by JULIET WATERS

George Pelecanos has never seen the commercial success of other urban noir writers like Michael Connelly, for instance, but few genre writers match him for compelling, intelligent, soulful page-turners.

An Emmy-winning writer on HBO’s The Wire, Pelecanos is like a symphony conductor of urban anxiety. His meandering, meditative latest, The Night Gardener, steers the standard police procedural into a territory better described as the police sociological.

Pelecanos uses the cold case plot to create a carefully crafted social history of inner-city Baltimore and problems that are far too deep to be solved with better ballistics or DNA testing. Between the lines of this murder mystery, Pelecanos presents another case: the one against the war on drugs that has, over the course of 20 years, eroded neighbourhoods, communities and faith in the legal system. In doing that, it has severely reduced the competence of the police and created a level of apathy and entrenched cynicism that is now burying these neighbourhoods.

Though Pelecanos shifts the focus of the genre, he’s not one to abandon the basics. The Night Gardener opens with a body, not in a room, but in an inner-city community garden. The year is 1985 and the crime, which will remain unsolved for 20 years, is a stark metaphor for the decay and heartbreak that will violate this neighbourhood in the decades to come.

The victim is a teenage girl, the third of a serial killer who has dressed her in new clothes and dumped her in the garden, where a recent rain has washed away any evidence. The sergeant in charge, T.C. Cook, will develop a strong hunch for who the killer is. Cook’s 90 per cent closure rate implies that his hunch is probably right. He doesn’t need the help of two rookies at the crime scene. That’s fine with Gus Ramone, a young officer who lives by simple rules: “follow the playbook, stay safe, put in your twenty-five and move on. He was not enamoured of Cook or any of the other legends on the force. Romanticizing the work could not elevate it to something it was not. This was a job, not a calling.”

Dan Holiday, however, is a different breed of cop. “Citizens, criminal and straight, sensed Holiday was a joker and fuckup, and still, they liked him. His enthusiasm and natural fit for the job would probably get him further in the MPD than it would Ramone. That is, if that little man with the pitchfork sitting on Holiday’s shoulder, didn’t ruin him first.”

Cut to 20 years later, 2005. Cook is retired, the victim of a recent stroke, and still haunted by that unsolved crime. Ramone is a good cop, a family man and a budding Nationals fan. Holiday, so it seems, did succumb to the devil on his shoulder. Forced off the police force under a cloud of suspicion, he now owns a chauffeur/bodyguard service. He drinks, tells tall tales, chases “strange pussy” and drives clients, like a rich British writer who bears a striking resemblance to Martin Amis (whose long forgotten attempt at noir, Night Train, was based in Baltimore as well). Holiday aches with nostalgia for a job that was, in his mind, a calling.

When Holiday literally stumbles, drunkenly, on a teenage body and a crime that bears more than a passing resemblance to the unsolved mid-’80s murders, the three men are briefly reunited. The unlikely hero of the trio, however, turns out to be Ramone. Pelecanos has created the most unlikely of noir heroes: the good-enough cop who is a better-than-average husband, father and neighbour. He’s a cop who’d rather go home and sleep with his wife than hear the results of a crucial ballistic report, and a father whose bi-racial children give him more insight into the true origins of crime and true consequences of tragedy than cutting-edge police technology ever will.

The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos, Little, Brown, hc, 384pp, $33.95