DENNIS LEHANE'S SINCE WE FELL

“On a Tuesday in May, in her thirty-seventh year, Rachel shot her husband dead.” This is the line that begins the brief prologue to Since We Fell, a tour de force from Dennis Lehane which reminds is above all about what a talented writer he is. Like Mystic River, it is a novel about emotions. But what makes it so remarkable is the way it is told, in three sections, each with its own focus and its own style, the latter serving to emphasize the former.

The first, titled 'Rachel In The Mirror', could easily stand alone as a novella in a mainstream literary magazine. It covers the story of Rachel Childs, raised alone by her psychology-professor mother who authored a best-selling self-help book called The Staircase, which referred to the stages any relationship goes through, and which Elizabeth tells Rachel was a piece of 'emotionally adolescent snake-oil'. She barely remembers her father, who left the family when she was young, but she recalls her mother's threat as he walked away: “If you leave I will expunge you.” Her mother gave Rachel little information about her father, but she becomes determined to track him down, and after Elizabeth's death in a car crash, that determination becomes an obsession. The story of her quest is interwoven with her experience as a successful TV reporter in Boston, married to a successful producer, and on the verge of network stardom. She is sent to cover an earthquake in Haiti, and in the chaos that follows the disaster, she finds it impossible to 'report' the positive, and her career and marriage both crash. Like the quest for her father, it's a tale of disappointment, and a revelation about the nature of life and life's pain. It is a perfectly done, self-contained story, but one that needs to be remembered as the tale unfolds. It also contains one of Lehane's aphoristic moments, like the Irish whiskey scene in The Drop, when a character explains “the only people who ask questions like 'did he want to be something besides a bartender?' are people who can become whoever they want. The rest of us are just Americans.”

When the second section, 'Brian', opens, Rachel bumps into the private detective she had originally hired in Western Massachusetts to search for her father at the faculties of universities in the area. Brian is now back in charge of his family's lumber business in Canada, and he is the stable figure Rachel needs, as she's now suffering from an inability to face the world. But all, as they say, is not what it seems, and Brian is living a double life, built on a structure of lies. Were this the opening of the novel a shrewd marketing type might have called it The Girl On The Staircase, because it fits into that modern genre of woman battling to find the truth behind an ominous menace. Lehane is again pitch-perfect: his writing builds that menace slowly, and it concludes with the scene that opened the prologue.

The third section deals with the aftermath of the shooting, as Rachel tries to piece together the mysteries that have gone before. It's titled 'Rachel In The World', which reflects the change as she is forced to act. And it's written in the kind of action prose we've seen from Lehane in his last few novels, quick moving, event-driven, and pushing toward a conclusion that at first glance, while legitimate and consistent, might strike some as being somewhat mechanical. Until one stops to think about what has gone before and what has been said to Rachel and thought by Rachel, and presented to Rachel. And here is where this brilliant novel transcends the concept of psychological thriller, or to be more accurate, it tells us where the roots of the psychology that creates the situation for such thrillers lies, and what it means. Because what it is about, recall, is the nature of living, and how we cope with its pain. And what we do, Lehane is telling us, is play roles, play con games, by which we fool others and ourselves about what we are inside. From her mother's book and tales to the hitman playing injured father, from Rachel indoors or inside herself to Rachel out in the world as wife or as avenger, we learn to accept the darkness outside, the dirt beneath. Because, as we learn, we do not own life, we rent it.

Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane

Little, Brown £18.99 ISBN 9781408708330

published on 16 May

This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.Crimetime.co.uk)

RICHARD LANGE WINS THE CWA SHORT STORY DAGGER: A JUDGE'S TALE

The Crime Writers Association awards dinner June 30th was great fun, and I was privileged to attend as one of the judges for the Short Story Dagger award. It was my first experience of judging, and it was a long slog, with shall we say, an avalanche of stories from all different published formats--including one, Neil Gaiman's 'The Case Of Death And Honey' which we had been sent and all liked but then discovered had actually been entered for the Dagger the previous year!

Eventually Laura Wilson, our chair Ayo Onatade, and I each submitted long-lists of about 12 stories. I collated them, and it quickly became obvious that our short list had created itself. Two stories appeared on all three of our lists, three on two of the lists, and in correspondence we found the Dashiell Hammett story was on one long list (mine, as it happens) but had just missed the other two. It became our sixth story, and I was grateful to see it in print in what is a very fine collection for anyone keen on the progression of detective fiction from cosy to hard-boiled.

