INTERVIEW:Crime writer, mainstream novelist, and now the creator of a 'majestic fiery epic' . . . Dennis Lehane refuses to be categorised, writes George Kimball
AS SHOOTING FOR the Hollywood adaptation of his noir novel Shutter Island wrapped up last summer, Dennis Lehane, on a rare visit to the set, engaged in a brief conversation with its director about the soundtrack possibilities. Lehane was acutely aware that the musical components are conceptually central to the iconic director's films, but he wasn't about to tell Martin Scorsese how to make a movie.
"But if I can throw you a few breadcrumbs here," he told Scorsese. "I listened to a lot of Sinatra singing Rogers and Hart while I was writing it." Lehane likes to write to what he calls his own "soundtracks". In the past, he had created a working ambience by simply choosing the music and cranking up the volume, but the 1919 era of his latest book didn't seem to lend itself to the approach. ( It's a Long Way to Tipperaryand Hinky-Dinky Parlez-vous? evidently don't sound quite the same on an iPod.) "When I started The Given Day, I first tried to listen to the music of the time, but I found it distracting," said Lehane. "So for the most part I listened to blues - a lot of RL Burnside and Howling Wolf, a lot of guys on the Fat Possum label, plus Nina and Etta.
"As I was writing Mystic River, I listened to a lot of high-energy stuff, because I wanted the narrative voice to be that of a guy sitting beside you at a bar, telling a story he was really excited to be divulging," he recalls. "So Mystic Riverwas written to early Springsteen and Them and The Clash, Green Day, the Pretenders, Red Hot Chili Peppers, stuff like that.
"The Kenzie books all had different soundtracks. I know I wrote the second and the fourth to Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana and Guns N' Roses. It's been so long that I can't really remember everything about the others, but I don't think I wrote any book in that series without Exile on Main Street, Let It Bleed, and Sticky Fingersplaying regularly in the rotation."
As he moved through his 20s, Lehane, who had spent the better part of the decade immersed in creative writing programmes at a succession of colleges and universities, found himself increasingly disenchanted with what he described as "faux-literary fiction" and decided to take a break.
"At some point I realised that, for better or for worse, I was most attracted to what Cormac McCarthy calls 'fiction of mortal event'," said Lehane in recalling his epiphany.
To alleviate his boredom, he sat down and in the space of three weeks knocked out the first draft of A Drink Before the War.Set in the same gritty Dorchester neighbourhood of Boston in which Lehane had grown up, the book seemed on one level an homage to the classic detective novels of the pulp era. Lehane's debut novel introduced his own alter ego, a hip, intrepid young detective named Patrick Kenzie who solves crimes with Mick Jagger blasting through his earphones, and his sometime business partner, the ravishingly lovely Angie Gennaro.
Somewhat to his surprise, he found himself universally lauded as the wunderkind of cutting-edge mystery fiction. He had yet to turn 30, and he was the best-selling mystery novelist in America.
A Drink Before the War shot to the top of the list, and each of its successors in the Kenzie- Genarro series - Darkness, Take My Hand (1996 ), Sacred (1997 ), Gone, Baby, Gone (1998) and Prayers for Rain(1999) - outsold its predecessors.
The Lenzie-Gennaro mysteries were not only critically acclaimed, but had earned such a devoted and loyal following that he could probably have been assured a comfortable living had he devoted the rest of his life to nothing else. But, with his 35th birthday approaching, Lehane made the risk-taking decision to send his detectives on an extended hiatus. "Patrick and Angie needed a little R&R after gunfights and car chases and a multitude of injuries both physical and emotional," he explains.
The detective novels had been characterised by a meticulous, brick-by-brick depiction of Boston geography. Lehane decided to set Mystic River in East Buckingham, an imaginary neighbourhood he had initially created for the novella he wrote as his graduate thesis. Although East Buckingham was inescapably a Boston neighbourhood, albeit a composite one, Lehane found the experience of working within his alternate universe liberating. The tale of three working-class friends affected by a single, traumatising boyhood episode brought back into focus a quarter-century later was a stunning triumph. The New York Times Book Reviewcalled it "a powerhouse of a novel."
"Boy," marvelled Elmore Leonard, another crime novelist who defies categorisation, "does he know how to write!"
In his next book, Lehane not only ventured outside the familiar comfort of his urban surroundings, but to an era that preceded his birth. Set in the 1950s, Shutter Island was a dark and spooky neo-Gothic tale with an escaped serial killer loose on a barren, windswept island in the midst of a howling hurricane - Elmore Leonard meets the Brontë sisters, if you will.
