DENNIS LEHANE WALKS THE MOONLIGHT MILE

It's been twelve years since Patrick Kenzie found Amanda McCready, returned the four year old to her negligent mother, saw her kidnappers jailed, and broke up with Angie Gennaro. Patrick and Angie got back together, and now have a daughter of their own. Angie's more or less out of the private eye business, studying to work with Downs Syndrome children, and Patrick's trying to get a staff job being perpetually dangled in front of him by a big-time agency, so he'll do the kind of work he despises for the kind of people he despises. And then Amanda, now 16, goes missing again, and her aunt Beatrice knows how to appeal to the guilt Patrick feels.

Dennis Lehane returned to Kenzie and Gennaro after a ten year hiatus that saw the huge jump forward of Mystic River, which of course rode the success of Clint Eastwood's film. He followed that up with Shutter Island, a daring and offbeat novel rather than one designed to capitalise on Mystic River's success. That one became a Martin Scorsese film, and he went on to script for The Wire, so there was little predicting his next book, the remarkable historical novel The Given Day. When I interviewed Lehane about The Given Day, we talked about the return of Kenzie and Gennaro, and Lehane explained it simply: 'he (Patrick) hadn't talked to me for ten years, and then all of a sudden I heard his voice in my head'. I asked if the voice he heard was Casey Affleck's, who had played Patrick in his brother Ben's faithful adaptation of the Amanda story, Gone Baby Gone. He said 'no, but it's funny, because Casey wasn't anything like I'd pictured Patrick, but I can't get him out of my mind'. (You can read the whole interview here)

To an extent, that's a problem with Moonlight Mile, because it's hard now to separate Affleck's protean ability to enter a character and reflect his inner workings from the Patrick we may have imagined. If anything he adds depth, and Lehane himself was scared by the task. 'Do I still have that looseness,' he wondered. 'They had an ignorance about them, and I wonder if I can recapture that now that I've flirted with self-importance.'

Patrick remains an unlikely detective hero. His world sometimes seems to be an extension of high school, where he was not quite tough or cool enough to be successful, or become a target, but just cool and smart enough not to be a mark. And trying to locate Amanda quickly throws him in over his head, because her mother Helene and Helene's latest loser boyfriend are tied in with the Russian mob, and a hit man named Yefim who's got almost as funny a line of ironic patter as Patrick. Of course Patrick finds Amanda, he's too good and dogged not to, and everything gets far more complicated than he could have imagined. Which is what happened in Gone Baby Gone, and as in that book Patrick needs to make a decision. But this time the decision is informed by his added age, his added responsibility as a father, and his exposure to the results of his moral decision twelve years earlier.

Lehane does a nice job of picking up his characters and allowing them their changes. He's as sharp as ever; Patrick remains a knowing-smart ass; 'I see a future for you in self-help,' he says to a drug-addled youth counselor who's made some bad decisions. At times it seems this book is more consciously funny than its predecessors, but that may be because it is more informed by the world around Kenzie and Gennaro; the concerns of Mystic River, The Wire, and The Given Day are never far away. It is not a world gone well: the shadow of economic inequality, of injustice, of greed, hangs over everyone in the novel. Lehane's remarkably straight-forward about society's failures; a dog-walking woman in western Massachusetts launches into a fantastic diatribe against the perverted values of our education system that could have come right out of The Wire. And, if I may be indulged one pedantic quibble, his sense of geography remains odd; in The Given Day a train took an impossible route to New York; in Moonlight Mile there's a house in western Mass 'south of the New York border', which is weird because the border runs almost due north-south!

There is almost an inevitability to the denouement, and Patrick in particular is again forced into decisions that make him question how best he can be true both to himself and those he loves. And follow the responsibilities of society as well. He's helped a bit by a twist which some may see coming; but it's no small task, just as revisiting a successful series more than decade later wasn't. Lehane has written the kind of comeback novel any writer would admire; he has questioned his characters, and let them find their own way. It's another fine achievement.