This was our short list, with the descriptions I wrote for the CWA's releases:

Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane 'Red Eye' (from Face Off, published by Sphere) Connelly's Harry Bosch travels from LA on the red eye to Boston to arrest a suspect his cold case file has turned up, and finds Lehane's Patrick Kinsey on a stake out of the same suspect. A tale whose understatement brings out the sharpness of both authors' handling of character, highlighting the differences between the two detectives in order to reveal their ultimate sameness at the core.

Dashiell Hammett 'The Hunter' (The Hunter & Other Stories/No Exit Press): In this story a detective who might be seen as a variation on Hammett's famous Continental Op uses ruthless bullying to try to get a confession, and in Hammett terms, something like the truth. This story, never published in its time, reminds us that the essence of hard-boiled is not cracking wise, ready violence, or blazing roscoes, but the world view which seeks solutions for their own sake, even though solving the crime does not necessarily bring society or its citizens (or its detectives) any closer to satisfactory solutions for their lives.

Richard Lange 'Apocrypha' (Sweet Nothing/Mulholland Press): An ex-convict called B works as a security guard in a jewellery store and lives in an LA flop house, where a couple of would be players who mock him as 'McGruff the Crime Dog' plan to rob his store. Lange reveals small bits of B's character with off-hand remarks about his past, but it's the fatalistic view of life, and the dark clarity with which it is drawn, that make this a subtly powerful neo-noir story.

Richard Lange 'Sweet Nothing' (Sweet Nothing/Mulholland Press): Richard Lange's stories of Los Angeles lie somewhere between Charles Bukowski and George Pelecanos. In 'Sweet Nothing' Dennis is a drug addict who's lost almost everything, including his children, and is trying to make himself respectable again. He shares an apartment with Troy, who weighs 450 pounds, and works as a manager in a Subway store. One night he meets a woman whose daughter is on life-support at a nearby hospital, hit by a car while jaywalking. Lange's characters are simply trying to get by in a world which sometimes seems casually antagonistic; this story is a very brightly lit piece of LA darkness.

Stuart Neville 'Juror 8' (OxCrimes/Profile Books): If you remember 12 Angry Men you will recall Juror 8, the older man with his own business who is the first one persuaded by Juror 9. But, asks Neville, what if Juror 9 weren't such a noble Henry Fonda, but more like the Fonda of Once Upon A Time In The West, and what if the boy accused of stabbing his father to death actually was guilty?

George Pelecanos 'The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us' (OxCrimes/Profile Books): In 1930s Washington DC, Greek immigrant Vasili is just starting his climb to the American Dream of success, and the one non-Greek friend he makes in his restaurant job turns up dead. Pelecanos' story is, like much of his writing, about the values of work and family, the struggles of little people in a world where those values aren't always followed. Vasili is written with such honesty the contradictions become plain, even in his own attitudes, but at heart he is a man of honour, and this is a dark look about what it means, or meant in those days, to be a man.

The two stories that appeared on all three long lists were 'Apocrypha' and 'The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us'.  When we met for lunch to decide the winner, it wasn't an easy decision, hence the commendation as runner-up for the Pelecanos, but in the end we were probably influenced by the overall quality of Lange's collection, the quality of the second-nominated story, 'Sweet Nothing', which is sweet nothing at all like the winner, and indeed, just passingly a 'crime' story at all, and the freshness of the voice.

What was fascinating to me was the similarity between our two finalist stories. Both are tales of men of low status working in jobs they feel lucky to have, whose choice of whether to act to do what they perceive as being right runs the risk of losing their job, if not creating the kinds of problems with the law and with the unlawly, that vulnerable people always face.

There was a small debate about 'The Martini Shot', the title story of George Pelecanos' first collection. I thought it was an impressive story, but there was some discussion whether it actually ran too close to novel length (which didn't bother me).  In the US, awards for novellas (indeed sometimes 'novelettes') are common but I don't see that as necessary. In the event there was also some discussion about the sex scenes in this one, whether they were necessary to the story and whether they distracted from it. But it should be noted Pelecanos came close to having two stories on the short list too. 

But Richard Lange was a new name to me, and having discovered his work was compensation enough for judging the award, even before the dinner. It was richly deserved, and you are advised to read him.

DENNIS LEHANE'S WORLD GONE BY

When we left Joe Coughlin at the end of Live By Night, he'd worked his way up to the top of Tampa's gangland, but lost his beloved wife Graciela in a shootout. He seemed ready to take his son and head for a quieter life in Cuba. But when World Gone By opens World War II is on, and Joe is of almost respectability in Tampa society, removed from the day-to-day of the gangster life while acting as the consigliore to the family headed by his old friend Dion Bartolo. But life will not stay quiet.

