WASHINGTON -- The coolest writer in America is not particularly cool at this moment. No one is. It is summer in Washington, and the air conditioning comes in two strengths, arctic and might-as-well-be-broken. Here, in a Mexican restaurant on the edge of Georgetown, it's "Body Heat" steamy, and with no hope of Kathleen Turner's showing up to improve the scenery.

Not that George P. Pelecanos is complaining. He never complains. Nor does he curse or snort cocaine or throw back shots of Jaegermeister while boasting of his next big score, as so many of his characters do. If this guy had a theme song, it would be "Que sera, sera," as sung by Curtis Mayfield. He's one happy camper.

How can we reconcile this affable, easy-going man with the seven raw, violent novels that have made him a cult darling? Or with the guy who wrote that scene with the ice cubes (don't ask) in the newest one, "The Sweet Forever" (Little, Brown, $23.95). Look, we're not so naive that we expect a writer to be like his characters, but where's the darkness, where's the angst? We have come here expecting hard-boiled. This guy is barely poached.

Suspicion dawns that the real Pelecanos has sent this soft-spoken suburban dad as a stand-in. The author is pretty busy, after all, what with the day job as a producing partner at Circle Films, "The Sweet Forever" to promote, another novel to write, a screenplay in progress. And, if British GQ had just dubbed you the coolest writer in America, if Publisher's Weekly had called you Washington's Zola, wouldn't you have better things to do than meet with some reporter from the provinces?

But the real tip-off is the unstudied nonchalance about his career. Here's a guy whose publisher is betting on him to break out as a best seller, whose diehard fans hoard his early work as if they were Internet stocks. Miramax bought his sixth book, "King Suckerman," for rap star Sean "Puffy" Combs, and paid him enough to write the screenplay that the day job is pretty much optional. He gives every indication of not giving a damn.

"I feel like I'm hitting the audience I'm supposed to be hitting," he says, when asked if he's frustrated by not having a larger readership. "I'm not really for mass consumption."

Uh-huh. No way. Writers do not talk like this. Someone with Pelecanos' famed ear for dialogue would know that.

But the deal-breaker comes when "Pelecanos" says: "You know how some people say they if they couldn't write, they couldn't live? I don't get that. If I couldn't write, I'd go back to selling shoes. I have three kids to support."

Look, buddy, we're going to need to see some I.D.

The genuine article

A check with the Motor Vehicles Administration later confirms that George Peter Pelecanos is 41 as of this past February, 5-feet-9 and 165 pounds. So this is him, after all. Besides, he knows an awful lot about Washington, and what it was like to grow up here in the 1960s and '70s, part of a close-knit Greek family.

He hasn't strayed far from his roots, that's for sure. He was born in Columbia Hospital for Women, a block away from his current office at Circle Films. He grew up in Montgomery County, and he's raising his own family there, in a Silver Spring bungalow so close to the district line that he swears he could throw a rock across it.

As a kid, he took the bus into the city to help at his father's lunch counter downtown. He studied people's faces and wondered about their lives. He saw the changes that began in '68, with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the riots that followed. People on the bus began dressing differently, wearing different clothes, different hair styles. He wanted to know everyone's story -- where they were going, where they had been, how they had changed. He was becoming a writer, he just didn't know it.

At the University of Maryland, College Park, he took Charles Misch's course in hard-boiled literature "as a goof." The goof turned serious from the very first book, Raymond Chandler's "The Lady in the Lake." For the next 10 years, he gulped down all the standards of the genre at the rate of two to three a week. Not only the books by the Maryland boys, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, but also John D. McDonald and Ross McDonald.

From age 16 on, he was a salesman. Shoes all though college, stereos, electronics, appliances at Luskin's. Before he knew it, he was 30, married, general manager of a major appliance chain, making more money than he ever dreamed. His own company was the logical next step. Pelecanos saw his future -- and it scared him to death.

He told his wife, Emily, that he wanted to quit his job, walk away from the big salary and write full-time. She swallowed hard and told him to go for it. A year later, give or take, he had a manuscript, "A Firing Offense." It's about this young Greek-American guy, Nick, who once sold appliances and now works in the corporate offices of an appliance store. Sort of autobiographical, sort of not, like most early fictions. One thing is certain: Buying a television will never be the same after you've read "A Firing Offense."

Pelecanos' next step was at once savvy and naive. He knew that St. Martin's Press published a lot of crime fiction, so he sent the book to an editor there, unagented. He worked in a bar, started on his second book. Almost a year to the day later, the editor

called, announcing he wanted to buy it. For $2,500.

"Can I tell you something? I didn't care. I'm not complaining," he says. Naturally. "The reason I bring it up, is so people understand what it's about. It's hard work, and there's not a lot of money necessarily. I wrote five books, and I never made more than $10,000 on any of them."

Those first five books include two more about Nick, "Nick's Trip" and "Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go." In an age where most literary private detectives seemed to be in recovery, Nick was sliding further into his addictions. Not a promising premise for a franchise, but Pelecanos never intended to write about the same character book in, book out. He was breaking the rules before he really knew them, interrupting the trilogy with a quirky road story, "Shoedog," then writing "The Big Blowdown," a prequel to the Nick books, set in 1949.

