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The Drood Review This site is copyright
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An
interview with Dennis Lehane
Len Abram interviewed Dennis Lehane by email about Lehane?s five Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro novels, and about his newest novel, Mystic River. This interview was originally published in the January/February 2002 issue of The Drood Review. The Drood Review: Locale plays prominently in your books. The neighborhoods and suburbs of Boston add historical interest and contrast to your stories. Could you have written the same stories, with the same characters, set anywhere else? Dennis Lehane: It would have been harder certainly. I know the South pretty well, and I?ve set short stories in Florida, South Carolina, and Texas, but ultimately I?m a tourist there. Now tourism can work to your advantage ? I love the way the eye of a Brit like Martin Amis, say, brings a fresh perspective to my own country when he writes about New York ? but it has its limits. What I hope I have an instinctive understanding of, as a writer, is Boston, yes, but also the blue collar urban world that exists in the Albany of William Kennedy or the Bronx and New Jersey of Richard Price or the South Philly of Pete Dexter. So if you put me in that kind of world, I could conceivably set a novel there once I?d learned the street names and the nuances of local dialect. That?s still a comparatively small bit of real estate, though ? parts of New York, Pittsburgh, Philly, Chicago, maybe Detroit. Otherwise, I am a tourist and I have rather definite limits. But limits are cool. They keep the ego in check. Drood: As the title of Mickey Spillane?s I the Jury suggests, the private detective often becomes a vigilante ? judge, jury and even executioner. The most dramatic example in your stories may be in A Drink Before the War, in which Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro execute a gang leader. Is there a no-man?s land between society and the criminal where only the detective can administer justice? DL: There is an argument that the PI in American detective fiction is just a continuation of an age-old archetype that started with the warrior, morphed into the knight, morphed again into the gunslinger in westerns, and then was updated to the private eye. I think there?s a lot of truth to this, and noir fiction is certainly the fiction of the outsider. Mistrust of government institutions and society?s ability to render apt justice are hallmarks. Noir is often the voice of the underbelly, of a second America that lives in the shadows. And the rules of this second society are more primal and, one could argue, more vicious. Patrick and Angie?s murder of the gang leader in A Drink Before the War is hardly an act of moral certainty, however. It?s very different from Mike Hammer shooting the evil woman at the end of I the Jury and responding to her "How could you?" with "It was easy." To some extent, Patrick and Angie are part of the problem at the end of Drink. And the problem is racism. So they kill the black gang leader but not the white politician who is probably more guilty. They reinforce the status quo essentially, the one that allows us to delude ourselves into thinking a white, blue-collar moron who throws a rock at a busload of black school kids and freely uses the "N" word is as dangerous as the well-educated CEO who publicly decries "racism" but makes sure no blacks live in his neighborhood or reach positions of prominence within his company. Drood: Patrick and Angie don?t seem to be racist. DL: Not racist, per se, but symbolically in terms of that act, they are part of the larger problem. Whether they mean it or not, they do play into an overarching societal structure that punishes the small fish while the big fish swim away. And this is not something they?re unaware of, either. Patrick riffs on it in the "one white, one dead" section that follows Socia?s murder. While they didn?t start out with this objective, the Patrick/Angie books gradually became an examination of the ways in which those who battle violence become violent themselves. The most shockingly violent act Patrick ever committed, in my opinion, occurs in Gone, Baby, Gone, in which he steps up behind a wounded child molester, shoots the man in the back of the head, and never breaks stride. And that?s the darkness in him ? that?s his father ? and it underlies what so much of that book is about: How do we, as individuals, deal with the mandates of society when those mandates are so often wrong? Now, I don?t have the answer to that, and neither does Patrick, obviously, but I think the question is worth asking. Drood: By the way, since we are talking about racism, you avoided the South Boston school busing problems in the mid-1970s, around the time that Dave Boyle gets molested, in Mystic River. Too distracting from the main purpose of the novel? DL: I touched