The war has taken many of the best soldiers who did the mobsters business, and a sort of chaos is brewing, sparked, Joe and Dion think, by an informer within their organisation. Joe's private life is about to get complicated; he's carrying on a dangerous affair, and he's informed, by a hit woman looking to stay safe in prison, that there is a contract out on him. But who would want to kill Joe Coughlin, whom everyone respects and nobody seems to hate? And he's started seeing a ghost.

You may recall Coughlin as a young boy, in The Given Day, where his father was a bigshot in the Boston police and his older brother was working his way up the blue ladder. But none of that was for Joe, and what Dennis Lehane's novel is about is the lure of the gangster life, Joe's inability to leave it behind, and the impossibility of squaring its twisted morality with that of the 'straight' world. 'Our thing' may swear by family, but as Joe knows all too well, his read family has paid a huge price to the other family whose life he so enjoys.

On the one hand, this is a fast-moving thriller. Who is trying to destroy the Bartolo-Coughlin good thing? Who wants Joe dead? And as Joe moves between a series of bad and worse men, you see the crack widening between his personal world outside the business and the business itself. And then slamming together very tightly. Within the pace of the plotting, some of this is Lehane's best writing: any number of chapters could literally stand alone as short stories (see 'Bone Valley' or 'Names On The Wind' as examples), and the punch line of 'Names On The Wind', in which a black gangster kills the man sent to kill him, who has just that day become a father, is telling: 'Who knows if you would have been any good at it?'.

It's like riding a car, which is under control, but just barely, because the driver knows what he is doing, but you know you are headed for a crash. In the end, it's as if Lehane himself is as much in love with the gangster life as Joe Coughlin is, only he's detached enough to see a bigger picture, a picture which includes ghosts. It is a marvellous feat to be able to write a sequel that at first seems to be a lesser version of its predecessor, and then turns out to be both simpler but more profound.

World Gone By by Dennis Lehane

Little,Brown £16.99 ISBN 9781408706695

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

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: THE DROP

The Drop tells the story of Bob Saginowski, a quiet bartender at Cousin Marv's, whose owner, Marv, actually is his cousin. But Marv isn't really the owner; the bar belongs to Chechen gangsters, and they use it as a drop, where the money collected from their night's activities is dropped off. They have lots of drop bars; the collection moves around. Bob's life is about to change, when two things happen. Walking home one night he rescues a battered dog from a garbage can; he's forced to adopt the dog and he also meets Nadia, who helps him cope with that. It changes again when two guys in masks rob Cousin Marv's. It wasn't a drop night, but the five grand lost still belongs to the Chechens; they want it back and they want the robbers gone. Bob's quiet but he knows things. 

The movie opens in the bar, with Bob buying a round for a group of friends remembering Richie 'Glory Days' Phelan, a small-time drug dealer who disappeared ten years before, after leaving Cousin Marv's. Marv doesn't like that Bob sprang for the round; it tells you a lot about the two, almost but not quite all you need to know.

Bob is a showcase role for Tom Hardy, the British actor who's got to adapt to Brooklynese (usually difficult, British actors tend to switch from Brooklyn to the Bronx to Alabama in the same sentence) and Hardy handles it well. When I reviewed Dennis Lehane's novel, an expansion of his original short story I said Hardy would have to underplay the role significantly (you can link to that here) and he does just that. In fact, at times his performance recalls Tim Robbins' in Mystic River, doing the slow retard shuffle for all it's worth. Mystic River, of course, was another Lehane story, and like Dave in that story, Bob may have simply seen too much.

The setting of The Drop has been changed, from Lehane's Boston to Brooklyn. Cousin Marv's bar is now decorated with a New York Giants football helmet lamp, and the patrons sport Giants and Jets jackets instead of Patriots or Red Sox. I suppose Brooklyn is hipper than Boston, but the film is resolutely unhip, set in the same kind of working class neighbourhood as Mystic River's Southie, full of dead ends and alleys, which Belgian director Michael Roskam seems to relish.

Because of the dog, and Nadia, Eric Deeds enters Bob's world. The dog was his, and if Bob wants now to keep it, there will be a price to pay. Deeds is a borderline psycho who is rumoured to have killed 'Glory Days'. And Bob has provided the police (and thus the Chechens) with a small piece of identification about the bank robbers: one wore a watch stopped at 6:15. From these roots the story proceeds slowly, but almost relentlessly. You have to pay attention to small bits of dialogue, to small actions, to keep up with it fully; there are hints dropped along the way which pay off as the story is resolved, but more important, there are echoes: characters who mirror each other, events that reverberate in time, and a feel of tragic inevitability to almost everything that happens.

