Dennis Lehane

• Born: August 4, 1965
• Place of Birth: Dorchester, near Boston, Massachusetts

TYPE OF PLOT: Private investigator

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, 1994-; Coughlin, 2008-

Contribution

Dennis Lehane has extended the gritty realism of and to the traditional private detective form. His first novel, A Drink Before the War (1994), won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel. In the next five novels in the Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro series, Lehane continued to explore the darkest recesses of human behavior, with a collection of violent and grotesque characters few writers would even have attempted. Though he admits that elements of the thriller and more generic crime writing are present in his work, and he is clearly aware that he is working within the conventions of the private investigator novel, when asked to classify his own writing, Lehane calls it noir.

Despite the dark tone, there is always an undercurrent of comedy in his novels, from the flippancy of the Patrick-Angie relationship to the comic, clownishly dressed would-be enforcers of Sacred (1997) to Cheese Olamon, the 430-pound Swede who thinks he is an African American. Some critics have complained that Lehane inappropriately mixes tones, switching from the comic to the unbearably gruesome in his works, but his comedy is more organic to his plots than are the wisecracks included by or . Sacred won a Nero Award and was nominated for a Shamus.

Even when Lehane felt he had exhausted the detective form after five Kenzie-Gennaro novels, he continued to write about crime, mystery, and the horrifying. Mystic River (2001), one of his best-known works and a critically acclaimed bestseller, is imprinted with the style and themes of his series novels—murder, the presence of evil, and the impact of evil on whole generations—but without a detective as a major presence. Shutter Island (2003), an unsettling psychological thriller about a United States marshal trapped in an asylum for the criminally insane on an island during a hurricane, has a surprise ending that goes well beyond the mere unmasking of a killer and questions the very nature of reality and perception. In 2002, Mystic River became a finalist for the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award (for best book about New England) and won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for best novel of the year.

His next stand-alone work, Coronado: Stories (2006), is a collection of short stories—"Running Out of Dog," "ICU," "Gone Down to Corpus," "Mushrooms," and "Until Gwen." In 2014, Lehane published the short story "Red Eye" with Michael Connelly, featuring both of their famous characters, Patrick Kenzie and Harry Bosch, together for the first time. The work was published in the anthology FaceOff (2014). The same year, Lehane adapted the film The Drop (2014) with James Gandolfini into a novel. The film was based on his short story "Animal Rescue" (2009). Lehane also published the psychological thriller Since We Fell in 2017 and a crime mystery novel set in the 1970s, Small Mercies (2023), for which Apple TV acquired the screen rights the same year.

Lehane also wrote the Coughlin series—The Given Day (2008), Live by Night (2012), and World Gone By (2015)—following the experience of a White family and a Black family living in Boston, Massachusetts and Tulsa, Oklahoma in the early 1900s. Historical events from the time are woven into the plot, such as the September 1919 Boston Police Strike and baseball player Babe Ruth.

In addition to his novels and short stories, Lehane has worked as a writer-producer on a number of television series, including HBO's The Wire in 2004, Boardwalk Empire in 2012, and Silk Road in 2014.

Biography

Dennis Lehane was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a tough Irish Catholic working-class neighborhood of Boston. He graduated from a Catholic high school in Boston and, after two years at two different Boston-area colleges, attended Eckerd College in Florida, where he received his bachelor of arts degree in 1988. While at Eckerd, he considered himself a writer of gloomy short stories but tossed off a draft of a novel in three weeks “to entertain myself,” as he puts it.

Lehane then took on a variety of jobs—counselor for handicapped and abused children, limousine driver, and truck loader. During this period, A Drink Before the War was published, a heavily revised version of that first novel dashed off at Eckerd. While attending Florida International University on a fellowship, he produced a draft of what would become Mystic River as his master’s thesis. After graduating in 2001 with a master of fine arts degree, he returned to Boston, continuing to work at jobs he did not have to take home with him, leaving time for writing, his true passion.

Analysis

Influenced by the gritty realism of James Ellroy and James Crumley (especially The Last Good Kiss, 1978), Dennis Lehane calls his writing noir, for its dark mood and the almost palpable presence of unbearable evil that are constants running through all his work, beginning with the five Kenzie-Gennaro detective novels and continuing through the nonseries novels Mystic River and Shutter Island.