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane
Little Brown, £15.99 ISBN 9781408703137

This essay will also appear at Shots: www.shotsmag.co.uk

THE KILLER INSIDE HIM: REFLECTIONS IN A SHATTERED GLASS ON MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM'S THE KILLER INSIDE ME

There was a moment, about halfway through Lou Ford's beating of the masochistic prostitute Joyce Lakeland, when I started to feel squirmy, and I am not often put off by violence in films. When Lou later beats to death his fiance Amy Stanton, it wasn't quite as queaze-inducing, though it was perhaps uglier, because Amy's submission to Lou up to then has been mental, not physical, and Amy has twice nearly extracted herself from it.

Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me is arguably the most faithful adaptation of Jim Thompson yet, if anything bringing Thompson's soiopathic killer into sharper focus and catching the strange hallucinatory character of Thompson's manic depressive prose very well. Winterbottom has ridden out the inevitable furore over the film's graphic violence, eventually coming to the public position that his aim was to make it so unpleasant that the audience couldn't get a cathartic lift from it (assuming no one in the audience is another Lou Ford). However, the difference between the violence against the women and the less graphic deaths of men in the film leads one to suspect that Winterbottom saw the misogynist streak in Thompson, the sexual nature of the violence, as an area he wished to explore in greater detail. It's also noteworthy that much of the worst of the violence is done with sound effects, and while the camera focuses on Casey Affleck's Ford, registering the deep coldness behind the character.

Ford is not only a sociopath, but he's a cop, and he is played brilliantly by Affleck. As we saw in The Assassination Of Jesse James (where he played Bob Ford, presumably no relation) and in Gone Baby Gone, he is a master of keeping internal turmoil under wraps, leaving the audience to work out the character along the way. Lou Ford gives him the perfect role to do that, and he makes the best of it; the bland faces of his life in public and his life in the privacy of his own house contrasting with the forces inside him which, we are led to believe, are released by the pleasure in violent sex that Joyce (played by Jessica Alba) opens up to him. In the film, it is as if this sex triggers him, reminding him of who he really is, and everything else flows from that, a flow Affleck keeps tightly under control. I can't think of a star with the same qualities; the actors Affleck most reminds me of are Hurd Hatfield (an easy parallel exists between Affleck's Bob Ford and Hatfield in The Left Handed Gun) and, as we shall see below, Timothy Carey.

Winterbottom remains very faithful to the novel, to the point where Thompson's almost fever-dream recollection of Lou's childhood, looking for the 'explanation' of why he is the way he is, remains difficult to figure out. In the novel it's clear; Lou's father is a doctor, who indulges in sado-masochistic sex with his housekeeper Helene; when he discovers she has initiated Lou, he receives the first and only beating of his life. Lou consults his father's books on aberrant psychology, as if trying to discover for himself what he really is. Because he is aware that he does not fit in. It's what makes his scenes with Amy (Kate Hudson) so unpleasant, because she exists only to the extent she can make him fit in, yet he's resisted any chance to make their relationship one that would fit into society; that the society accepts their affair is one of the small indicators that appearance isn't reality in Thompson's world.

The Killer Inside Me was the first of Thompson's novels for Lion Books, and probably the most autobiographical of any of his books after his first two, more mainstream novels. His father was a disgraced sheriff, who treated young Jim with violent cruelty, and Thompson's family was supposedly the basis for the criminal and incestuous Fargos in his second book, Heed The Thunder. This is 1950s America, in West Texas, and Winterbottom and DP Marcel Zyskind capture the hot dusty simmering beneath the pleasant surface; once or twice they refer a little too explicitly to Edward Hopper; people often link Hopper and Noir, not always successfully, at least in part because the images are so well known, and in part because they don't necessarily convey a sense of violence lurking underneath.

The connection that usually gets overlooked, because of the emphasis on Lou's violent sexuality, is that all the killings in the film grow out of simple corruption, the kind of small town small-scale venality that lies at the heart of much neo-noir (big cities seem to present a bigger challenge to noirists in our era than they did in the 40s and 50s). But when you think about the other great film adaptations of Thompson's work, you see the links running through.