on it in the section where Jimmy and Val Savage cement their friendship as the only two white kids bused into a black school, but I felt like I?d said all I wanted to say about racism in A Drink Before the War. When I touch on it now, I try to do so in subtle ways ? Dave playing on race fears when he tells Celeste about the "mugger;" Jimmy?s riff on rap, which could be taken as the musings of a man who is in denial about his own racism or simply the musings of a guy who hates rap, take your pick. I?ve been accused of being an apologist for the xenophobic aspects of the blue-collar, mostly white neighborhoods I write about, but I find such criticism ignorant if only because anyone who reads my books and comes away thinking I?ve painted a rose-colored portrait of that world needs to be taught how to read again. Drood: Do you think that there is too much violence in your books? DL: The more the books became about questions of violence, the more I began to argue with myself over how much of the violence in the books is valid in a "hearts of darkness" kind of way and how much of it was pure wish-fulfillment. Sacred is a fantasy book; it?s meant to be taken with a wink and a nudge, so the violence in that book can?t be judged against, say, the bowling alley scene in Darkness, Take My Hand or the child molesters? house of horrors in Gone, Baby, Gone. But the other four books in the series are meant to be taken more or less straight-up, and I began to wrestle with the violence question because I don?t think good ever comes of violence. It?s often necessary, no question, but even the smallest act of violence has ramifications ? many of them quite messy and far-reaching ? that those involved in that act itself can rarely see at the time. Drood: Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are in love and in business together, a difficult challenge for most couples. Our culture talks a lot about equality between men and women, but your detectives practice it, equal risks, contributions, rewards. Do you think that one of the accomplishments of the Kenzie/Gennaro books is that they break stereotypes? Angie can?t cook, whereas Patrick can; she?s a better shot and may even have saved his life (Sacred) more often than he saves hers (Prayers for Rain); and she?s less sentimental and more business-like than Patrick. DL: A former professor of mine gave me a hard time after he read the first book because he thought I?d succumbed to PC-disease in my creation of Angie. But I don?t know many weak women. I don?t recognize that bimbo in movies who hangs on the hero?s arm and faints at the sight of danger. The women I knew growing up tended to be strong, wounded, unsentimental, and very proud, and those are the types of women I?ve tended to gravitate toward as both friends and lovers. The biggest surprise for me with these books is the political reaction to them, since I never think in political terms. Angie was never meant to be a feminist model. She?s just a character, and a deeply flawed one at that. I despise this disease of post-modernism that some people suffer from in which they need to see characters as "representative" of an entire race or gender. Angie is not Everywoman. She?s just Angie ? she drinks too much, smokes too much, has extremely messed-up ideas about relationships, is deeply religious and yet very conflicted about that religion, and projects an air of confidence that is alternately admirable and annoying. Patrick, too, is a compendium of flaws and strengths. And that?s what interests me about characters and people in general. Drood: What does this tendency to take on danger say about Patrick?s longevity? DL: I?ve probably used the warrior model a bit too much when it comes to Patrick, so his longevity prospects aren?t real good if he keeps getting ass-whupped at his current pace. And so, again, that speaks to the problems of keeping a series fresh, because sooner or later you run into questions of believability that are even louder than the ones you start out with when you decide to write a book in which your private eye character engages in actions which few real life private investigators have ever had to deal with. I mean, poor Patrick, his worst enemy isn?t himself or some deranged murderer, it?s me. Drood: Patrick, like Angie and Bubba, has a chip on his shoulder about the wealthy and upper-middle class. Trevor Stone in Sacred; the pols at the Ritz bar (and the Ritz itself) in A Drink Before the War; the Charlesgate Apartments, which replaced the working class West End in Darkness, Take My Hand ? these seem immoral or corrupting. Why the class warfare? DL: The busing crises of the ?70s really tore open the age-old rift in Boston between the working class environs of the city and the upper-class areas like Beacon Hill and Back Bay as well as the tonier suburbs. What got lost in the horrific displays of racism ? of which there were multitudes, no question ? was that many people felt