Reading Dennis Lehane’s most recent novel, Since We Fell, feels like an eerie shadow of modern-day life: The protagonist, Rachel Childs, is afraid to go out of her apartment. But this story came out in 2017, not 2020, and Rachel isn’t afraid of coronavirus. After a series of betrayals, abandonments and breakdowns, she’s struggling with agoraphobia.
It’s a dark book, but that’s nothing new for Lehane, a writer who burst onto the crime drama scene—well, it sure felt that way for many of us readers—in 1994 with a series of books about a pair of Boston private investigators. The world they operated in, full of killers and stalkers and victimizers of children was bleak, bleak, bleak, punctuated with wisecracks and cathartic violence.
Around the edges of that series—burdened with an unfortunate, decade-later capper—Lehane has turned out some of the best crime fiction of his day. Mystic River. Shutter Island. Books that are arguably his best-known works, thanks in part to movie adaptations.
But Lehane has always been consistent with his solemn characters, storylines and tone. It’s all there, in the title of his second book: Darkness, Take My Hand.
The Boston—Dorchester, actually—native has been more active in writing for television in the past few years than writing novels. Lehane was a writer and consulting producer on the Mr. Mercedes series, based on a series of books by Stephen King, and wrote episodes of The Outsider, an HBO series that starts out as a serial killer story and turns into something very different.
When Lehane returns to the world of writing big, best-selling novels, the reading public will be thrilled. In the meantime, a look at his work between covers.
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The Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro series
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Lehane made a hell of a debut in 1994 with A Drink Before the War, the first book featuring Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. From the start, Lehane made his glib, violent protagonists more than just glib and violent: Patrick grew up with an abusive father while Angie is married to an abusive husband.
But Lehane sharply punched holes in what could have been clichés: Patrick, a wiseass who hates authority figures, expresses his unrequited love for Angie, but when he flirts with her One Too Many Times, she is inclined to take his head off. Deservedly so. Angie, meanwhile, could fall into the trap of being the tough chick that fell for a jerk that treats her wrong. But the relationship between Angie and her husband—a longtime friend of Patrick too, part of their crowd growing up—is not simple and straightforward. When she does reach the breaking point, it’s incredibly satisfying for readers … but doesn’t really lead to “happily ever after” for Patrick and Angie.
The Kenzie/Gennaro books are filled with satisfyingly-drawn characters, from corrupt pols to murderous gang members to Patrick and Angie’s allies like Bubba, who is the series’ murderous answer to Robert B. Parker’s Hawk or Walter Mosely’s Mouse … except Bubba isn’t just lethal and anti-social. There’s really something wrong with him, and as much grim humor as he adds to the stories, Lehane doesn’t let you forget that you wouldn’t want Bubba living next door to you. Even if he disabled the booby traps that secure his domicile.
Through six novels, Lehane tells a story that includes elements of race and racism, violence and what it does to people and unimaginable cruelty. The Shamus Award-winning A Drink Before the War, as harsh as it is at times, feels like a warm-up for what comes next. Darkness, Take My Hand published in 1996, builds to a climax that seems as inevitable as it is surprising.
The third book, Sacred, from 1997, seems light by comparison—it would have to—in its pretty standard tale of Kenzie and Gennaro being hired to find a missing person.
But Gone, Baby, Gone … damn. Published in 1998, the fourth book in the series offers a cursory glance at the “find a missing person” story when a woman hires Patrick and Angie to find her young niece. But what follows is a thrilling but downbeat tale that indicts not only the bad guys but the good guys and addresses but does not answer the question: what’s more important, justice and truth or the best interests of a child?
Nearly a decade later, Ben Affleck made Gone, Baby, Gone, into a movie starring Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as Patrick and Angie. But director Affleck would have probably done better to cast himself, and not his brother, as damaged Patrick. Monaghan is fine as Angie, but the movie made Angie the supporting character that she most certainly is not in the books.
Published in 1997, Prayers for Rain feels like the last in the Kenzie/Gennaro series, even though it is not. It’s the last truly satisfying book in the series (to date, anyway) and—probably advisably so—pulls back from the stories that were so deeply affecting to the central characters and focuses on a case that seems to beg for adaptation in movie or TV form: A woman who had earlier hired Patrick to help her shake off a stalker dies a violent death. Kenzie and Gennaro take on a mysterious manipulator and the scenes in which they turn the victimizer’s world upside down are gratifying.
Eleven years passed before Lehane returned to the world of his favorite Boston PIs. By the time Moonlight Mile was published in 2010, Lehane had found great mainstream thriller success with Mystic River and Shutter Island and the sixth Patrick and Angie story felt like a third wheel on a date.
In the 10 years since I read Moonlight Mile, I found, I’d forgotten even the basic elements of the story. But yes, it was a sequel of sorts to Gone, Baby, Gone. Just not a good one.
It seemed that Lehane had left his most endearing characters behind.
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The Blockbusters: Mystic River and Shutter Island
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This is, apparently, what happens when you write a couple of nearly perfect crime novel/thrillers, full of twists and surprising character beats: They get made into movies, and when people hear the titles, instead of thinking of your books, they think of Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn.
Mystic River seems, in the early chapters, like a return to the grimy Boston neighborhoods of the Kenzie and Gennaro crime novels. But Lehane does much more.