It's the Eric Deeds character who's most problematic. Matthias Schoenarts, as if taking a cue from Hardy, underplays his character too, but sometimes the sense of real menace in Deeds is lacking. What the film does, subtly and quickly, is establish the way in which Deeds and Bob are yin and yang, contrasting sides of a coin. I don't want to review the film by comparison to the story and book, but in the novel Deeds is given a lot of background, establishing his own victimisation in prison, his own violence, and his self-help list of things to remember, a perverse sort of Dale Carnegie prescriptions to influence people, if not win friends. Also lost is the backstory for Detective Torres, which is not so essential, and, sadly, the wonderful speech about life which Chovko, the Chechen gangster, makes when Bob pours him a Midleton Irish. Only the punch line remains.

The original story was called 'Animal Rescue', and that's what the whole story is about. There are people who need rescuing throughout the film, and some get rescued, while others don't. That the local church, which Bob has attended regularly for ten years without taking communion, is being sold off for redevelopment simply echoes that theme. Hardy's hang-dog expression makes this theme of rescue clear, and Noomi Rapace is very good at playing another damaged person in need of rescue herself even as she throws a lifeline out to Bob. Picking up a small statue of angel with one wing at Bob's kitchen table she asks, 'do you want me to fix it?'

But the hidden center of the film is James Gandolfini, in his final role, as Marv. Once a player, if only on a small scale, he's now living with his sister (the excellent Ann Dowd), both of them hanging on to dreams but barely getting by. After the film one critic told me it was sad to see Gandolfini playing Tony Soprano yet again in his final role, but nothing could be further from the truth. He inhabits Marv, and his TV role never enters into it. It's a fine performance that works in perfect contrast to Hardy's restraint, exactly the way the characters should be, and it's that concentration on the contrast that makes The Drop work so well.

NOTE: This review also appeared at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

DENNIS LEHANE'S THE DROP: BOSTON'S BEST

The Drop was originally a stunning short story, called 'Animal Rescue', which was the  best story in the 2007 anthology Boston Noir. Dennis Lehane has expanded it into a short novel, and also written the screenplay for a film which has just opened in the US and will come to the UK as part of the London Film Festival. I suspect the screenplay may have preceeded the longer prose version, but I could be wrong. If you listened to this week's Americarnage podcast you heard me recommend it to our audience (if you didn't, you can take in the full hour of sports and arts mix here; if you do note that I was wrong in my guess about the cast; I checked afterwards and James Gandolfini plays Cousin Marv, which in retrospect is perfect casting) because this is a finely crafted piece of exceptional writing.

The Drop is the story of Bob Saginowski, a quiet bartender living a life of quiet loneliness until he rescues a beaten dog and takes it home. There's more to Bob than meets the eye—he's a steady presence Cousin Marv's bar; Marv actually is his cousin, but the bar is no longer his. It's owned by Chechen gangsters, who use it periodically but irregularly as a drop for their day's illegal profits. Marv is bitter about his fate; Bob seems resigned to his. The dog begins to change all that. But with him comes a woman, another battered soul named Nadia, and eventually with her comes a sleazy ex-convict, Eric Deeds, who's supposed to have murdered a local character called Richie Whalen, also known as 'Glory Days', one night when he left Cousin Marv's.

Dennis Lehane's writing took a great leap forward from his Kenzie and Gennaro series of detective novels with his first stand-alone, Mystic River, which he followed with Shutter Island, a smaller novel whose writing is tightly controlled in the service of a remarkable exercise in the ambiguity of psychological gothic horror. He wrote on The Wire, and his next two books were larger, historical pieces, The Given Day being the more ambitious of the two (you can read my Given Day interview with Lehane here) and then made a return to Kenzie and Gennaro a decade on.

Two things make this novel another step forward. First is the way, even within a shorter framework, Lehane layers his story. There is a cop, stuck in a dead-end within the force, who's investigating a robbery at Uncle Marv's, and whose senses tell him other secrets lie hidden. He attends mass at the same church as Bob, and has noticed Bob never takes communion; the church itself is being sold off by the diocese; it's community has disappeared.

Everything reflects, everything connects. It's all personal, the story is driven by human needs and human reactions. But the story is made memorable by the writing. At one point, the Chechen boss comes into Marv's, and we start to see glimmers of Bob's character as he, unbidden, reaches to the top shelf and pours a glass of Midleton Irish whiskey for Chovko while telling Marv to fetch a bottle of Stella Artois for his muscle, called Anwar. There's some tension around the return of money stolen from the bar, money left in bag with a severed hand included. Bob has cleaned, literally laundered, the dirty cash. Not confident in his position, he serves Chovko.