The neo-noir aspect of Lehane’s writing is most evident in his graphic descriptions of violence—killings, torture, maimings, and excessive displays of inhuman behavior. Characters have their hands and tongues cut off, spines are broken by being jumped on until they crack like splintering doors, and victims are crucified on the ground. Violence is emblematic of, as Patrick realizes in Darkness, Take My Hand (1996), “[e]verything rancid in this world . . . swastikas and killing fields and labor camps and vermin and fire that rained from the sky.” The violence extends to the psychological realm—in Prayers for Rain (1999), for example, the monstrous Scott Pearse is able to kill Karen Nicholls by simply torturing her psychologically and driving her to commit suicide, all without touching her.

More than anything, Lehane’s novels demonstrate humanity’s great capacity for unspeakable evil. The evil is so all-encompassing that none of the novels seem to have any kind of enduring moral center. Patrick is swept up by it, killing an unarmed man in the first novel of the series, participating (albeit with a kind of disgust) in the bowling alley scene of Darkness, Take My Hand in which Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy, themselves icons of power and unconscionable evil, are tortured unimaginably before being killed and “disappeared.” Innocent characters like Grace Cole and her daughter Mae are driven out of the fictional world of the novel; pure and simple characters like Karen Nicholls are driven to suicide; children like Amanda McCready are returned to exploitative parents to have all hope and light stripped from them. There is never an easy answer—even the protagonists and everyone with whom the reader wants to identify are flawed in some way.

In Lehane’s novels, children are almost always victims. This provides the novels with a certain power—who does not agonize over child abuse?—without becoming cheap exploitation of the images for the sake of sensationalism. Lehane is genuinely concerned with the plight of children in society, which at best drugs children with television and commercialization and strips them of hope and joy, and at worst, commits unspeakable acts of violence against them. This redoubles the feeling of hopelessness one gets from Lehane—not only is this generation evil, but also it is replicating the evil in future generations. Every evil character has a past history of abuse and mistreatment.

Another major theme in Lehane is gentrification, the slow infiltration of vacuous and morally empty yuppies into strong ethnic neighborhoods. The yuppies bring condominiums where triple-decker houses used to stand, trendy cafés where neighborhood delis used to be. This is the transition from the Flats of Mystic River, where working-class Jimmy and Dave grew up, to the upper-class Point, where Sean Devine resides. Though Lehane shows the dark inner workings of the neighborhoods, he still seems to believe that they are better than what is replacing them.

Lehane’s primary technical skill as a novelist—the one thing he says he was born with—was an ear for dialogue. All his novels are rich with the sounds and rhythms of the neighborhoods, the wealthy and the criminal. At times witty and flip, at times tough and frightening, the dialogue of these characters is realistic and natural, depending not on cheap phonetic spellings, but the true speech intonations and contexts of people who use the language.

Darkness, Take My Hand

Darkness, Take My Hand, Lehane’s second novel, is, according to him, “over the top.” It builds on the grotesques introduced in A Drink Before the War (especially the lumbering and frightening comic character of Bubba Rogowski) and introduces a cast of monsters for whom pathological is almost too mild a description: Gerry Glynn, the mastermind of a violent vigilante group “cleansing” the streets of Dorchester while masquerading as the friendly local bartender; Kevin Hurlihy, another classmate of Patrick and Angie, who rapes, murders, and tortures without the slightest pang of conscience; Evander Arujo, the innocent sent to Walpole, Massachusetts’s toughest prison, on a minor charge who returns to the world a deranged torturer and killer; Alec Hardiman, the HIV-positive psychopath who molests Arujo inside the prison and uses Arujo as his remote-control murderer while outside; and Jack Rouse, the head of the Irish mafia in Dorchester.

The murders that punctuate the book are eventually shown to be part of a series of murders over the past twenty years that have one feature in common: The victims, after mutilation, are fastened to the earth in an image of crucifixion, the vigilantes’ comment on sin and execution. In the end, the vigilantes’ plots are exposed (it turns out that Patrick’s father was a leader before his death), most of them are killed, Angie’s husband is also killed, and Angie herself is recovering from gunshot wounds. The ringleader, Gerry Glynn, is shot by police as he stands in a ring of fire he himself set, in a symbolic scene straight from ’s Inferno in the La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). Vigilantism is seen as just another form of self-righteous violence, and it sickens Patrick.

Patrick’s current love Grace Cole rejects him because of the violence in his life, and Patrick moves in with the bereaved Angie.