The best is Bertrand Tavernier's Coup De Torchon (1981) based on Thompson's novel Pop. 1280, which was published twelve years after The Killer Inside Me, in 1964. Tavenier (see the IT interview with him here) relocated the story from Texas to French colonial Africa, which makes the racial undercurrents of the novel even more telling. Sheriff Nick Corey in that book is the only lawman in a small town; it's set earlier than The Killer Inside Me and it doesn't have the undertones of 1950s conformity that Winterbottom draws out nicely. By now, Thompson was much more pessimistic and nihilistic than he'd been in 1952, and had drunk a hell of a lot more too. In fact, one of the films it recalls (see the publicity still with the front-lit Affleck and Hudson in a car) is the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, in the sense that Lou Ford is acting out the life of a normal American in the 50s, while a so-called 'alien' lurks underneath. The Coens made a whole movie, The Man Who Wasn't There, just to examine that link between Fifties sf and noir.

In the novel, Thompson makes a point of the 'welcome to Central City' signs on the highway in an out of town. One points out that the population has grown tenfold, the other warns against picking up hitchhikers because they might be escaped lunatics. I think the connection is clear, and re-emphasised 12 years later in the title of Pop. 1280.

Thompson's books lend themselves to exploitation; it's a temptation for film makers to simply jump on the salacious elements and run with them, while simultaneously making the 'heroes; more appealing characters. It's almost painful to watch Stacey Keach trying to work against that in the original version of The Killer Inside Me; as if only he among the film's makers understood what was going on. In that context it's interesting that three of the four most faithful versions of Thompson novels have been made by non-American directors, as if Thompson's point, made in his pulp writer stream of subsconscious, were more obvious to outsiders, or perhaps less unsettling to them. My other two contenders were both made in 1990, Stephen Frears' The Grifters (though its screenplay is by the American Donald Westlake), and James Foley's much-underrated After Dark, My Sweet, where even the naming of the characters, 'Kid' Collins and 'Uncle Bob' suggests Thompson's obsession with incest and abuse. (Another notable foreign adaptation, Alain Corneau's Serie Noir (1979), I haven't seen). The runners-up would include Maggie Greenwald's The Kill-Off (1989—it was a bumper time for Thompsons) an off-beat take on neo-noir that doesn't quite catch Thompson's essence, while Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972) is more interesting as classic Peckinpah than neo-Thompson. What's interesting too is the way in which elements recur in all the novels and films, and the ways they are turned around.

In The Getaway (recall that Peckinpah worked on Invasion Of The Body Snatchers for Don Siegel) Doc McCoy is less of a psychopath than in the book; Steve McQueen wasn't going to play evil, and Al Lettieri's Rudy is around to bear that burden. And the ending, which in its own way works, is not as apocalyptic as the novel. In contrast to Peckinpah, Winterbottom's ending is, if anything, even more apocalyptic than Thompson's, an explosion that recalls Aldrich's version of Kiss Me Deadly. And, in the end Peckinpah is more concerned with reaffirming his angel/whore view of women than integrating them; of course when they're integrated in Thompson's fashion, they die.

The Grifters incest theme is reflected slightly in the Helene character, whose role is far more ambiguous in the film; it would be easy to mistake her for Lou's mother. What is consistent is the way Winterbottom's film attempts to put the blame on mother, more than the novel did, for Lou's inhumanity, just as the film of The Grifters can make Angelica Huston take the blame for John Cusack's character, while at the same time toning down his pathology.

Thompson did two screenplays for Stanley Kubrick; both times Kubrick tried to snatch screen credit away from him. On The Killing (1956), his original credit was for dialogue, but arbitration from the Writer's Guild got it changed; certainly there is a lot of Thompson, beyond Lionel White's novel, in that book—the loser characters played by Jay C Flippen, Elisha Cook, and Timothy Carey have elements of Thompson's alcoholic fatalism, while Carey's encounter with James Edwards' black car park attendant was taken farther in Thompson's late novel Child Of Rage. And the ending smacks of Thompson, though endings are usually problematic for him—because his heroes are doomed to lose, he often writes them into corners and needs to go apocalyptic in order to get them out. Then again, it may be the only way they (and he) can face this world.