The common denominator was always Washington, but not the Washington so often seen in political thrillers. If a president or Supreme Court justice showed up in Pelecanos' work, he'd probably be drinking from a brown bag on Florida Avenue, a hooker at his side.

Even as his family grew, Pelecanos still managed to meet the book-a-year pace expected of crime writers. His press runs and advances remained small. Some of his books were going out of print in this country, even as they were picked up for publication in Japan, France, Greece, Hungary and Great Britain.

But there was a definite buzz around his name, thanks in large part to the independent mystery booksellers. Across the country, these folks were all but sitting on customers and refusing to let them out the door without a copy of Pelecanos' latest.

Hand-selling

One of the first mystery bookstores on the Pelecanos bandwagon Baltimore's Mystery Loves Company. In the summer 1992, the just-opened Fells Point bookstore received a letter -- from a new author, asking if he could do a signing there.

"I said, 'We're a brand-new bookstore and if you'll take a chance on us, we'll take a chance on you," remembers co-owner Paige Rose, a fervent Pelecanos partisan. "A lot of his relatives came [both his sisters live here] and they brought Greek pastries. Now he won't sign anywhere else in the Baltimore area."

Independent mystery bookstores can be key to building writers like Pelecanos. When workers are enthusiastic about a book, they talk it up, "hand-selling" it to their regulars. They might also .. convince customers that a writer's work is collectible just because the printings are so small. (Today, a copy of "Nick's Trip" can fetch up to $150.)

Inevitably, these independents also tell other authors about their finds. That's how Pelecanos began winning some of his more famous fans.

"They were talking about him when I was starting out," says Dennis Lehane, a prize-winning Boston writer who now tours with Pelecanos. "I'd ask, who's the best out there, and time and time again, it was Pelecanos. ... There's nothing calculated or commercial in George's stuff. He doesn't give you the big Hollywood moments that have sort of polluted fiction. And I think that's why he's so beloved by writers."

Michael Connelly, a New York Times best seller, was hearing the same hosannas. "George is one of the most original [writers] out there. There's no one doing what he's doing in terms of the subject matter, the people he chooses. I think it's kind of courageous because this stuff, you either really love it or it turns you off."

Connelly admits he's taken a greater interest in the business side of his career than Pelecanos ever has, or will, in all probability.

"I really admire him, not only his writing, but also his attitude," he says. "Any writer wants his stuff read. It's not like he's writing for himself. But I think he's also really at peace with himself and with whatever happens."

Presumably, though, Little, Brown did not buy Pelecanos' sixth and seventh books in order to publish a midlist author. Editor Michael Pietsch, who also edits Connelly, is convinced -- even if Pelecanos isn't -- that the writer has the stuff to reach a mass audience,

He is, in many ways, a dream author, Pietsch says. His manuscripts are pristine. "The Sweet Forever" -- a nail-biter set in 1986, as crack cocaine is just coming into D.C. -- is the best one yet, in Pietsch's estimation. Pelecanos also is a very low-maintenance author. He assumes Little, Brown will do its best to promote his books, and Little, Brown tries to live up to his faith in them.

"He said from the outset, 'I'm going to be the easiest writer you've ever worked with,' " says Pietsch, who has just acquired Pelecanos' eighth novel, "Shame the Devil," for publication next year. "He's smart, he's unassuming. When he makes a suggestion, it's without being demanding. And everything we've wanted him to do, he's been more than willing to do."

That includes a national tour beginning later this month. A funny thing about tours -- the writers who don't get them want them; the writers who have them almost always complain. Pelecanos doesn't really complain. Of course. For a day or two, he admits, it's not so bad being on the road. Room service meals paid for by the publisher, lots of gratifying attention from his fans. Lehane is good company, too.

But you know what? He misses his kids. He just wants to go home, see his kids and his wife, and write some more. That's all he ever wanted to do, and now he's doing it.

Was it really so terrifying, when he was 30, and his life flashed before his eyes, and what he saw was a successful businessman? He writes about slashed throats and bloody shootouts, he can imagine acts of decadence and deprivation that would leave most middle-age suburbanites breathless. (Not mention those ice cubes ...) How bad could it have been, owning your own company, being rich?

"I can't think of anything worse than just doing something for money," he says. "I was unhappy at that point. I was happier being a salesman than I was having 200 people working for me. It just wasn't me."

So he took a gamble, one that paid off for him in a way that such gambles rarely do for the dreamers and small-timers that inhabit his fiction.

Not that he would complain if it hadn't, of course.

Book signing

Who: George P. Pelecanos

Where: Mystery Loves Company, 1730 Fleet St.

When: 1 p.m.-3 p.m., Aug. 8

' Call: 410-276-6708

Works in order

Given George P. Pelecanos' confusing publishing history, most fans find themselves starting in the middle of his list of books, then scrambling to find the others and read them in order. Here, in chronological order, is a list of his work to date:

* "A Firing Offense" (Serpents Tail, $12.99)

* "Nick's Trip" (Mask Noir, $12.99)

* "Shoedog" (out of print; can be found through used book dealers) * "Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go" (Serpents Tail, $12.99)

* "The Big Blowdown" (St. Martin's Press, $24.95)

* "King Suckerman" (Dell, $6.50)

* "The Sweet Forever" (Little, Brown, $23.95)

Pub Date: 8/05/98