The Double

Prolific genre writer George Pelecanos, who is also well known for his contributions to the TV shows The Wire and Treme, published his detective novel The Double in 2013. As Pelecanos’s legal investigator and private PI main character points out, his favorite fiction has "a good story told with clean, efficient writing, a plot involving a problem to be solved or surmounted, and everyday characters the reader could relate to” – a winking reference to the kind of writing that Pelecanos aims for in his own novels. The Double is built on this model, as we follow the protagonist’s investigations of three unrelated cases, each of which ends with varying degrees of success.

Our detective is Spero Lucas, a twenty-eight-year-old former Marine who is still haunted by his experiences of door-to-door fighting in Fallujah. The adopted son of Greek immigrants, who loves weed, indie rock, and his mom’s Greek cooking, Lucas has a machismo that grew into the desire for danger when he returned home from the war with what is clearly a troubling, but not disabling, case of PTSD. Now, to satisfy his thrill-seeking nature, Lucas works as a legal investigator for Washington D.C. attorney Tom Petersen and solves cases by himself on the side. His life is carefree and relatively unattached since what he is looking for are the things he missed in the army: “Sex, work, money, and a comfortable bed. Everything he dreamed of when he was overseas. A guy didn’t need anything else.”

Lucas in the middle of three different cases.



The first case comes from his lawyer patron, Petersen, who asks him to get involved in a thorny criminal case: his client, Calvin Bates, has been accused of murdering his girlfriend. Although all the evidence seems to point to Bates being the perpetrator, there’s something about the details of the murder that Lucas finds questionable. As he digs deeper, he finds clues at the crime scene that shift the way the murder played out. Eventually, Lucas finds another, more probable assailant, bringing enough doubt to what had seemed like an open and shut case, that the man is acquitted.

The second case is the long-unsolved murder of a girl from Cardozo High School – a teenager who had been a favorite student of Lucas’s brother, who is a teacher. As Lucas zeroes in on the man who is most likely responsible for raping and killing this young woman, he realizes that he will never have enough evidence to bring him to justice. Instead, Lucas settles for beating him to within an inch of his life.

The third case is the one that takes up the majority of the novel. Lucas’s favorite bartender introduces him to Grace Kinkaid, a kind woman from the nonprofit world who has recently been robbed and would like Lucas to find and retrieve the stolen goods. As a PI, Lucas specializes in these kinds of missing-object jobs. Since his normal fee is 40 percent of the value of the item, and in this case, what has been stolen is a painting worth around $200,000, he is happy to take the case. The novel takes its title from this painting. Called “The Double,” it features the portraits of two men, painted by early-twentieth-century artist Loretta Browning, formerly of little renown, but recently growing in popularity.



At the same time that he starts investigating “The Double,” Lucas meets an older woman at a bar and embarks on a passionate affair, the sexual side of which Pelecanos writes about explicitly. Clearly just in it for the sex, Charlotte Rivers sets up assignations with Lucas at a hotel near the White House. However, for Lucas, what starts as the same kind of purely physical relationship that he is used to, quickly turns emotional. He reconsiders the selfishness of “sex, money, and a comfortable bed” being all that there is in life. The relationship ends when Lucas realizes that Charlotte would never actually want to be with him.

Lucas quickly narrows down the possibilities for who stole Grace’s painting to her ex-boyfriend Billy Hunter, a man whose seemingly smitten attention soon turned abusive and humiliating. As Lucas investigates, he figures out that Billy Hunter is actually Billy King, the leader of a three-man gang that includes two other criminals: a dim-witted Eastern European scumbag and an emotionally fragile yet loyal African-American ex-con. Their trick is always the same: the very handsome and sexually confident King seduces women he finds through an Internet phishing scam that involves selling cars. During the quick romance, he learns about their valuable art, and then the other two guys do the actual robbing – after which King disappears. Usually, the women are too shell-shocked and embarrassed to go to the police.

To find King, Lucas uses the help of a fellow vet to kidnap and torture an art dealer connected to the criminal gang. The scene is horrific in its violence, and Lucas’s friend is deeply disturbed by what the PI is willing to do. Lucas tracks King to a crooks’ safe house in Calvert County, a very rural part of Maryland. Here, we learn a little bit about King’s miserable childhood – enough to shade this otherwise one-dimensional bad guy. When the two men finally confront each other, King spells out the theme of the book – that doubles are everywhere. “You are me, fella,” he says, “You’re as close to me as I’ve come across in a long while.” In the climactic fight that follows, Grace is accidentally stabbed, but, eventually, Lucas kills the three men without much concern or remorse.