Kubrick brought Thompson back to write the screenplay of Paths Of Glory (1957), though Calder Willingham was then hired and star Kirk Douglas preferred his version. Thompson wound up listed third, behind Willingham and Kubrick in the credits, though, according to Thompson's biographer Robert Polito, much of Thompson's original survives intact. Douglas obviously would not have wanted his character's heroism reduced, but the corruption among the top officers, and the fatalistic attitudes of the ordinary soldiers (again Timothy Carey, and though he's far more over the top, I still see him in Carey Affleck). Despite the problems with credits, Kubrick commissioned two more screenplays from Thompson, including Lunatic At Large, which was rediscovered in Kubrick's papers after he died, which has raised the possibility of a new Thompson film. It's currently in development, with Sam Rockwell and Scarlet Johannson attached, as they say. Around that time Thompson had his first heart attack, Kubrick moved on to Spartacus and then Lolita; he never returned to cheap noir. Thompson's books would continue to be optioned on the cheap, or he would be commissioned to write screenplays for chump change (he had to sue Sal Mineo to get paid the bare minimum for one); among those who mooted projects with him were Orson Welles and Sam Fuller, each suited in his own way to Thompson's material—after all how far is Hank Quinlan from a Thompson character? He also was hired to write a script called Bo about hoboes, for Robert Redford, a mix that seems somewhat less likely. Thompson wrote scripts for a couple of TV shows I have a dim but respectful memory of—a cavalry western called McKenzie's Raiders which starred Richard Carlson (no relation) and a mob thriller called Cain's Hundred--and did lots of hackwork. He died not long after the release of the first film of Killer Inside Me, for which he also received very little.

I go into his biography because where Winterbottom's Killer differs from the usual take on Thompson, is a recognition of exactly why the novel itself holds up so well; that's why I think it is the best Thompson adaptation yet. The modern audience is enthralled by Thompson's gutter world; they love the tales of the sad-sack alcoholic navigating his way around Hollywood, they love the darkness as if it were an antidote to the anodyne pre-packaged world around them; the era of the 90s onward could be seen as a rebirth (or repacking with better technology) of the 1950s. But where The Killer Inside Me stands apart is precisely the manner in which Lou Ford is not only indistinguishable from his fellow humans, but works at making it that way. He is not Phillipe Noiret's louche sheriff, nor is he a crook or gambler or sad sack worker who we know from the start is born to lose. Lou Ford works at being a perfectly normal American, and this is what Jim Thompson seemed to find the most horrific of all. He didn't believe in the American Way—any hitchhiker might be an escaped lunatic, any pleasant cop a Lou Ford. In his world it usually took a woman to set the fuse burning, and that's what makes the violence so upsetting, because it is rage against the self, the self that recognises it is different and punishes those who don't.

NOTE: This essay will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

IT'S HARD FOR ME TO WRITE UNLESS WHAT I'M DOING SCARES ME: THE DENNIS LEHANE INTERVIEW

It wasn't difficult for me to finish Dennis Lehane's new novel, The Given Day, before I got on a plane for Tampa and the Super Bowl, which I was broadcasting for the BBC. What was difficult was carrying it! My main regret was the proof copy was so big I didn't bring it with me; the notes I'd taken had stopped being comprehensive as I got more and more caught up in its many-layered story, eventually I was just jotting down some of the best lines and my admiration of the way he made the structure work. The novel is another quantum leap for a writer who'd already made one such jump, from his Kenzie and Gennaro books to Mystic River; it's an historical novel centered on the Boston police strike of 1919. It's also his first novel in five years, and worth the wait; I'd say it falls somewhere between Mystic River and E.L. Doctorow. It's a risky book too, because Lehane's stock as a 'crime writer' has never been higher, and though the novel is set among the police, and a corrupt police lieutenant is a great villain, worthy of any crime drama, the parameters of the story go far beyond that, to issues of race and class, immigration and melting pots, of unions and management, of government control and government's purpose, and of baseball.

It's a daring move, an epic novel from a writer who's one of the hottest properties in Hollywood, and thus far very well served by the movies. Not only was Mystic River made into a superb film by Clint Eastwood, but Ben Affleck directed brother Casey in a remarkable adaptation of Gone Baby Gone, which seemed to fall lamentably between the cracks when the awards season began. Martin Scorsese is filming Lehane's gothic thriller Shutter Island, a challenge to adapt for the screen, and Lehane himself has scripted for The Wire, the epic TV cop show.

