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)

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

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S DROP

The Drop pits Harry Bosch against an acronym; the drop in this case referring to Deferred Retirement Option Plan. When Bosch was brought back onto LAPD and assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit, he knew it would be for a limited time, but now he's hoping to get the maximum extra time allowed before being forced to retire. But as usual with Michael Connelly and with Bosch, there are ambiguities: The Drop might also refer to the drops of blood from a long-unsolved rape-murder which provide a link with a convicted rapist—only he was only eight years old at the time. If someone messed up with the DNA, any number of convictions could be overturned as a result.

Or The Drop might the dive taken by LA political fixer George Irving, found dead beneath the balcony of the room he'd just taken at the Chateau Marmont. Did he fall? Did he jump? Was he pushed? Irving's father is Irvin Irving, a city councilman whose enmity Harry earned when they were both on the force. Irving's now a thorn in the LAPD's side, but he wants Harry as the investigator, and so does the Chief: putting Harry in his usual position between a rock and hard drop.

If that sounds relatively complicated, rest assured it is. George Irving made his living peddling his father's influence, and he was involved in fixing a city licence for taxi services, and might have bent a cop or two to do it. Harry's former partner Kiz now works in the chief's office, and the politics of the department's battle with Irvin Irving lurk over every move Harry makes. The two cases are not connected, but as Harry investigates the rapist whose DNA was identified, now living in a halfway house, he becomes involved with one of the workers there, someone who believes people can be helped to change, that evil is not a permanent state of being. Someone who brings a palette of grays to Harry's more black and white, or shall we say noirish, world.

That has always been the strong point of the Bosch novels, the way that Connelly can meld the format of the police procedural with the noirish, if not hard-boiled, detective. Because Bosch works outside the subtleties and compromises of politics, he fights against his own demons, which tend to make those on his side, but without his morals, almost as guilty as the criminals he chases.

The Drop is Bosch at his complex best, and if anything Connelly weaves a web so tight that the series of revelations at novels end function like a stone skipping across water—and leave enough uncertainty about Harry's future to make his own drop, or Drop, ambiguous. It's Connelly at his best, and there aren't many better.

The Drop by Michael Connelly
Orion, £18.99 ISBN 9781409134282