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)

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

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

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