I'd arranged to meet Lehane the day after the game, and that Monday it was pouring down rain in St. Petersburg, so I appreciated the old-fashioned portico protecting the sidewalk on the block of Central where the restaurant Bella Brava, incongruously chic and modern, is located. As it turned out Lehane had been at the game too (he actually met his wife at a Super Bowl party!), so we talked football and Bruce Springsteen's halftime show for a while, and noted how this rain seemed to be washing away all trace of the game from the area. He'd just finished with the annual writer's conference he runs at Eckerd College, where he did his own degree in writing; he doesn't spend much of his time in his native Boston anymore, living most of the year in St. Pete with his wife, who's an opthamologist there, and doing his writing in a downtown office. Lehane looks like a character from one of his Boston books, and sounds like it too, so I ask him about his time as a student at Eckerd, which must have been a big change from Boston.
DL: It got me to switch to decaf, if you will. To calm down. I wrote very minimalist at the time, and you could say I've been working away from that.
It's odd, because The Given Day is such a big book, but with its concerns with race and class, and the way you tell the big picture with smaller personal stories, it reminded me a lot of The Wire.
DL: Well, that all predates The Wire, the issues of class and race. My first novel was about race war standing in for class warfare, and that was the point of the last page of that book, if I can give myself props, cause I wrote it in 1990 (it was published in '94), I thought was the best thing I'd written. But The Wire, what it taught me in the last four years was distillation, and structure in a different way. The novelist's structure is unwieldy, and you don't realise how much so until you try an epic. Without The Wire I might have produced a 900 page book.
When I started reading The Given Day, it seemed familiar; the opening scene recalls The Natural, with Babe Ruth getting off the train, and Don DeLillo opened Underworld with the 1951 playoff. But what you did with it, both as framing, and commentary on the story, was impressive, and the way baseball comes back into the main story too, in just a small but significant way.
DL: Do you know the writer Stewart O'Nan? (Here we digress to discuss, as fellow Boston Red Sox fans, Faithful, a book O'Nan co-wrote with Stephen King about the Sox 2004 World Series win, the win which canceled Ruth's so-called 'Curse of the Bambino', and finally rewarded all us long-suffering followers). He has a concept he calls the 'natural clock container', and for me that was Ruth. My clock was from the 1918 World Series to Ruth's sale to the Yankees, and the police strike was the story contained within that container. It's the kind of thing you rarely see done on TV, because it's hard to follow one big story, there's too much indulgence, it's what stopped Twin Peaks, say, from being as great as it could've been. But the story has to stay true to its spine. I'd write stuff for The Wire that I'd love and at the story meetings they'd say 'that's great, but how does it pay off to the ending?', and they were right.
There's a great sense in The Given Day of things reflecting the past eight years in America, particularly in the way the powers that be, including J Edgar Hoover, invite trouble, as an excuse for repression. That's before John Hoover became J. Edgar, and the Bureau of Investigation became the FBI, and it's a great untold story about repression...
DL: Well, I don't think there's a single human being who's not a dirty bomb in Manhattan away from tromping all over civil liberties...
There's a great line, when James J. Storrow, who's sort of the enlightened upper-class, says of the police chief, Edwin Curtis, 'such men fiddle while cities burn...such men love ash'. Curtis, Hoover, governor Calvin Coolidge: we see their equivalents in government today.
DL: Thanks, I'm glad you liked the line, but there's no pat answer for the 'meaning' of the book. If it was pure good and bad, it wouldn't be interesting...
And the FBI agent Rayme Finch sees it, he says 'people don't want truth they want certainty, or the illusion of it.'
DL: Finch was a real character; he was the first Melvin Purvis, a superstar agent, who overshadowed Hoover. But what he's talking about, that's the human impulse.
It reminded me in a lot of ways of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.
DL: Hammett is so great. I have to go back and read that again. Everyone goes back to Chandler, but Hammett's where it starts.
It's interesting too that, in the end, the only union that saves the characters is the marriage union...
DL: I knew I was writing about unions, about all aspects of the word union. If you look back at my books you'll see I'm playing with one word or concept. But if you have to tell people what the ending means, it means you haven't done your job.
The Given Day is such a departure from your previous work; it's as big a jump from that as Mystic River was from your detective novels.
