When I moved to Quincy, Massachusetts more than thirty years ago, this city with its weathered multifamily houses, Irish pubs, tight-knit neighborhoods, and a Dunkin’ Donuts on every corner felt safe and friendly. But over the years, friends shared stories about Quincy’s grittier side, including its ties to the crime boss, Whitey Bulger. It’s not an exaggeration to say almost everyone who’s lived here a while has a story about the man who left a dirty thumbprint on so many lives.
I learned more about the darker side of Quincy in the novels of Dennis Lehane. In his Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro series and in Mystic River, he shines a cold light on blue-collar communities more hard-edged, heartbreaking, and yes, more thrilling than I’d imagined. It was the first time I’d seen a place like Quincy in fiction, and I devoured those books.
Not long ago, I heard him speak at an event sponsored by the city. It was held at Granite Links, a posh golf course, perched high above the infamous Quincy quarries, where gangsters once dumped cars and bodies. The quarries have been largely filled in now. Quincy is being gentrified, and many of the places Lehane writes about in his novels have changed.
But the people of Quincy showed up for him that night. You could feel the love and electricity in the air in the packed ballroom as he shared stories about Quincy that many of them already knew, including a particularly gruesome one involving a car antenna and a fatal plunge into a quarry.
One of the things he said that really struck me was that when it came to writing, he was not a plotter. That was surprising, given how intricately plotted his novels are. He explained that for him, everything begins with character. In the case of Small Mercies, it was Mary Pat, the South Boston mother driven to seek revenge for her daughter’s death, who grabbed hold of him and wouldn’t let go. He had to tell her story.
The stories of people in blue-collar communities matter just as much as the stories of those with power and prestige. Writers like Lehane make sure that the people who are one missed rent payment from disaster, the ones who cross the line and make irrevocably bad decisions in desperation, the ones who live with daily hardship and violence, the ones you look away from when you walk past—don’t disappear. I don’t often see characters like this in novels, but when I do, it is usually in crime fiction.
When I wrote Swallowtail, I wanted to bring the blue-collar city of Quincy to life with all its contradictions: the bleak neighborhoods and beautiful ones, the music of the language heard on its street corners, and the love-hate relationship people here have with its dark, complicated past.
Here are some other novels that give a voice to communities often left out of the literary spotlight.
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Dennis Lehane, Gone Baby Gone
Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone vividly evokes violent, drug-filled working-class neighborhoods in Boston and Quincy. It tells the harrowing story of private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro’s search for a missing child whose neglectful mother, Helene, seems to have forgotten her existence even before she goes missing.
Their search leads to a hair-raising scene in the Quincy quarries. In the midst of chaos and terror, Lehane conjures the chilling essence of this place that has claimed many lives with lines like: “I could smell that clean, cold, and suddenly frightening odor of a century’s raindrops just before I hit the water.”
Later, Patrick finds himself in a house of horrors in Germantown, one of Quincy’s roughest neighborhoods. The grisly scene where he confronts a child molester wearing “a yellow half T-shirt that left a wrinkled, milky midriff exposed…and a pair of black nylon tights,” is impossible to unsee, no matter how much you want to.
Gone Baby Gone is a bleak thriller full of twists, but it’s also a story about a child in peril that raises unsettling ethical questions. Ultimately, it’s not the plot turns that stay with me, it’s that villain rising like a swamp thing from one of the grimmest corners of Quincy, and Helene, the mother defined by her out-of-control, self-serving indifference.
Chuck Hogan, Prince of Thieves
Chuck Hogan’s Prince of Thieves, the novel behind the movie The Town, takes place in the tough Boston neighborhood of Charlestown. I lived in the projects there when I was around two. My parents weren’t religious, and my mother used to tell a story about the time when a neighbor was lecturing us about heaven and hell and I asked, “Is Charlestown heaven?” The short answer: definitely not.
Prince of Thieves follows a close-knit crew of career criminals from Charlestown who take a bank manager hostage during a robbery. This tautly written novel drops you immediately into the high-anxiety heist.
Hogan describes the moment when Doug MacRay, one of the robbers, first sees Claire Keesey, the bank manager, as: “A spear of daylight. A woman’s hand on the knob and the kick of a chunky black shoe—and the swish of a black floral skirt walking into Doug’s life.” The razor-sharp poetry of these lines succinctly foreshadows what is to come.
They get away with the robbery, but its repercussions reverberate throughout the book. There are more heists, more nail-biting moments, and plenty of action. But the heart of the story is Doug, a flawed but sympathetic man whose carefully constructed identity as a bank robber begins to crack when he falls for Claire.
Even if you’ve seen The Town with its breakneck car chases through the narrow streets of Boston, Prince of Thieves is a different experience and well worth a read.
Micheal Harvey, Brighton
When I was a teen, I sometimes hung out with my sister and her boyfriend in Oak Square in Brighton MA. He called his colorful friends there “the buzzards.” I was not comfortable around them, but they told good stories about some of the not-so-good things they’d done.
Michael Harvey’s crime thriller, Brighton, unflinchingly captures that same edgy blue-collar world with its daily dose of drunkenness, crime, violence, and racism. But it is also a novel about boyhood and two friends, Kevin Pearce and Bobby Scales, who are united by an act of violence that sends them off in different directions.
Kevin manages to escape Brighton and becomes a successful journalist. Bobby is left behind to accept the consequences. Years later, when Bobby becomes a suspect in a string of local murders, Kevin must return, ostensibly to help his friend, but also to face the past that won’t stay buried.
Brighton opens with Kevin skimming stones across the water. It’s a tranquil scene, but only for an instant. Things quickly turn dark in this novel that is as much about blue-collar neighborhoods like Brighton, places that can drag you under, as it is about the people there who struggle to stay above water.
Alison L. McLennan, Falling for Johnny
Falling for Johnny is an intense and moving novel about the unlikely friendship between a teenage girl named Riley and Johnny McPherson, a thinly veiled version of Whitey Bulger.
When Riley’s mother is murdered, she and her father move from Quincy, where she had a hard childhood, to South Boston, where things get worse. As her father descends into alcoholism, Riley is bullied by girls at school, a vicious boy stalks her, and violence lurks around every corner.
There seems to be no relief until she runs into a fatherly older man walking his dog. As a friendship develops between them, the reader knows that this man is Johnny, the notorious gangster who killed her mother, but Riley doesn’t.
Riley eventually ends up at a teen drinking spot in Quincy where things go frighteningly out of control. I spent many sleepless nights when my own teens were out in places like this, and this scene was hard to read.
Falling for Johnny is closely based on the life of Whitey Bulger. But the version of him that emerges through Riley’s eyes is more intimate than what’s found in the historical record. McLennan conveys hints of tenderness and vulnerability, but she never lets you forget that he is a stone-cold killer, and that makes this story all the more chilling.
Falling for Johnny is both a sharply observed portrait of a man much like Bulger and the story of a resilient but innocent young girl whose life is nearly shattered by her experiences in Quincy and South Boston. On the surface it might feel like two separate storylines, but they are connected by the same misogynistic culture of violence.
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