George Pelecanos’s 'Martini Shot'

The volume’s title, shared by the included novella, refers to a film or TV crew’s last shot of a working day. Not all the stories in this collection have to do with criminal informants, street basketball whizzes, or private eyes, and "The Martini Shot" gives us a glimpse into a world Pelecanos knows pretty well, that of a TV writer/producer — though Vic Ohanion’s show is about to be cancelled, while Pelecanos worked on The Wire, HBO’s critically acclaimed series, with several other writers, including fellow heavy hitters Dennis Lehane and Richard Price.

Vic’s story concerns a number of things: the transience of life and love in the TV business; the formerly and semi-criminal element that typically makes up part of the huge crew needed for TV production; and specifically, what might happen if a TV crime writer armed with a prop gun attempted to stop actual criminals from harming a dead friend’s lover. The quietly effective tale ends in a different place than one might assume from reading only that brief plot description. It might make an interesting film, in fact, albeit a fairly expensive one — and one that would require critical thinking about how to handle the love scenes between Vic and his colleague Annette, which on the printed page are extremely explicit, as in Penthouse letters-explicit.

Underlining, needed and not

The other stories in the volume mostly feature an urban sensibility. People size each other — and themselves — up, on the gritty streets of Washington, DC, but in other locales as well. The results aren’t consistently successful. The weakest narrative in the collection, “Chosen,” focuses on a well-to-do couple who adopt a number of children, two of whom are not the same color as they. Pelecanos crams the entire history of a marriage into fewer than 26 pages and unnecessarily underlines the meaning of that history (men and women evaluate the same experience quite differently).

Sometimes that underlining is needed, however. It works more effectively in “The Confidential Informant,” in which the sad, central character seems so directionless that Pelecanos, in the persona of the character himself, must spell out the meaning of his existence.

Whatever the success of any single story, though, these accounts usually present convincingly complex worlds where simplification might have been tempting. For example, in “String Music,” Sergeant Peters’s point of view is half of a split-POV narrative that involves fellow cops responding to a nasty domestic call in a nasty neighborhood where suspicious neighbors are present. As Peters arrives, someone calls him a “cracker-ass motherfucker,” which he ignores:

Then someone started whistling the theme from the old Andy Griffith Show, you know, the one where he played a small-town sheriff, and everyone started to laugh. Least they didn’t call me Barney Fife. The thing was, when the residents start with the comedy, you know it’s over, that things have gotten under control. So I didn’t mind. Actually, the guy who was whistling, he was pretty good.

Following this, Peters decides he’ll look in on the mother of one of the kids in the neighborhood he deems savable, the other voice in the story.

Pelecanos leaves up in the air whether or not he will be saved.