Published in 2001, Mystic River seems like—maybe it really is, in the minds of some readers—a line of demarcation between the phases of Dennis Lehane’s writing. Although another Kenzie and Gennaro book was to come years later, it’s easy to see the turn in Lehane’s career, and writing, that came with the novel’s publication.
A story that falls in step, in setting and characters at least, with the author’s previous work, Mystic River heightens the stakes. Dave, Sean and Jimmy are boyhood friends in Boston when Dave is grabbed off the street by men in a car. Dave comes home, but his trauma at the hands of the men changed him, and for the rest of his life.
As adults, Sean is a cop and Jimmy is an ex-convict-turned-shop-owner while Dave is chalked up as the perennial “lost kid” who came back damaged. Then Jimmy’s daughter is killed, Dave gets more erratic and Sean tries to make sense of it all and keep violence from decades earlier from again staining their lives.
Lehane’s story and characters are steeped in inevitable, unstoppable dread. It’s really a disservice to the book that the Oscar-winning 2003 movie version—directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins—is what many people think of when they hear the title. The book is almost without peer among thrillers of its time.
Shutter Island is much more than the sum of the Leonard DiCaprio-starring film of the same name. Published in 2003, the book was reportedly influenced by Gothic stories and it certainly shares the trappings: A remote and lonely island, dark and stormy nights and, for god’s sake, an asylum for the criminally insane.
There are noir atmospherics, too, with its 1950s setting, Key Largo-style hurricane and a mystery about an unaccounted-for patient that we should have seen coming. It’s a testament to Lehane’s skill that the twists take us by surprise.
Director Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation, released in 2010, overshadows the book but not nearly as thoroughly as Mystic River does its source material.
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Lehane’s ‘Other’ Series and His First Play
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Before Lehane became a screenwriter for TV, he wrote a two-act play, “Coronado,” which was published as part of a 2006 short-story collection of the same name.
The play is based on an earlier short story, “Until Gwen,” that’s also included in the collection. Lehane notes in an introduction to the play that he transformed the short story into a work for the live stage to write a role for his brother, an actor; a role that was a “monster,” something to fulfill his brother’s desire to play a part other than a nice guy. The perfect character already existed in “Until Gwen,” Lehane realized. “Coronado,” which has been performed several times—Lehane includes the list of actors from mid-2000s performances. (And yes, his brother is in there.)
Like some of Lehane’s “other” work, it sometimes feels as if Lehane’s “other” series gets overlooked.
The so-called “Coughlin” series follows members of Boston’s Coughlin family through several decades and locales. The Given Day, published in 2008, is a tutorial on how a great writer can wrangle fictional characters, real-life figures and historical events and make it all seem urgent and personal. The book is set in 1918 and follows two men: Danny Coughlin, a Boston cop from a family of cops, and Luther Lawrence, an African-American baseball ace.
Lehane does well with adding actual historical figures like J. Edgar Hoover and Babe Ruth into the story and they help him with the story threads of dissent and racism.
Live By Night, from 2012, and World Gone By, from 2015, focus on a younger Coughlin, Joe, who not only eschewed the police life but embraced the budding world of organized crime, particularly in Florida and Cuba. By the time World Gone By plays out, it’s the 1940s and things get a little … spooky. But Lehane’s characters continue to serve some of the author’s favorite themes, including love, loyalty and remembrance.
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Looking for Love in Isolated Places
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Lehane’s most recent novel, 2017’s Since We Fell, has other wince-inducing qualities besides the aforementioned comparisons to pandemic-era quarantining.
But Lehane earns the winces from his readers because, for all the uncomfortable emotions it evokes, it’s a well-written thriller. It is, though, a much more straightforward story than the twisty-turny Shutter Island.
Rachel Childs is a former newspaper reporter-turned-TV-reporter being considered for a network gig when she’s given what seems like an ideal showcase: she’s sent to Haiti to cover a natural disaster. Her reports are compelling and sympathetic but her failure to protect a group of girls from rapists and killers pushes her into mental collapse. Said collapse occurs, unfortunately, on the air.
Her live breakdown is quickly circulated online, where she’s accused of being drunk on the job. Rachel loses everything—her career, her ambitious husband, her friends—and becomes pathological about leaving her apartment. Although undiagnosed, Rachel is probably agoraphobic.
Then comes Brian, a seemingly benign good guy who she met years before. He sweeps into her life and helps her work toward overcoming her fears. And they live happily ever after.
Well, no.
Brian is not who or what he seems, of course. But why would be insert himself into Rachel’s life, and why do his feelings for her seem so genuine?
Lehane’s story is—here’s a surprise—damn dark in its first half. It’s not like the second half is sunshiny, but Rachel’s self-imposed quarantine and the fear of being ridiculed by strangers who saw her “drunken” video— and her outright fear of strangers—are somehow more harrowing when the stakes are raised and she’s fighting for her life.
Since We Fell has, reportedly, been optioned for a movie version, with Lehane himself doing the screenwriting. A big-screen—or Netflix-size—treatment of the story might overshadow the book. This wouldn’t be new to the author or his readers but, as Stephen King reportedly answered fans that said Hollywood had “ruined” his books, the originals are all still right there on the shelves.
Dennis Lehane’s work is still right there on our shelves, ready for us to take them down when we feel like leaning into the darkness.
