You know not your favourite private detectives by the clothes they wear or the food they eat or even by the company they keep. For most, it is as if they were cloned: crumpled garb, fast food, cold beer and oddball friends. Increasingly, it is the music of their cracked lives which either sets them apart or sinks them without trace.
Patrick Kenzie is either a man of great taste or none at all, but his stated desert-island preference for everything by "the Stones and Nirvana" stretches credibility, though it could be defended as a canny move to draw disparate generations into his orbit. But this is one of the few dead-ends Dennis Lehane hands out to his dishevelled hero in this compulsive, well-paced, jagged story of murder, madness and the ties that bind. Lehane - like his main character an Irish-American from Boston - is fast building himself a reputation as a serious player in the densely populated crime thriller genre. The reason is simple enough: he writes fluidly and well, developing his characters and their milieu with confident brush stokes; and his stories are strong, taut with suspense until the death or deaths of its key figures. His Irish characters, however, tend to be a bit too Oirish for comfort.
Kenzie is the classic outsider PI, buttressed from the amoral world by the friendship of loving buddies Angie Gennaro and Bubba Rogowski - the latter a crazy but good (i.e: on the right side) former soldier with a hunger for clean and clinical, if bloody, solutions; the former a smart ex-lover reluctantly drawn back into the fold. Together they face a man who takes pleasure in destroying the world of his victims, driving them into the dark recesses of their mind until they seek solace in suicide. It is a plausible psycho-thriller, with enough turns and terror to keep the pages turning.
Kenzie - a strange name for an Irish-American - is working-class and proud of it. So are his friends. Together they share a cynical scepticism about the prevailing moral code and the institutions that uphold it. This ambivalence to society and its rules is a hallmark of the classic PI from Marlowe to the more contemporary tales of James Crumley's C.W Sughrue and "Milo" Milodragovitch. Away from the sterile processes of the law and the hypocricies of a society in decline, they remain the only ones capable of dispensing real justice, of seeing the bad and the good in sharp relief. It's a dodgy concept, being judge and jury. As such it is all the more reason that their honesty must be beyond reproach. We must believe in their sense of justice, in their true moral calling.
Lehane understands this. His characters are vulnerable personalities, with a plethora of doubts and anxieties, who have known the downside - just like us. But they have chosen to stand for something. In this case, it is with the weak against the mentally strong. They don't expect redemption for their efforts, just the satisfaction of good getting one over evil. These are the modern morality plays, and though in Lehane's world the characters colour their reluctant missions with crackling, mordant dialogue and a marginally offside lifestyle - loose, guilt-filled sex and the prospect of the odd joint - Rolling Stone fans and their Nirvana children would expect little else.
Joe Breen is an Irish Times journalist