Given his bourgeoning reputation, by now even the avant-garde fiction he had abandoned in despair a decade earlier seemed commercially viable.
After Gwen, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly(it would be republished in both "The Best Short Stories" and the "Best Mystery Stories" of 2005) provided the centrepiece for Coronado, a collection of five short stories and the eponymous two-act play. (He had adapted Coronado, a stage version of After Gwen, as a vehicle for his brother, the New York actor Gerry Lehane.) Although his website had promised that Patrick and Angie would return in his next book, the notion of committing himself to a big-stage historical epic had been gnawing at him for some time.
"Growing up in Boston, I'd always been somewhat fascinated by the idea that at some time in the not-too-distant past our police force had walked off the job," he recalled. "Around 2003, I began to look into it, and was blown away by what I found. I began to devour any books I could find concerned with either the strike in particular, or the era in general. After steeping myself in that for about a year, I moved on into the actual writing of the thing."
The 1919 police strike was an episode fraught with moral ambiguity: the constabulary, underpaid, overworked, and underappreciated, had indisputably been pushed to the limit, but their decision to walk off the job inadvertently, if predictably, unleashed a three-day orgy of widespread looting and rape. The establishment reacted by mobilising the National Guard - and by deputising the Harvard football team - to restore order.
His actions in crushing the police union would elevate the heretofore obscure Massachusetts governor, Calvin Coolidge, to the 1920 Republican vice-presidential nomination, and when Warren G Harding died in office three years later, Coolidge became the 30th president of the US, an ironic consequence Lehane deliberately addresses only by implication in The Given Day.
"There are a lot of events in the book that had far-reaching implications," he acknowledges. "The returning soldiers who attended Game 5 of the 1918 World Series (and probably unleashed a nationwide influenza epidemic in the process); what would happen to the Greenwood section of Tulsa about a year-and-a-half after the book ends; Coolidge's ascendancy onto the national stage . . . I just thought it cooler to leave those future ripples for the reader to discover if he feels like it. You don't have to know, for example, that the Italian army was wiped out by the Turks in Cypress to enjoy Othello, but it is a neat piece of information to stumble across after you've read the play."
Lehane's depiction of 1918-1919 Boston explores many deep-seated conflicts - the entrenched, patrician Brahmin ruling class versus the growing political influence of the predominantly Irish-American police force and civil service, and the condescending attitude of both toward the new wave of immigrants and the perceived threat of "Bolshevism" - but, almost curiously, his rendition of the prevalent racial climate is relatively benign, considering that the "Red Summer" saw blacks slaughtered in ugly race riots elsewhere in America.
His own adolescence coincided with the highly contentious "busing crisis" of the mid-1970s, a dark era of ugly racial polarisation which saw Boston labelled - not entirely unfairly - as "the most racist city in America outside the confederacy". Lehane appears to have emerged unscarred by the experience, and his fiction has consistently reflected an understanding of the city's racial complexities.
"Edward Everett Square, where I grew up, was right where white South Boston met black Dorchester, so there was exposure to both groups," recalled Lehane. "I'm not saying there wasn't some racism, but in that environment it was more usually (in the words of Rodney King), 'Why can't we all get along?' During the busing crisis, the more prevalent view in my neighbourhood was that we'd look at those lunatics from Southie and say 'Hey, that's not us!'" A Drink Before the Wardispassionately explored the chasm dividing working-class Irish-American attitudes and those of the emergent black gangsta element spawned by the stark hopelessness of inner city ghetto life. The Given Day deconstructs the post-first World War era through the interwoven lives of its three central characters, one of whom, Luther Laurence, is a sympathetically-drawn African-American.
"There was the beginning of an uptick of racism at the time, but nothing near what it was on a national level, simply because the minority population in Boston was so tiny that blacks weren't perceived as a threat," says Lehane. "Luther, for instance, is treated for the most part with a sort of noblesse oblige by most of the white people he encounters - with the obvious exception of McKenna, the Boston police lieutenant."
Lehane intended all along to develop his storyline through a trio of major characters. Aidan (Danny) Coughlin is a first-generation Irish-American policeman dispatched on an undercover mission to infiltrate the subversive labour movement, only to wind up a leader of the policemen's union. He is joined on the journey by a pair of erstwhile Coughlin family servants, each on the run from the past, in Nora, the "fresh-off-the boat" Irish immigrant he eventually marries, and Luther, the African-American with whom he bonds in a mutually shared respect. Left implicit in the telling of the tale is that the social status of Nora isn't markedly different from that of Luther, even in the view of the lace-curtain family that employs, and then fires, them both.