Chovka considered the drink Bob had placed in front of him. 'This isn't what you gave me last time'.

Bob said,'That was the Bowmore 18. You thought it tasted like cognac. I think you'll like this more'.

Chovka held the glass up to the light. He sniffed it. Looked at Bob. He put the glass to his lips and took a sip. He placed the glass on the bar. 'We die'.

''Scuse me?' Bob said.

'All of us,' Chovka said. 'We die. So many different ways this happens. Anwar, did you know your grandfather?'

Anwar drank half his Stella in one gulp. 'No. He's dead long time.'

'Bob,' Chovka said, 'is your grandfather still alive? Either of them?'

'No, sir.'

'But they lived full lives?'

'One died in his late thirties,' Bob said, 'the other made it into his sixties.'

'But they lived on this earth. They fucked and fought and made babies. They thought THEIR day was THE day, the last word. And then they died. Because we die.' He took another sip of his drink and repeated, 'We die,' in a soft whisper. 'But before you do?' He turned on the stool and handed Anwar the glass. 'You gotta try this fucking whiskey, man.'

I don't often quote a passage, but that is some writing: perfectly paced, with the right tone and resonance. It's reflective, it's telling, and it breaks the very mood it sets. The book is filled with writing like this. I say this with some hesitance, and not just because it's Boston, but The Drop might be the closest thing I've read to the quality on honesty in writing which mirrors honesty in character, the quality that made The Friends Of Eddie Coyle so special. That means it's among the best Boston writing ever, and more important, among the best crime fiction too.

The Drop by Dennis Lehane

Abacus £7.99 ISBN 9780349140728

JEREMIAH HEALY: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Jeremiah Healy has been up at the Guardian online as of last Friday (while I was out of touch in the wilds of New Hampshire); I don't know if it's been in the paper paper or not. You can link to it here. It's pretty much as written: there was an odd addition that said the books were set in 'Beantown', a fictionalised Boston, but that was removed.

The bit mentioned from my essay in Following The Detectives, about demolishing a whole neighbourhood was actually a quote from Jerry, a joke, but one that established the location of Beth's cemetery perfectly for my essay. Jerry also spoke admiringly and knowingly of the other Boston writers who featured in the essay: Parker, Dennis Lehane and George V. Higgins--I mentioned this in my copy but it was edited out. I think there would be an interesting essay to be written about connections between Higgins and Healy and their fictions. And of course Spenser knows a cop named Healy...

I knew the Healy books well, but I can't pretend to have known Jerry. Yet I could have extended the obit much further from the personal comments of writers, critics and fans all of whom found him a fascinating and memorable person, as well as a dedicated and talented writer. It was for me a privilege to be able to write about him, and something that helped mitigate the sad circumstances of his death. I hadn't read the Terry Devane books, so I've ordered the first one, and hope to renew our acquaintance that way.

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

SHUTTER ISLAND: THE FILM

The big problem with adapting to film any story which withholds crucial information as a key device is maintaining the secret, the illusion which drives the story's twist. It can be desperately hard to do; think of Angel Heart as a prime example. In Shutter Island, to which I've finally caught up, the deftness with which Martin Scorsese illuminates the depths of Teddy Daniels' psyche merely serves to reveal, alarmingly early, what is going on, that the threats he (and more importantly we, the audience) experiences are internal.

At times, Scorsese, who seems to draw on any number of cinematic references throughout the film, almost restages Marat/Sade, which may, in the end be the best reference for this version of Dennis Lehane's much more low-key novel. Robert Richardson's camera moves with the kind of fluidity you expect in Scorsese, drawing out the shadows and the horror-movie iconography as if charting the actual inside of Daniels' damaged mind (think of Roger Corman's House Of Usher). It's probably no coincidence that Scorsese produced a 2007 documentary about Val Lewton's RKO horror pictures, which depend more on mood and psychological drama than actual physical schocks. And of course there's more than little Alfred Hitchcock here; although Robbie Robertson's score is composed of found music, much of it 20th century classical, it is often amplified to almost hysterical levels, in a way that recalls, as I'm sure it was meant to, Bernard Herrmann working for Hitchcock.

Scorsese remains faithful to Lehane's novel, but is able visually to draw out the business of Daniels' having bee with the soldiers who liberated Dachau. But there's a strange disconnect, between the horror of the Holocaust, the fear of nuclear destruction (classic 1950s sf paranoia) Jackie Earle Haley rants about, and the actual killings that form the heart of Daniels' personal tragedy. I found myself constantly trying to fit the jigsaw pieces of trauma together (and Max Von Sydow, as the almost cliched Nazi scientist has a small lecture of trauma and dream, which would be where even the slowest member of the audience would finally pick up the hints) but failing.