Gone, Baby, Gone

Gone, Baby, Gone (1998) is Lehane’s fullest treatment of his recurrent theme of child abuse and his most despairing look into the treatment society affords its children. The ending is painful; the kidnapping of Amanda McCready, the central plot element, is resolved as Patrick, Angie, and two Boston police detectives discover that Amanda’s kidnapping is part of a larger kidnapping ring headed by a handful of rogue police officers. These officers take abused and threatened children from their home lives and place them with genuinely loving parents, committing illegal acts of genuine kindness and mercy for the children.

As Patrick, Angie, and the two detectives close in on the illegal foster parents of Amanda, Detective Jack Doyle, the head of the kidnapping ring, and his wife, it is clear that the moral dilemma is beyond solution: return Amanda to her abusive and monstrous mother or allow her to remain illegally with the Doyles, who love her and provide her with a hope she will never get from her mother. Patrick sides with the Boston police and participates in the arrest of Doyle, and Angie, pained and distraught beyond words, leaves him. No one wins. In Prayers for Rain (1999), fate throws the pair together again, and they begin a fairly comfortable relationship. This novel was followed by a sequel, Moonlight Mile (2010), which depicts Patrick and Angie happily married with a child.

Mystic River

Mystic River is Lehane’s most praised book and his first nonseries book. Again, an abused child is central, but the emphasis in Mystic River is on how the entire neighborhood reacts to the abuse. Twenty-five years before the time in which most of the novel takes place, three children are playing in the streets of East Buckingham, an amalgam of Dorchester and a number of other Boston suburbs. The three are approached by two men claiming to be police officers and ordered into the car for fighting. Two refuse, but one—Dave Boyle—gets in, and though he returns alive four days later, the neighborhood is scarred forever.

Twenty-five years later, the young daughter of Jimmy Marcus, one of the two who did not get into the car with Dave Boyle, is kidnapped and murdered; Sean Devine, the other boy with Jimmy and Dave on that fateful day, is the investigating officer; and Dave Boyle, though innocent, is the chief suspect. Though Katie Marcus’s murder is a mystery, Lehane has said, “Who dunnit? Who cares?” The novel is about how the effects of the murder can be felt in every part of the narrow streets, every neighborhood bar, and on the porches of every triple-decker house in the city.

It has been said that place is a character of its own in Mystic River and that the river itself is central to the novel—flowing throughout the book, a mystical place where people can find hope and where bodies and dark secrets of the past disappear.

Principal Series Characters:

• Patrick Kenzie is a private investigator in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Patrick (“don’t call me Pat”) comes from an Irish Catholic family and was routinely abused by his alcoholic father, who, to the rest of the neighborhood, is a firefighter and hero. Patrick still retains the scar from having been burned with an iron. Married, he is divorced by the end of the first novel in the series.
• Angela “Angie” Gennaro is a private investigator who works with Kenzie and was his high school classmate. Angie is the granddaughter of a Mafia overlord, and although she is not ashamed of her family, she is determined to be successful without her family’s help. Early in the series, Angie is married to an abusive husband, Phil Dimassi, who also was a classmate in school and Patrick’s best friend. The relationship between Patrick and Angie is marked by a kind of witty banter. Despite their best intentions, Patrick and Angie do move in and out of a romantic and sexual relationship. This relationship is predicted and even expected by mutual friends.

Bibliography

"About Dennis." Dennis Lehane, dennislehane.com/about-dennis. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House, 2007.

Christopher, Mari. “Lehane, Dennis.” Current Biography, vol. 66, no. 10, Oct. 2005, pp. 61-65.

Dunn, Adam. “A Good Place to Die.” Book, Mar. 2001, p. 52.

English, Bella. “The Working Writer: Dorchester’s Dennis Lehane Brings Street Smarts to His Pages.” Boston Globe, 19 Sept. 2001, p. C1.

Fierman, Daniel. “Men of Mystery: As Michael Connelly Returns with a Familiar Face, Fellow Neo-Noirist Dennis Lehane Charges Off in a New Direction.” Entertainment Weekly, vol. 703, 4 Apr. 2003, p. 105.

George, Elizabeth. Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life. Harper Collins, 2004.

Lehane, Dennis. “Chatting with Dennis Lehane.” Interview. Kirkus Reviews, vol. 74, no. 15, 1 Aug. 2006, p. 10.

---. “Dennis Lehane: Hard-Boiled in Boston.” Interview with Louise Jones. Publishers Weekly, 21 June 1999, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/19990621/30688-dennis-lehane-hard-boiled-in-boston.html. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Mackin, Thomas. Review of Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane. World of Hibernia, vol. 7, no. 2, Autum 2001, pp. 20-21.

Reddy, Maureen T. Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. Rutgers UP, 2002.