking are rituals in Pelecanos:

I closed my eyes and felt the bourbon numb my lips and gums and the back of my throat. I waited for the warmth to fill my chest and followed it with a deep pull of beer. The beer was cold and good, and a chip of ice slid down the neck and touched my hand as I drank.
…
I shook a cigarette out of Boyle’s pack. Boyle produced a Zippo from his jacket pocket and thumbed open its lid. I leaned toward the flame, hit it, and took a drag that burned deeply into my chest. My smoke found his and drifted up through the misty cones of light that opened out from the lamps above.

Just as an aside, an event that has to be extremely rare in novels is when Nick is asked to father a child for a lesbian friend (Yes, there are homosexuals in Pelecanos.) through known donor artificial insemination. The process of asking Nick and Nick deciding to do it and Nick’s medical evaluation are covered in more than a cursory manner. In this case insemination is sex the “normal” way and not a turkey baster, also covered in more than a cursory way. Yes, as already mentioned, sex happens relatively frequently in this early stage of Pelecanos’ career.

There are also pets in Pelecanos: cats and dogs. A cat for Nick and a dog in later books. Nick almost fatally neglects his one-eyed cat but is very tender with her when she survives. Someone else will have to tell me what that was all about. Is the cat about Nick’s women? Is Nick being a cat person of any significance?

My six word review of “Nick’s Trip” is: Much better than “A Firing Offense”!

DOWN BY THE RIVER WHERE THE DEAD MEN GO

It is time to begin the third and final book of the Nick Stefanos trilogy Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go. Although I am reading this book from the collection Three Great Novels Down By The River A Firing Offense Nick's Trip, I am including this review under the individual book since that is by far the most common way readers will experience this book. This is Pelecanos’ fourth or fifth published book, published in 1995. I thought book one A Firing Offense was a little slow to get to the point with too much violence and drugs. I thought book two Nick’s Trip was a lot better but still plenty of the Pelecanos’ early standards of alcohol and sex and violence. I think his recent books are better written and less graphic than his early work. I do know that Pelecanos can get the adrenaline flowing and make you think at the same time. (It turns out that violence is at its peak in the third book.)

Even with my history of Al Anon, it is still hard for me to label anyone an alcoholic. So I have given Nick Stefanos every benefit of the doubt through the first and second books, way beyond what he deserved. I keep forgetting that the alcoholic can be very functional and pleasant even while drinking. But now I have to say it: Nick is an alcoholic and just barely managed to avoid being a drug addict. If I needed conclusive proof, Pelecanos inserts blackouts (indicated by the single word paragraph “Black”) several times during extreme drinking episodes. It took me a while to register the many hints of alcoholism. It's called denial. Nick is a part of an alcoholic subculture from the first page to the last of this trilogy.

And he hangs out with several others with alcohol problems including one love interest.

Lyla lifted her wineglass. ‘Takes the edge off,’ she said, and had a sip. ‘Yeah, that’ll do it.’
‘I thought you looked a little thick today,’ I said. And I had noticed her hand shaking as she picked up her glass.
She shrugged apologetically. ‘Happy hour stretched to last call. Sorry I didn’t make it over last night.’

One of the things I like about George Pelecanos in his more recent writing is that his stories, while intense and on the edge, are also generally believable to me with less unbelievable action for the sake of action. His earlier work, less so. In Nick’s Trip Nick is about one second away from being killed in an isolated location when someone appears and shoots Nick’s attacker in the back, killing him. Like in the movies, too close to be believable but tense and exciting anyway, real or not. So I guess you have to be willing to suspend disbelief in most murder mysteries. In spite of the presence of plenty of cars, I am pleased to say there are no improbable car chases. But there is a lot of DUI or DWI.

The known donor artificial insemination baby that Nick fathered in “Nick’s Trip” makes a brief appearance by reference but doesn’t seem to have any meaningful role other than to be a small piece of what develops Nick’s character.

Near the register hung a framed photograph of Jackie Kahn, former Athena’s bartender and mother of my child, a boy named Kent, now nine months old.

There is never any suggestion that Nick takes any role in raising Kent who is on the west coast by now. Maybe he will reappear as a teenager or adult in a future Pelecanos novel.

Violence is as graphic as Pelecanos gets in “Down by the River.” One violent series of events goes page after page, fifteen pages of chapters 23 and 24. I often wonder why Pelecanos novels haven’t been made into movies yet. Maybe even our blood soaked movies can’t portray the level of violence onscreen as you will find in these two chapters. Nick can be in mayhem with bodies falling all around him and still walk away with minor damage.