Von Sydow relishes his role, but the film is stolen in some ways by Mark Ruffalo, who seems to physically transform himself depending on which role he is playing to Teddy, and by some of the players in smaller parts, notably Ted Levine, as the warden, and Patricia Clarkson, as one of the two versions of Rachel, the disappeared patient Teddy has come to the island's hospital for the criminally insane to find. It's awkward that Ben Kingsley is always doing exposition and trying to look nervous, and that John Carroll Lynch as the deputy warden appears to channelling Danny Aiello. Rachel Williams is sometimes badly judged as his dead wife; Teddy's description of her is far more chilling than any attitude she can muster. But the other difficulty is Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems to have brought along his bad faux-Bahstan accent from The Departed to play the same character he played in Revolutionary Road, with the same problem of believablity as a grizzled 1950s WWII veteran. He just doesn't have the matter-of-fact gravitas you'd expect from the era; more Tony Curtis than Richard Conte.

Scorsese, although this is DiCaprio's film, taking place within Teddy's head, never actually lingers there too long. In the end, that's why the movie works well as it does, because he's taken the Brian DePalma-like decision to make us the character, and let us experience what's happening to Teddy, and try to make sense of it. That we can figure it out, and still not make sense, still feel caught up by the swirling morass of his sanity, is a tribute to his immense skill as a film-maker.

Shutter Island (2009) directed by Martin Scorsese, screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis from the novel by Dennis Lehane

ROBERT B PARKER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY, COMPLETED

My obituary of the great detective novelist Robert B Parker is in today's Guardian; you can link to it here. I read Parker from his very first novel, and probably read just about all of them, and the bit about the Chandler revival was true; those Ballantine editions with the glossy covers were very popular, and I wrote an essay at the time for a magazine called Starling, about discovering Chandler. Maybe I'll dig it out and reprint it here. I've written a lot about Parker over the years, and my attitude toward him is summed up in one of my favourite 'interviews'; a review of Trouble In Paradise which you can link to from the 'Bullseyes' section to the right, or by hitting the link here.

I felt unusually odd writing the obit because last month I finished an essay on Boston for Following The Detectives, a Maxim Jakubowski-edited anthology about various cities and their detectives, which was predominantly about George Higgins, Parker, and Dennis Lehane. And in November I reviewed his Spenser novel The Professional, linked to here, which is worth reading because it summarises both the strengths and weaknesses of his later work. But I could still hear what I'd written then echoing around my head, Parker's death was that unexpected.

The obit ran mostly as written, allowing for the usual oddities of style (Colby College became Colby college, though one would never see Oxford university in the British press; the actress Helen Hunt became an actor), but lost was one comment on why Parker's slighter work remained entertaining; the wise-cracking Spenser usually got the zingers to end each chapter--zinger was probably thought to need explanation.

More crucially, an entire paragraph on his westerns was cut. This was odd, because it reflected the earlier reference to Rich Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation, because it connected Tom Selleck to the Jesse Stone films, which also thus go unmentioned, because Gunman's Rhapsody is an important work within his output, because Appaloosa was a quality film, and a successful one, and also because the forthcoming fourth novel in the Cole and Hitch series is mentioned in the final paragraph, but with no explanation, as if the previous reference had not been excised. Anyway, here's the missing bit, which was the penultimate graf in my copy:
-->

In 2001, Parker's novel Gunman's Rhapsody recast Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as Spenser and Hawk; which led to his working on the screenplay for the 2003 TV movie remake of the classic Monte Walsh, starring Tom Selleck. Selleck then played Jesse Stone in a series of TV movies between 2005-09, with one remaining unaired. Parker's 2005 western, Appaloosa, was made into an excellent film by the actor Ed Harris, and spawned two more novels featuring lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. 

I could go on about how the link between westerns and detective stories is so important, but mostly I'd like to end by remembering just how much pleasure Parker's writing brought me over the years, and how much we will miss him now that he's gone.

GEORGE PELECANOS' WAY HOME

George Pelecanos' novels arrange themselves, mostly, in series; the three Nick Stefanos books, the outstanding DC Quartet, which includes two of his very best, and the quartet featuring Derek Strange (and sometimes Terry Quinn). Shoedog, another of his best, is a standalone, and Drama City (thus far) appears to be one too. Although on the surface there are no concrete links to suggest that Pelecanos is in the process of building another series, I find it very easy to approach The Way Home, his excellent new novel, as very much part of a continuity with his previous two books, The Night Gardener and The Turnaround; a trilogy concerned deeply with issues of parenthood, of how we as parents and we as a society raise our children, and in the changing perception of values within that society, and which may reflect some of his experiences writing for The Wire .

