The Martini Shot and Other Stories

A collection of stories, mostly gritty, low-level crime stories set on Washington DC's mean streets. The Martini Shot itself is set in the world of TV, featuring a scriptwriter on a popular cop show. When a member of the crew is murdered, the screenwriter decides to track down the perpetrators himself, to see if, as a writer, he can do more than just talk the talk.

'George Pelecanos is a stunningly good chronicler of the mean streets of Washington DC ... For anyone who has somehow missed out on Pelecanos, he is up there with Elmore Leonard and even Chandler for street dialogue and inner city settings, and there is always a pleasing moral undertow to his work' Daily Mail on The Night Gardener

“Even if you didn't know that Pelecanos is a hotshot screenwriter - his CV includes The Wire, The Pacific and Treme - you would soon guess so as you tore through these tough and slangy tales of drugs and death .... Pelecanos knows how to make every word count.”

Bracing and witty novella - Washington Post

[The Martini Shot is] one of this author's freshest and most original recent works - New York Times

The characters of the novella are rich, deeply textured and perfectly Pelecanos - Toronto Star

Truly lovely . . . And when he offers us a glimpse of the choiceless choices of the inner city in places such as Baltimore and Washington DC, he can touch greatness - USA Today

- EVENING STANDARD

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 twenty books 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, What It Was, The Double, and The Martini Shot. 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. The Turnaround won the Hammett Prize for literary excellence in the field of crime writing. His fiction has appeared in Playboy, Esquire, 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 New Yorker, The Washington Post, GQ, Sight and Sound, Uncut, Mojo, and numerous other publications. Esquire magazine 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 point out that Mr. King used the word "perhaps."

Pelecanos was a producer, writer, and story editor for the acclaimed HBO dramatic series, The Wire, winner of the Peabody Award, the AFI Award, and the Edgar. 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, produced by Steven Spielberg, and most recently worked as a writer and Executive Producer on the HBO series Treme.

Pelecanos lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is at work on his next novel.

A collection of stories, mostly gritty, low-level crime stories set on Washington DC's mean streets. The Martini Shot itself is set in the world of TV, featuring a scriptwriter on a popular cop show. When a member of the crew is murdered, the screenwriter decides to track down the perpetrators himself, to see if, as a writer, he can do more than just talk the talk.'George Pelecanos is a stunningly good chronicler of the mean streets of Washington DC ... For anyone who has somehow missed out on Pelecanos, he is up there with Elmore Leonard and even Chandler for street dialogue and inner city settings, and there is always a pleasing moral undertow to his work' Daily Mail on The Night Gardener

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