Mystery fiction has a history of being redefined. When Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins wrote novels in which crime, kidnapping, murder, and chicanery were significant plot elements, their works were simply regarded as novels, and they were reviewed that way. They weren’t classified as “genre” fiction or “literary” fiction; they were just fiction, and could be enjoyed (and were) as such.

Sometime later, the road forked. Detective stories were packaged differently from other novels, usually in cheaper bindings and dust jackets, and sold differently, often mainly to lending libraries. They were put into separate sections in bookstores, and were reviewed, if at all, in “mystery” columns.

They tended to self-segregate, too, becoming more predictable with regard to plot structure, veering away from literary aspiration into puzzle-making, with tissue-thin characters set in place largely to fulfill story requirements.

In recent years, the road has forked again. There are still plenty of mysteries to be consumed as light entertainment, but another branch of the genre has shown greater ambition. These authors bring the same elements to their novels that “literary” writers do: fully developed characters, elegant prose, and complex, realistic story lines that often eschew detectives and many other components of the traditional mystery. For these authors, it’s about style, about visceral emotional impact, about delving into the depths of the soul.

These are novels that happen to embrace elements of mystery stories but seek higher ground as serious mirrors of the world, and few writers achieve this effect more profoundly than George Pelecanos.

In “The Turnaround” (Little, Brown, 294 pages, $24.99), Mr. Pelecanos did not attempt to write a straightforward mystery; there are no detectives or police, and no one tries to figure out what happened. We, and his characters, know what happened — or, at least, we think we do:

Three bored white teenagers in the summer of 1972 drank too much beer and went looking for trouble, drove into a black neighborhood, yelled a racial epithet, and threw a small pie at three equally bored young black men, then peeled out. Unfamiliar with this part of Washington, D.C., they went down a dead-end street and found themselves trapped. As the three black teenagers approached, one of the white boys jumped out of the car and got away, one was shot to death, and the last was badly beaten.

Here, Mr. Pelecanos moves the story to the present, reintroducing his characters, now middle-aged. The one who got away has gone on to a successful legal career, while the one who didn’t, Alex Pappas, his crushed eye socket giving him the look of abiding sadness, runs the same coffee shop that his father founded a lifetime ago. He mourns one son killed in the Middle East while grooming the other to take over the shop someday, just as his father did.

One of the black men, James Monroe, convicted of manslaughter, didn’t handle jail well, and served a very long time. His brother Raymond, let off entirely, is a gentle, moral man who works as a physical therapist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, happily involved with a woman whose son he loves, and who loves him.

The third member of the group, the violent Charles Baker, served a year for his part in the beating. In and out of prison ever since, incapable of even considering honest work, he feels that the surviving white guys owe him something for sending him down his crooked path — and he intends to get it.

Alex Pappas is not a complicated man, but he has his grief and his loves, as well as his dreams, and you have a ball bearing for a heart if you don’t worry about him. The same sentiment pertains to Ray Monroe — different color, different neighborhood, different music, but the same simple decency that unites the best of us.

Mr. Pelecanos showed rare talent in his earliest books, most of which featured Greeks and African-Americans in the Washington area. As good as the novels were, they were thinner, more traditional mysteries — the work of a young writer whose own decency shone through the noir language, the characters, and the activities that defined them.

The prose has become more sanded and polished in recent work, the understanding of human nature more profoundly and empathetically developed, with events leading to almost unbearable suspense, as it is impossible not to become deeply involved with the threatened individuals who populate his superb books.

“The Turnaround” is not Mr. Pelecanos’s best mystery, but it is his best novel.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.