'Mystic River', 'Shutter Island', 'Gone, Baby, Gone' – the work of writer Dennis Lehane is as well-known on-screen as on the page, writes DECLAN BURKE
IF ANYONE is still wondering whether Ireland is closer to Boston or Berlin, Dennis Lehane suggests that a certain kind of black humour provides the answer. “Boston’s Irish,” says Lehane, the US-born son of a Cork father and Galway mother. “Irish-American, okay, but Irish. So the Boston humour, it’s the sense that you might just want to comment on the fact that the world’s going to screw you, just before the world screws you. That makes it easier.”
Raised in the Dorchester suburb of South Boston, Lehane is the critically acclaimed and best-selling author of The Given Day(2008), Shutter Island(2003) and Mystic River(2001). The latter two novels were successfully adapted for the screen by Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood respectively, while Ben Affleck directed Lehane's Gone, Baby, Gone. That book was one of a series of novels featuring private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, the most recent of which is this year's Moonlight Mile.
Over breakfast at the Merrion Hotel, Lehane is warmly engaging, full of anecdotes and forthright opinions. His no-nonsense approach to writing is echoed in his considered responses and flat Boston vowels. For one who has achieved at 45 the kind of success most writers can only dream of, Lehane’s roots remain firmly in South Boston, his Irish heritage and particularly that gallows humour.
“My wife’s Italian, okay? And she just doesn’t understand our people at all,” he says with a laugh.
“It’s the Irish thing of, y’know, we’re not going to talk to a psychologist about our problems, we’re just going to make a joke and move on. Because it ain’t getting better.
“Whereas my wife will sit there and talk with her family, usually with their hands, about a situation for hours. And then she’ll be like, ‘Honey, what do you think about it?’ ‘Well, what I thought about it five hours ago.’
He smiles and continues: "I think what I love about where I grew up is that the people were terribly funny. And in a very caustic, offhand way. And Patrick [Kenzie] has that sense of humour. The reason I was really happy to go back to Patrick and Angie with Moonlight Milewas I missed telling jokes. I'd gone 10 years without telling jokes in the work."
Lehane's debut, A Drink Before the War,won a prestigious Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for best first novel in the genre after it was published in 1994. Five novels and five years later, the Patrick and Angie series ground to a halt with Prayers for Rain, the book that followed the harrowing tale of child abduction, Gone, Baby, Gone.
“After five books with Patrick and Angie, I was like, I can’t send ’em into the pit of hell one more time. How much more damage could I do to them and still expect them to survive? And they just dried up. They left. I used to picture them in a hotel room, and the phone would be ringing, and it’d be me ringing them. But they never picked up.”
More than a decade later, Patrick and Angie reappeared in Moonlight Mile,a book that is arguably Lehane's most personal piece of writing, not least because he had just become a father, as had Kenzie.
“Yeah, I think that’s really what it was. Now, the daughter in the book is four, and my daughter when I was writing the book was about four months. But the questions, the paternal questions, that that book raises, that’s what I was playing with.
“But I had this massively crushing responsibility on top of me, one that wasn’t even remotely comparable to something my friends were going through. Most of my friends are still working-class guys, and they’re dealing with this incredible financial meltdown, where they just shafted the poor completely. That would be Patrick, his nuts would be caught up in that.
“So I decided to take all my feelings and all my fears, and then add financial pressure. What are you going to get?”
The personal and the political are always bound up in Lehane's work. The gothic surrealism of Shutter Island,for example, was an attempt to explore the post-9/11 landscape.
“I knew when I was writing it that the political thing was there, and I told myself, don’t even write to it. Just know it’s there, and play with it as much as you can, when you can. I guess I was so angry about the Patriot Act and all this fear-mongering that came in after 9/11, and I just said, ‘This is a new McCarthyism, we’re swimming in it. If you want to call it anything else, you’re bulls***ting yourself.’
“And what happens when you start to watch what you say? Ultimately you start to watch what you think. And you start a systematic breakdown of the freedom of your own mind. And that’s what I wanted to play with. That’s what I was doing.”
At the time of writing Shutter Island, Lehane was also working on his historical novel The Given Day, which is set in Boston after the first World War.
"Yeah, they leaked into one another," he says. "If you read one of my books and you don't get what I was after politically or socially, I'm cool with that. If that's the first thing that occurs to you, then I've screwed up, I've written a polemic. But with The Given Day, I was very clearly saying, the difference between America post-WWI and post-9/11, well, there's almost no difference at all. And it's still going on.
“There’s no question whatsoever that what caused the financial meltdown in 2008 was Wall Street. It was a culture that, once all sensible responsible financial restraint and government regulation was removed from it, it ran amok.
“Who did we ultimately blame? Once the noise machine got finished, people were blaming public sector workers and unions. It’s the stupidest f**king thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
He plays down the political aspect of his novels, but Lehane is undoubtedly an issue-driven writer. In Mystic River, for example, he addressed paedophilia.
"I hated being in there," he says sombrely. "I hated it. Climbing around in that head, it was awful. But Mystic Riverwas looking at a tragedy in which the victim is the hero. The hero of the story is Boyle, because it's in him. He won't act on it, but it's clearly in him. So he does this sideways move where he sees this guy with a child, and he beats the guy because he wants the child. That's the secret of the book.
“So, writing that story, I had to get into the head of a guy who’s attracted to a child. There were days and days and days when I would write certain Dave Boyle scenes and I would be wrecked afterwards, ruined. I just couldn’t work, couldn’t function. All I could do was eat and sleep for days on end.”
It’s a subject the former social care worker cares passionately about. “I’m on record as saying that on most issues, political and social, I’m to the left of Canada. But when it comes to how we treat paedophiles, I’m to the right of Hitler. One offence, you spend the rest of your life in jail. Simple as that. Priest, no priest. You commit an act of sexual predation on a child, you go to jail for the rest of your life.
“I think this is something the Church can learn from the whole [Rupert] Murdoch thing. Until the Catholic Church releases the names of every single priest who they know for sure at a global level, living or dead, committed sex [crimes] against a child, their apologies are meaningless.
“Don’t try to tell us what being a Catholic means. Just give us the names.”
Lehane is touring to promote Moonlight Milebut his back catalogue is so enduring that he's likely to be asked by fans about any of his books stretching back over the past two decades. More often than not, though, he is asked about his work on the seminal TV series, The Wire.
“That was so much fun,” he says. “It really was that abused word, awesome. And what was really great about it was, as the old line goes, when you’re a novelist you’re God, but a screenwriter is God’s tailor. For some reason, the tailor gets paid more than God, but that’s just how it works out.
“Anyway, when you write a novel, you’re the general contractor. And the architect. And . . . well, you do everything, right down to picking what sort of handles go on the toilets.
"When I worked on The Wire? I was brought in to paint a room. And that was it. David [Simon] and Ed [Burns] dealt with all that other shit. And they're going, 'Could you make that your particular shade of pink? I want that to be Dennis Lehane pink.' And I thought, yeah, I think I can do that."
Dennis Lehane's Moonlight Mileis published by Sphere