As he wrote the book, Lehane discovered that other characters kept pushing themselves to the forefront. Police captain Thomas Coughlin, Danny's father, was originally conceived as "a flat, (Karl) Rovian 'guy behind the guy'." "But he just kept deepening every time I took another look at him," Lehane reveals. "I liked that he existed in a state of perpetual contradiction: he's corrupt and moralistic; he's loving but he's brutal; he's cynical, but he holds deep, old-fashioned core values. That probably all happened because I didn't impose my will on him. I just let him tell me, page by page, who he was." Actual historical figures, from Coolidge to J Edgar Hoover and the bumblingly indecisive Boston Mayor Andrew Peters, interact with Lehane's fictional cast, and the baseball icon George Herman (Babe) Ruth plays an important role, providing the transitional scenes that move the story along.
Ruth, the most celebrated athlete of his day, was sold by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees in 1919 following a one-man labour revolt of his own, and while it wouldn't be accurate to describe his function as that of a Greek chorus - Babe isn't smart enough for that - the naive innocence with which he observes the unfolding of events serves its purpose. Readers, on the other hand, may find it difficult to reconcile Lehane's Ruth with the larger-than-life figure of The Big Bam, Leigh Montville's definitive 2006 biography of the "Sultan of Swat".
"When Montville's book came out I was already three years into the writing of mine," explains Lehane. "By then Ruth was my Ruth. I didn't want to lose him to something as mundane as facts, so I deliberately steered clear [of The Big Bam]. I'd read pieces of other biographies, but mostly, I wanted to keep Ruth rooted in my fictional cast. He works better that way."
Sporting motifs are a common recurrence in Lehane's fiction. (Patrick Kenzie sometimes seems to keep track of time by the Red Sox's schedule; the murder central to the Mystic River film is foreshadowed as a baseball game plays on the bar-room television.) Danny's introduction in The Given Day comes in a blow-by-blow description of his winning bout in an inter- departmental boxing match.
"That scene was born almost out of desperation," recalls Lehane. "I'd worked out all kinds of ways to introduce Danny's character, and in my mind they all sucked. It finally came to me that because I had several others noting that Danny used to box, that might be a way of getting into it. Once I settled on that, it fell easily into place and I was able to establish his character by his performance in the boxing ring.
"Sports are dramatically interesting," says Lehane. "There's a built-in conflict, built-in desires (winning), and an obvious built-in physicality, which is always a boon to drama. That's probably why sports show up in a lot of my books. It's definitely not because of my own non-existent athletic ability. I did play baseball, but I was just good enough to realise how good I wasn't."
Sprawling period piece that it is , The Given Dayhas struck more than one critic as the blueprint for an epic film, and the option rights were almost immediately snapped up by Paramount, with Sam Raimi set to direct. But, Lehane hastens to point out, "if I'd been thinking of a movie I wouldn't have written a 700-page book." Although his oeuvre has already spawned four films, including two still in production, Lehane deliberately distances himself from Hollywood's treatment of his work. ("I have no desire to operate on my own children," he once famously said.) "I wouldn't say I wash my hands of it entirely, but I do keep a distance," he reflects. "I'm involved to the extent that before I sell the book I have a say in deciding whom I'm going to sell it to. I've consistently picked people of quality, and I think I'm a decent judge of what quality is when it comes to film. Once I've picked those people, be it Eastwood or Affleck or Scorsese, then I step back and trust my original instincts by putting my faith in them, and hope it's rewarded.
"I know books, " adds Lehane. "Scorsese and Sam Raimi know movies. It's their gig." While many writers find themselves wincing at the prospect of what Hollywood has done to their books, Lehane is for the most part satisfied.
"I think Mystic Riveris a terrific film but the elapsed time between my finishing the book and when I saw the adaptation on the big screen was less than two years, so I had no real perspective on it as a whole; no suspension of disbelief," he remembers. "I can only judge it by its component parts, and it has great acting, great direction, great cinematography, great script distillation - and very shaky Boston accents!"
Mystic Riveropened in October 2003, and was both a commercial and artistic success. A $100 million worldwide gross more than offset the $30 million production cost, and Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Academy Awards (for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively). The movie was nominated for four others, including two for Eastwood (Best Picture and Best Director).
Lehane's only traceable fingerprint in the film came in a cameo role: watch the Buckingham Day parade sequence closely and you'll see Dennis Lehane, presumably representing some goofy politician, waving to the crowd from from a convertible.