As usual, Pelecanos is notable for his descriptive detail. Sometimes it seems that he can take it to (comic?) extremes: “He hit my dash lighter, slid the cigarette off the top of his ear, and put the filtered end in his mouth.”

He wore a nonvented Italian-cut suit over a powder blue shirt with a white spread collar, and a maroon tie featuring subtle geometrics, gray parallelograms shaded in blue to pick up the blue off the suit.

I assume that Pelecanos writes from real life observations. I wonder where he saw that tie or if he has one like it.

“It’s time for some fucking justice.” Characters invented by Pelecanos often take enforcement of the law into their own hands when they think that the criminal justice system has failed or will fail. In Pelecanos, the morality of the hero is always somewhat blurred.
Decisions have consequences for Nick. But he has his own way of putting it. And his own conscience and guiding light in which he tries “to find a kernel of spirituality before returning to the cold reality” of his day. There is no evidence that he ever finds the kernel.

You know, you don’t always have to work so hard at being cynical around me, Nick. I know that, in your own way, you have a fairly clear idea of what’s right and what’s wrong. Not all the good that gets done in this world gets done in a church or a meeting hall, I realize that.

Guiding lights and basic truths are occasionally spelled out or tried out by Nick and others.

I could have called Boyle back and ended it right then, if I had just called him back, things might not have gone the way they did between Lyla and me, and I never would have met Jack LaDuke. But the thirst for knowledge is like a piece of ass you know you shouldn’t chase; in the end, you chase it just the same.
…
You got this one way of lookin’ at things, like it’s right or it’s not, and nothing in between.
…
I don’t believe in this victimized-society crap. All those people pointing fingers, never pointing at themselves. So people get abused as kids, then spend the rest of their lives blaming their own deficient personalities on something that happened in their childhoods. It’s bullshit, you know it? I mean, everybody’s carrying some kind of baggage, right?

But it seems that it always comes down to what you’ve got.

You got matches? You always got matches, Nick.

Nick’s got a cat.

I had another beer, and another after that. By then, it had gotten pretty late. I thought of my cat, out in the weather, hungry and pacing on the stoop. I dimmed the lights and put on a coat, then locked the place and set the alarm. I went out to the street.

So, for me, it was great that these three stories were all bound into one book. It gave me a chance to get to know Nick Stefanos pretty well and to read the stories in the correct sequence. But like several of Pelecanos’ heroes, I am not sure if I like him. I am glad the world is not filled with people like him who fight fire with fire. We have to hope for better than Nick. The end does not justify the means, does it? Knowing Nick Stefanos is like being schooled in alcoholism. You might have to go to a few Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to decide if Nick is believable.

[Paul Robbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Based around Washington DC, Nick Stefanos, salesman, barman turned private detective get embroiled in the seedy underworld of DC crime. Gritty, desperate and hardhitting, this volume collects the first three novels by George P Pelecanos.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good. Held your interest. Flowed smoothly along.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Stefanos Series by George Pelecanos
A Firing Offence.
Nicks Trip.
Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go.

Well what better way to get your holiday reading
than by getting three novels in one big old book,
in this case the three books of the Stefanos
series by George Pelecanos that when read
together read pretty well as one long old
detective novel where the hero Nick Stefanos
goes from working selling Hi-fi and TV's for
Nutty Nathans in the first book to Private Eye
and Bar Tender of The Spot a low rent Bar in
Washington.
The three books are all fast paced with loads of
action, plenty of Drugs and booze and several
murders to solve with George's typical musical
soundtrack running from The Dream Syndicate and
Lou Reed to the Cure and Camper Van Beethoven and
lots more in between.
The 600 plus pages of the three books flew by and
there are enough twists in all the stories to
make the endings hard to guess but not impossible
to figure out.
All in all three more great George Pelecanos
books that are well worth reading.

[Thomas Arvanitis · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were more things to like than dislike in these mystery books featuring a Greek/American protagonist set in Washington DC. The use of language and the imagery it conveys is one of them. The mysteries were good, but not exceptional and while most of the characters were not clearly defined, you get realistic glimpses that make you think that you are reading about real people. As a Greek, I also liked the (small) Greek aspect of the stories.
The main problem, in my opinion, is that too much of the book(and this is true for each of the novels) is spent describing the bars the main characters go to and the (countless) drinks they have. I found it implausible that people with so much alcohol and drugs in them could function the way these characters can. Plus, the resolution always involved a confrontation/shoot-out that could easily have been avoided, in my opinion, if they just went to the police.

[Molly Broxterman · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was too macho for me at times.