I am not suggesting that Pelecanos is writing a novelized version of the TV series, absolutely not. There is a sense, in a sprawling narrative like The Wire, that you can cover lots of angles and bring a multitude of perspectives to bear. But Dennis Lehane talked (see the IT interview here) of having to leave out lots of good material because it didn't drive the storylines forward. The brilliance of what Pelecanos has done in his last three books is to focus his story-telling within narrative arcs that enable him to focus on specific personal stories. The Night Gardener had a framework of murder to be solved. But in Turnaround, the crime was in the past, and it was the working out of the present that drove the story. In The Way Home, it is a crime not committed, a sense of values upheld, that provides the tension, and by keeping that central plot simple, the narrative is left free to consider the characters. Spareness was the key to Shoedog; like a fine Gold Medal noir, there was no waste, which left you inside the characters. The same sort of spareness, but with a far more sensitive affinity for the quotidien society around those characters, makes The Way Home compulsive reading, and I think it's fair to say few Gold Medal books would strike such a chord of realism in the internal dynamics of an average working family in America in their own time as Pelecanos does today.

Chris Flynn is a teenaged screw-up, much to the consternation of his hard-working, blue-collar father Thomas. When Chris is sent to a juvenile prison, Thomas feels his son has to learn to pay the price for his actions, and in confinement, Chris eventually does. The story then shifts; Chris is working, laying carpet with his father, one of his prison buddies as his partner. He has a girlfriend, he has a straight life. Then, tearing up a floor, Chris discovers a bag of money...and leaves it. And from that point, the story escalates, with confrontation taking on an inevitability that will force Chris and his father to make hard choices, about exactly what it is men have to do, and exactly what fathers need to do for their sons.

Pelecanos writes movingly about the little things that make fatherhood; Flynn remembering the heat of his son's little hand as he rode in his bicycle seat. But that is part of a bigger picture. He states clearly what Flynn is: 'a guy who went to work every day, who took care of his family...and would pass on without having made a significant mark. He had been fine with this in the past. His aim was to install values, work ethic and character into his son, and see him through to adulthood, where he would become a productive member of society and in turn pass this along to his own children. But when Chris jumped the tracks, Flynn's belief in the system failed.' This is the central theme of this trilogy, and the failure of the system is not just one of kids going off the rails.

There is an element of melodrama about this; Chris' prison attitude is changed by a tragic event and the story is resolved with a piece of 'standing-up' whose roots may be a little more sentimental than realistic. Pelecanos' model is often the myth of the American west, where men have to do what men have to do, but where families, and houses, are signs of 'civilization' imposing itself on the lawless wilderness. Given the metaphor, the fact that Pelecanos is, at heart, a sympathetic writer, makes such hints of sentimentality work. They also work because, in the other thing which seems like it might be Wire-influenced, this book has the structure and flow of a scene-by-scene screenplay: each scene works, leads to the next, keeps the flow moving. It's a bravura piece of writing, and would make a fine film in the right circumstances. One final point about the Wire influence: possibly the pressures of working on the show ended Pelecanos' novel-a-year pace, if only for one year, but I think it shows in both The Turnaround (see my original review of that book, the first post to IT, here) and this book, in the sense that the personal stories are now foregrounded, the territory is staked out, and the crime elements are really there for structure. I think those two novels may have had a little longer to percolate, and they are among his best books as a result.

Sometimes, when people wonder why I'm drawn to crime fiction, I say because it addresses society as it is, not as we'd like it to be. The reality is, crime fiction doesn't actually do that very often. More often, it's addressing society as we dramatize it, without accepting that the dramatisation is real. The beauty of The Wire was that the dramatization did become real, something you can't simply finish and walk away from and never think about again. That is what Pelecanos has done here. The beauty of The Way Home is that you finish the novel and wonder whether, in the real world, living up to values alone is enough to get it done.

NOTE: This review also appears at Crime Time: www.crimetime.co.uk

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN: MY GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of John Hope Franklin is in today's Guardian (here). It was one of those that was a privilege to be able to write, to say a little about someone whose own career stood as a monument to what was accomplished by the civil rights movement, even though he accomplished much of it in the face of systemic apartheid.


It was also fascinating to discover some stories I hadn't known before, especially that of his namesake, John Hope, educated at Worcester Academy, which I knew well as a teenager, whose father was white and mother black, but who refused every chance to 'pass' in the white world, and became a founder, with WEB DuBois, of the Niagara Movement. Franklin's biography of George Washington Williams seems equally interesting --almost a prototype of the Hope and Hope Franklin characters, and the story of his father Buck resonated because of the bits of Dennis Lehane's The Given Day set in Tulsa's prosperous black areas, a sort of tribal homeland before its time.