DL: It's hard for me to write unless what I'm doing scares me on some level, unless it's something I haven't done before. I have to stay as loose as possible, you can't worry about what people want. What you owe your audience is a great performance.
But with your next book you're going to return to Kenzie and Gennaro?
DL: Yes, it's ten years later, and it scares me. Do I still have that looseness? They had an ignorance about them, and I wonder if I can recapture that now that I've flirted with self-importance. But he (Patrick Kenzie) hadn't talked to me for ten years, and then all of a sudden I heard his voice in my head.
Was it Casey Affleck's voice?
DL: No, but it's funny, because Casey wasn't anything like what I'd pictured Patrick, but I can't get him out of my mind. But it worked. Only Ben and Casey knew what they were doing there, well, them and the DP (John Toll, cinematographer) but they could see it. Obviously, Patrick has aged, he's not 32 anymore.
You say 'flirted with self-importance'. I read an interview with you, and you talked about success and how you could've become 'a real dick', and your first marriage blowing up. But it wasn't clear in that interview, was this cause and effect?
DL: No, I had lost my wife and home, and then the book (Mystic River) took off. That's when I could've turned into a prick. But that's when I was able to put things into perspective. I tell my students don't become a writer because you need to self-actualise. Go to a therapist! So many have no idea of who they are, they think if they become successful it will tell them who they are, but it doesn't fill that part. I was secure, but with an incredible ego. What's dangerous is when you have the incredible ego but you're still insecure.
It sounds like a definition of Hollywood.
DL: It's so amazing to meet people there who are secure in themselves. They're talented, but it's their work. Ed Harris was like that, just so impressive. It's funny, because when Ben Affleck was shooting Gone Baby, he was shooting lots of coverage, and everyone was looking at each other saying, he must be be scared. If you shoot a lot of coverage either you're scared, or, if you're someone like Scorsese, you're a genius. Turned out, Ben knew exactly what he was doing.
Scorsese is making Shutter Island, with Leonardo DiCaprio. That novel was a real departure for you.
DL: I'd tried to jump on the bus and I felt like I'd be hanging on the side for the rest of my life.The first time I'd met Richard Price, who was a literary idol of mine, he asked what was the goofiest thing I could do, and I said write a gothic novel, and I figured if Richard Price didn't laugh me out of the room, I might as well try.
It seems a hard book to adapt for the movies
DL: Well, the script is terrific, and Scorsese's directing. With all that in play, it's all down to alchemy (laughs).
In your early books, and in both the first films, child abuse is a major theme.
DL: I worked with abused kids, as a counselor, and I had to stop. It was an obsession of my early writing, but it's tough, there's a fine line between calling attention to it, and exploiting the issue for entertainment. But coming up in the 80s, in writing workshops, the hardest thing to justify was the killing of a child, or writing about the holocaust. It was like you skipped twenty steps for empathy. It was like when I saw an ad for The Boy In Striped Pajamas. Children and the Holcaust, I said 'enough!'. But seriously, I sealed it for myself with Mystic River, and I don't have to go back there again.
We discussed films for a while, how The Wrestler revisited great 70s movies like Fat City or The Scarecrow. I was looking forward to seeing Gran Torino that night, and we talked Clint Eastwood, and eventually whether the shot of the little boy looking out the back seat of the car was a shot too much in Mystic River; a habit I'd suggested in my book about Clint that he had, when he wanted to make sure he hooked the audience. And finally we got down to the greatest line of dialogue in American film, and we were only a beat apart. For Lehane it's William Holden as Pike Bishop, in The Wild Bunch, saying 'let's go'. I'd always been more partial to Warren Oates' reply: 'why not?', but no, Lehane said, 'Holden's line is action, and Oates' is reaction'. 'Nilhilstic reaction,' I said, 'which is why I liked it'. 'But it's 'let's go' that defines the movie, and them,' he said, and thinking about it, he was right in an American hsitorical sense, even if Oates' line seems more purely Peckinpah, a signal of change, perhaps. 'Did you know,'Lehane asked, 'that Peckinpah wrote a whole scene for that, that they told him to cut, and he shot so little usable that 'let's go' was basically all that was left.' 'So he didn't start out minimalist, like you, he was just edited that way?' I said. There is a sense sometimes that big stories demand their own space, and in The Given Day it seems that Lehane has used no more space than that story demands. It's a major achievement.

NOTE: This interview also appears on Crime Time: www.crimetime.co.uk
THE GIVEN DAY is published by Doubleday, ISBN 9780385615341