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Gardening at Night

The Night Gardener George Pelecanos Little, Brown, 2006 Rating: 4.2

Posted: August 31, 2006

By Kevin Forest Moreau

The aspect of George Pelecanos’ writing that makes his books so absorbing might also, it turns out, be the one thing that’s keeping him from achieving breakout success along the lines of his friend Dennis Lehane. Despite universal acclaim from critics and fellow crime writers, Pelecanos’ books don’t enjoy the healthy sales of, say, a Michael Connelly novel. According to a great recent New York Times story, this fact almost got him dropped from his publisher, before it turned around and decided to unleash an aggressive marketing campaign for his newest work, The Night Gardener.

Clearly, Little, Brown wants to push Pelecanos up into Lehane’s territory, sales-wise, and it’s hoping that The Night Gardener might just be his Mystic River. Now, Gardener isn’t as socially incendiary as River -- both involve child murders, but none of the main characters in Gardener is the likely suspect. More importantly, while both writers allow their plots to unfold out of their characters, River gets to the point much quicker than Gardener -- you’re almost 100 pages in (90, to be exact) before anyone even discovers the body that sets events into motion.

That body belongs to Asa Johnson, and the manner of his death -- shot in the head, left in a community garden -- and the fact that his first name is spelled the same forward and backwards seems to link him to the Palindrome Murders, a rash of similar killings that plagued the Washington, D.C. area twenty years earlier.

But The Night Gardener isn’t about the murder, at least not in the sense of following a single-minded detective as he sorts through Byzantine clues to suss out the killer. There is an investigation, of course, but dramatically it takes a back seat to the thoughts and actions of three men: Gus Ramone, a working-class cop and family man; Dan “Doc” Holliday, a former cop spinning his wheels with a boring business as a driver; and retired detective T.C. Cook, haunted still by his inability to solve the Palindrome Murders.

Pelecanos juggles a number of peripheral characters, like a wannabe criminal legend with a tangential link to Holliday’s own unofficial investigation into Johnson’s death. He walks us through Ramone’s job with all the procedural detail of a Connelly or an Ed McBain. And he keeps our attention through a couple of other murder cases seemingly unrelated to the one at the core of the story. In other words, he’s more than adept at crafting a sturdy mystery.

But the heart of The Night Gardener is revealed in personal moments that don’t necessarily bring anyone any closer to finding Johnson’s killer, but open up his protagonists with absorbing detail. From Ramone’s grounding in his home life, particularly his relationship with his sullen teenage son Diego, to scenes of Holliday’s flat, joyless life of empty sexual conquests and afternoons wasted with drinking buddies he doesn’t particularly care for, these smaller, more intimate scenes are the heart of this engrossing book.

Pelecanos’ approach -- to let us steep in the shoes of his characters, get to know them and care for them long before the real action starts -- just works. As in last year’s superb Drama City, it makes the difference between a good escapist read and a great, absorbing and affecting novel. The Night Gardener certainly qualifies as the latter; it’s easily one of Pelecanos’ best books in years. Whether it ends up pushing him into the world of security and sales enjoyed by his peers depends on his being discovered, enjoyed and cherished by a few thousand potential readers (okay, many thousands) just like you.

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