It's not just that Franklin was a great man; it's the idea that the power of learning, of writing, of teaching can have such an impact on the 'real' world. That's what we hope, so to speak, might still apply, especially since the battlelines are so much less well-defined in today's world.

DON WINSLOW'S ISLE OF JOY

I was impressed by the first Don Winslow novel I read, the excellent California Fire & Life, which I reviewed way back in 1999 for Crime Time 2.6 (number 18 if you're counting in decimals). The Power Of The Dog was one of the best books of 2005, a major novel that deserved mainstream attention. Since then he's published two well-crafted suspense novels, The Winter Of Frankie Machine (which Michael Mann is filming, starring Robert De Niro, for release next year) and The Dawn Patrol (which I reviewed last October for Crime Time, you can find that here), strong on characterization and setting, which I've compared elsewhere to T. Jefferson Parker's consistently successful Orange County stand-alones. But if Winslow has been strong on Californian background, it is nothing compared to this brilliant love-note to 1950s Manhattan.

I hadn't known what to expect when I uncovered a copy of the original Arrow edition, published two years before CF&L. Isle Of Joy, it turns out, is a small-scale tour de force. It should have made some reputation for Winslow, although I can see why it may have been overlooked at the time. A somewhat tongue-in-cheek spy thriller, it's not quite comic enough to be farce, but given the way the story proceeds to a most serious finish, one wonders if, had the overall tone been more serious throughout, it might have reached a bigger audience. I think the same fate has befallen a couple of Robert Littell's books, and it's a fine line to walk.

This one is a roman a clef, with a thinly-disguised John Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, who in this case is conflated with an earlier JFK lover into a spy. Walter Withers is an ex-CIA agent now working as a PI in late 1950s New York, when he is assigned to bodyguard Senator Joe Keneally's and his wife on Christmas Eve. But his real function is to act as beard when Kenneally needs to sneak off with actress Marta Marlund, and of course Marlund winds up dead, in Keneally's room. What follows is a story which twists and turns between the police, FBI, and CIA, with political capital up from grabs and betrayal suggested at every turn. There are more characters whose models are easily recognisable, not least a fiery Jack Kerouac. Everyone has secrets to hide, even Withers' erstwhile girlfriend, nightclub singer Anne Blanchard, whose life in the Village contrasts sharply with Walter's staid WASPy uptown.

That's important, because as I said the real beauty of this novel is its nostalgic portrayal of New York City in the late 1950s, when it was the center of the known universe, and when anything was possible. Winslow does as fine a job as anyone I've read at conveying the real feel of the era: if you've been watching Mad Men on television, you need to go back a few years before the really modern stuff started to take hold, before the fabric of life itself started to change. It's wonderfully evocative, while at the same time hinting that the betrayals and twists of the worlds of politics and spying were somehow part and parcel of the new world which was coming.

There's also a key scene set at the 1958 NFL championship game, between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts, the so-called 'Greatest Game Ever Played', when pro football began to slip into the nation's consciousness to replace baseball. Although Winslow makes a couple of sporting errors (Jim Parker, not Joe; and New York wouldn't be talking about Mantle and Maris together in 1958, as Maris was in Kansas City) they're not serious (of course, not everyone is a sports pedant, luckily for them. I'd noticed a couple of baseball anachronisms, and a train-route problem, in the proofs of The Given Day, but according to Dennis Lehane they were caught before the book went to press) I hope they were corrected when Arrow reissued the book last year. The audience that lapped up Mad Men, which was enough for The Mendes Family to hack up Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road on their behalf, ought to lap this up too. It's Yates' era, but it's dealing with the Manhattan the characters in RR left behind. In fact, Winslow nails Yates' dilemma when Walter mulls over the impending death of the Manhattan bar.

'This new American dream, neither city nor country but a banal melange of the two. A society connected by television and automobile and little else except the desperate delusion...that we all want the same thing, a house in the suburbs...A few more years and the clubs will be dead...and I'll be one of the few mourners at the wake. The rest of America will be in their suburban bomb shelters sitting in the televised glow of the seemingly endless parade of cowboy shows.'

That's a brief contemplative pause in what's otherwise a fast and entertaining trip. Winslow deserves a wider audience, and this is the kind of book that, once he has that audience, would cement his reputation.

Isle Of Joy Don Winslow Arrow (1996) £6.99 ISBN 0099706415 reissued 2008 ISBN 9780099706410

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