Chapter Sixty-Seven
Dennis Lehane
Pride of Ownership
Like many writers, Dennis Lehane started with short stories. He wanted to create the kind of beveled truth nuggets crafted by Raymond Carver, but he didn’t feel his efforts met that mark, so he didn’t submit a one. In 1990, two years out of college, twenty-five-year-old Lehane decided to try his hand at a crime novel instead. The first draft came pouring out in three weeks. Many rewrites and a Master of Fine Arts later, A Drink Before the War was published in 1994, earning a Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel.
Lehane’s star investigators are Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro from Dorchester, the tough, working-class Boston neighborhood where Lehane grew up. In that first book, they’re childhood friends turned professional associates, but they soon develop a relationship that turns on-again-off-again through Sacred, Darkness Take My Hand, Gone Baby Gone, Prayers for Rain, and Moonlight Mile. Lehane isn’t your average crime novelist, and Kenzie and Gennaro aren’t your average PIs. Unlike many of their fictional counterparts, Lehane’s protagonists carry the psychic cost of the violence they’ve suffered, witnessed, or perpetrated from book to book.
Five books into the series, Lehane stepped away to write 2001’s Mystic River, a complex story about three men whose lives take disparate paths after a disturbing childhood incident. In it, Lehane pushed the boundaries of crime fiction—the present-day murder is secondary to the emotional consequences of a past crime. It hit the bestseller lists shortly after its publication in 2001, and was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film directed by Clint Eastwood.
Most of Lehane’s subsequent work has similarly been informed by crime, though not strictly crime fiction. Shutter Island explores the psyche of a troubled U.S. marshal in deep denial over his demons. The Given Day is a sprawling historical novel, the first in a trilogy introducing a new family of characters, the Coughlins, encompassing the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Boston Police Strike of 1919, European anarchists, and Babe Ruth. Its saga continues in the Edgar Award–winning Live by Night, featuring patriarch Thomas Coughlin’s youngest son, Joe, a romantic though nonetheless criminal underling of a mob boss, and World Gone By, Lehane’s twelfth novel, in which Joe’s new life as a respectable businessman is threatened by events from the past.
From pushing genre novel boundaries with Mystic River to writing scripts for a Scorsese–helmed Shutter Island spin-off, Dennis Lehane’s success has carried him coast to coast, but Boston will always be home—in his heart and on the page.
How did your first novel come about?
The bottom line is I was unbelievably broke that summer and I couldn’t afford to go out. So I decided to try my hand at crime fiction because I’ve always liked it. It kind of blew out of me, whereas short stories—I thought I was a short story writer—could be painfully slow. So that was kind of an "aha moment" in my maturation as a writer.
I sent it to a friend of mine, Sterling Watson, a Tampa writer, and he said it was really terrible but structurally very strong. He suggested I rewrite it, and I did, several times, and each time it got deeper and better written. He sent it [to an agent he knew] on my behalf, and about six months later she called and asked to be my agent. For two years it kept going out and getting rejected. And just as I was finishing grad school, the same week, it was accepted by [Harcourt].
There were several conditional rejections of the book: Several publishers would accept it as a paperback; I said no. A couple said, “If you change the fact that the lead female character is a battered wife, then we’ll take the book.” I said no. My ability to stick to my guns stemmed from two things: One, I had a great agent who believed in me. Two, I was living so far below the poverty line nobody could make me any poorer.
You’ve spoken about a renaissance in crime fiction, beginning with the 1978 publication of James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss.
It’s straight-up literature. It’s got astonishing depth of prose. It’s one of the greatest novels about the 1970s ever written. Just because you’re published in literary fiction does not make it literature—and just because you’ve published in genre does not make it not literature. I felt that way when I read Crumley; I felt that way when I read James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet; I felt that way when I read James Lee Burke. The finale for me was when I read Richard Price’s Clockers and it got no serious literary recognition that year. And if the most important book published that year didn’t get respect because it was an urban novel with a cop at its center, then the whole system’s screwed. That’s when I said, “Maybe I ought to try my hand at genre.”
Do you follow a writing schedule?
I do now because I have two kids, but I never [used to]. I think it’s really important to write every day. You have to do an hour a day minimum or the muscles get atrophied.
Before you start a novel, do you know the ending?
Usually I know three things about a book, and the end is usually one. I know one thing in the beginning, one thing in the middle, and one thing at the end, and I don’t know anything else. And I just dive in. One step forward, two steps back is usually how I write. That’s why books take me a long time.
In Mystic River, you show the various characters’ points of view while remaining in the third person. Yet Dave Boyle, suspected of murder, doesn’t reveal his innocence until three-hundred-plus pages into the book.
Once we know that, I don’t think there’s much suspense. There’s not much mystery in Mystic River. There’s Who killed Katie? which I don’t think is terribly mysterious. I throw the suspect right out in front of your face, as quickly as possible. This is the least important thing to me, so if somebody figures it out, great. And then, What happened to Dave that night? Why did Dave have the blood on him? That was the mystery of the book. So how do I show readers the damage to this guy’s psyche so they believe in the end that he would admit to a crime he didn’t commit? And the only way I could do that was to withhold information as fairly as I could, staying in Dave’s psyche because [having been molested as a child] Dave’s in denial about a lot of what’s inside himself. I was a little concerned about that, but in the end I think it worked.