Fellow Boston native Ben Affleck made his directorial debut with Gone, Baby, Gone, the first (and, thus far, only) film adaptation of the Lenzie-Gennaro series. Response was somewhat lukewarm, although Gone did garner another Oscar (Amy Ryan, for Best Actress in a Supporting Role) and earned back - barely - its $19 million production budget.
If the experience of having just written Mystic Riverstill resonated with him at the time of the film, Lehane says: "The opposite was in play for Gone, Baby, Gone. I was so far removed from the material that Ben had to keep reminding me who certain characters were and why they'd done what they had. As a result, I was able to judge the film more objectively, and I was for the most part enthralled by it.
"I did have some issues with Angie's characterisation, but outside that, it was a love-fest," Lehane notes. "Ben is to the director's chair born, and Casey (Affleck, who co-starred) is a stud of an actor - as is Amy Ryan. In my view, Gone was the most authentically 'Boston' of any Boston movie ever made, with the possible exception of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It's Boston from the inside out. They really nailed that part of it." It continues to be listed as a potential 2009 release, but the film version of After Gwen appears to be stalled in post-production, but Lehane, and audiences, find themselves eagerly anticipating this year's release of Scorsese's Shutter Island, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley in the featured roles.
In her New York Times review of The Given Day, Janet Maslin proclaimed "No more thinking of Mr Lehane as an author of detective novels that make good movies . . . He has written a majestic, fiery, epic that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre." Nearly a decade after the last Kenzie-Gennaro book, Lehane finds himself alternately annoyed and amused that reviewers more commonly reflect their astonishment at his ever-expanding ambition. Indeed, part of the reason he had packed his detectives off to their literary Elba in the first place was to escape being so conveniently pigeonholed that he might be eternally defined by the mystery genre.
"In the end, I accept that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it's a duck," he says with a shrug. "I understand that, but I also think a lot of the labels applied to writing are, once you get beyond a marketing standpoint, just plain silly. I never met a good writer who defined himself - or herself - as 'a mystery novelist' or a 'literary novelist'. We're just writers." If there are going to be limitations to the scope of his work, in other words, they will be self-imposed.
"I do epic well, I think, and tragedy and 'mortal event', but I can't write that trenchant, beautifully-observed novel where the small moment has far-reaching ripples, a book like Charming Billy, or O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster, which I think is an unqualified masterpiece," says Lehane. "I wish I could write like that, but it's not me, so I don't."
As he made his way across the US on the recently concluded promotional tour for The Given Day, Lehane realised he could count on being approached by at least one customer in every Barnes & Noble in the US asking the same question: When are Kenzie and Gennaro coming back? "I don't know, but they will," he promises. "At some point they'll tell me it's time."
The complex Kenzie-Genarro dynamic has evolved over the course of five novels. Its initially platonic stage saw Angie dutifully married to an unworthy husband Kenzie found himself describing as "the asshole". "Some feminists complained that a smart, liberated, modern woman such as Angie would not have voluntarily remained trapped in a physically abusive relationship to begin with, though my wife, the shrink, could have told them otherwise," says Lehane.
In any case, by the time the oft-conflicted relationship had resolved itself several adventures, and not a few gunshot wounds, later, Lehane's own first marriage was ending in divorce. Read into that what you will.
Of course, Dennis Lehane is no more Patrick Kenzie than Ian Fleming was James Bond, but it's difficult to imagine that certain aspects of the detective's tastes - which he isn't shy about expressing - don't mirror those of his creator.
"Oh, writing Patrick Kenzie is a ton of fun, no doubt about it," says Lehane. "Physically, we're about the same size, but he's way braver than I am. He's also more conservative, and he's more restrictive in his musical tastes. He's also funnier - he has me spending hours thinking up those comeback lines that take him two seconds - but we share a sense of humour. You can't fake that. Patrick and I share a love of Marx Brothers' movies and the Stones, and Indie or some of the lesser-known bands I've been known to plug in the books. I'm more of a clothes-horse than he is, and I read a lot more. He's far less reflective than I am, but that's a good thing, given his job.
"And," points out Lehane, "he has a worse temper than I do. He came from a shitty home background, remember, while I came from a loving one." Lehane has plainly come to fondly view his Boston detectives as a pair of old friends. If he doesn't owe it to his readers to bring them back, he figures, he owes it to Patrick and Angie. "They've been very good to me," he says. "They paid for my house."
The Doubleday (UK) edition of The Given Daywill be published on January 29th; it is already available in the US.