The rule is you’ve got to play fair. That’s always been my thing. I meet people all the time who say, “I figured out who killed the girl in Mystic River in the first forty pages.” This is a book about how one stone hits the pond and ripples, and we have no idea how far those ripples are going to go or who they’re going to affect.
You’ve worked with physically and sexually abused kids …
I worked both in Boston and Florida as a therapeutic counselor, usually in group homes. At the place I worked the longest, we would pick kids from juvie who we thought were just on the right side of the line between victim and victimizer. And we’d try to save them before they became victimizers, because that’s usually the standard: If you get beaten long enough you end up being a beater. ... That directly inspired Mystic River, working with those kids.
Gone Baby Gone also depicts child abuse.
Gone Baby Gone started with the question, “What is the worst type of child abuse?” I think we can all agree it’s sexual child abuse. But then you start getting into grays. Is physical abuse as bad as neglect? So Gone Baby Gone was looking at every single aspect. … That’s what Amanda represents. Joy has been robbed from her.
After Amanda has been kidnapped, her aunt turns to Kenzie and Gennaro, Dorchester people like herself. It seems unique to Boston, the neighborhood loyalties of the working class.
Oh, yeah. It’s sort of blind loyalty. It can be pretty destructive. At the same time, I come from a place where your word was your bond. That and work ethic were the two most important qualities of a person: the value of their word and the value of their work. I get asked if the neighborhood people get pissed at me [for writing about them], and I say, “No, they don’t mind as long as you write about warts and all—as long as you’re not some carpetbagger coming from the outside judging them.” I’m from the inside, so I can say, yes, there’s a lot of racism, there’s a lot of tribalism, there’s a lot of violence, intergenerational violence, intergenerational crime. But there’s also an amazing amount of goodwill and neighborliness, for lack of a better word, and again, a strong sense of loyalty and integrity. I wouldn’t change a thing about having grown up there. It’s been the luckiest break I’ve ever had, really. I don’t know what kind of writer I’d be if I’d grown up in Aurora, Illinois.
You traveled back in Boston history for The Given Day. Did you know it would expand into a trilogy?
I knew it was going to sprawl out on me. I could see I was putting a lot of people in the dugout, so I could use them at various times should I choose. For now that saga is over. But that doesn’t mean that someday I won’t go back and look into [another one of those characters] for a book.
What inspired you to bring Babe Ruth into the story?
He just walked into the book. He walked in early, and he was so great and so much fun. That was really the beginning of the modern celebrity, and I wanted to run with that. I wanted to run through this incredible year that I think was one of the most exciting years in American history, September 1918 to September 1919, and Babe Ruth was in the middle of it all. As I used to say when I was teaching, sometimes the reason to write something is because it’s cool. Because you enjoy it. Because you’re having fun. Because you just think, Hey, why not? Those are reasons that sometimes get lost in the more schematic ways we approach writing. Sometimes if you get excited, guess what? The reader’s going to get excited, too.
Is it possible to do too much research?
Very much. I lost a year on The Given Day. A complete waste of time. Ever since The Given Day, I write, and as I’m writing and I get to a moment where I need a fact—“What did a pack of cigarettes cost in 1921?”—then I look it up. I research as needed. I don’t pre-research—never again. I know a bunch of facts about 1918, and unless I get on Jeopardy and it happens to be a category, they’re completely useless to me.
Your writing is very evocative of place: bug-infested swamps in Florida, dank bars in Boston.
I’m one of those people who get depressed if I’m in a place I don’t like, the way other people are affected by weather. I couldn’t care less about weather, but if you put me in a place I don’t like, I become very depressed very fast, even if I’m only there for a few days. I have a very strong reaction to the physical world I am in. I don’t like writing about places unless there’s something exciting to write about them. I love trains, so you see Luther’s train ride in The Given Day. Yeah, I usually write about evocative places.
You’ve written teleplays for The Wire and Boardwalk Empire. Are the limitations of TV writing—characters created by someone else, a fixed length and pace—liberating when compared to the challenge of a blank slate?
Yeah, it’s great. But at the end of the day you don’t take pride of ownership. I’m really proud to have been associated with The Wire, but pride of ownership goes to David Simon and Ed Burns. I’m just a guy who came in to paint a room. It’s a wonderful feeling and it’s a very relaxing thing to be working on a TV show that’s not yours. Boardwalk was a complete joy. But it’s not the same pride of ownership.
I’ve written screenplays, but you don’t know what’s going to show up on the screen. When you write a book, you go over proofs with your editor, and that’s it. It doesn’t happen that the book comes out a year later and you don’t recognize half of it. That’s exactly what happens when you write a script. Not that it’s happened to me in film, because on The Drop I was treated beautifully. But I’ve written scripts, I’ve been paid for them, and I’ve seen what they become, and they’re not even close to what I wrote. Richard Price said to me once, “I don’t care what scripts you wrote, you don’t put it on a shelf.” And that’s it. Clockers is on a shelf. The Wanderers is on a shelf. You look at them and say, “I did that.”
Steve Boisson is a Los Angeles–based freelance writer whose articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, Acoustic Guitar, American History, and many other publications.