the issue wasn?t one of race warfare, so much as class warfare. While anyone who opposed busing was instantly labeled a racist and those who were for it could go to sleep at night knowing, beyond question, that they were on the side of right, in the neighborhoods, many perceived a hypocrisy in that the decision-makers and their most ardent supports tended to live outside the neighborhoods being affected. It seemed yet another case of those who had power making decisions for those who didn?t, whether they liked it or not. And so in the late ?80s when a school in the nicest section of Cambridge attempted to change its focus to lower-income, less-advantaged children, many of the local, alleged liberal elite who?d been at the forefront of the busing movement, used political pressure to have the district rezoned so that the school couldn?t operate there. And establishment sources of the fourth estate such as The Boston Globe, which had relentlessly excoriated the racism of the neighborhoods in the ?70s, barely touched the story. Which, one wonders, is the more insidious form of racism ? racism by rock and bottle or racism by pen and zoning variances? The chip on Patrick?s shoulder stems from that. If there?s one thing he hates, above all else, it is hypocrisy. Drood: Patrick Kenzie likes the movies and so do you. The influence of cinema is evident perhaps most in Sacred, whose stories-within-the-story emulate Kurosawa?s Rashomon, and whose plot may be influenced by Laura and other noir movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Has film been as influential in your work as noir stories in print? Is your treatment of violence, such as the shoot-out at South Station in A Drink Before the War or the storming of the pedophile house in Gone, Baby, Gone, influenced by the balletic treatment of violence in Kurosawa or Peckinpah films? DL: I?m a certified movie geek, so the influence of film on my writing is hard to deny. Peckinpah probably influenced that South Station shootout and also DePalma. To think in cinematic terms when I?m creating an action scene helps a lot because I like to visualize down to the to most infinitesimal detail, and it helps to see it in terms of slow motion and jump cuts and camera angles, deciding when to speed up and when to slow down. So in that sense, yes, film is a huge influence. And the films which most impressed me as a kid were the neo-noirs of the ?70s, films like Chinatown, Night Moves, and The Long Goodbye. These were films in which the hero invariably lost. Oh, he might have solved the primary question of the plot, but the larger evil he was fighting was usually too immense and too entrenched for him to triumph over it. However, when it comes to the actual writing of violent scenes, I?m most influenced by other writers: Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake?s Parker books (under the pseudonym Richard Stark), to name just two. Both those writers depict violence in a manner that seems true to me; it?s very fast and very brutal and delivered in almost laconically distanced prose. It goes back to the idea that very little good comes from violence, so to write about it in such a way that it provides only vicarious thrills for the reader seems disingenuous. It?s a slippery slope, I admit, but I try to provide some thrills, yet also a sense of real pain. Poole?s mortal injury in Gone, Baby, Gone comes to mind as a good example of what I aim for. Drood: Will you continue the Kenzie/Gennaro series? DL: I think Spade and Marlowe remain icons because they didn?t wear out their welcome. Would Chandler be Chandler if he?d written 18 Marlowe books? I don?t know, but I wonder. Maybe Chandler could have sustained the level of quality, but the issue is more whether I can. And I have my doubts about that. The only artsy, metaphysical aspect of my approach to writing is that I can only write about characters when they come knocking on the door and tell me to. Patrick and Angie stopped knocking after Prayers for Rain. If they come knocking again, I?ll open the door and welcome them in with open arms because, well, they paid for my house and I?m exceedingly grateful. But if they don?t, then I?ll be content to let them live happily ever after without my dropping another case-from-hell in their laps. They deserve that. Drood: What effect do you hope your books will have for the reader? DL: I hope, first and foremost, that my books are entertaining. That?s our primary job ? keep ?em awake at the campfire. If you can?t do that, all the pretty language and elevated ideas and metaphorical and symbolic significance won?t matter. It?s gotta be fun, gotta be exciting, gotta have some kick. But a close second is the desire to create characters who live on, even if they die within the covers. And maybe the reader recognizes a piece of himself and his own conflicts and flaws and attributes in a character and says, "Hey, I?m not alone. How cool is that?" Copyright (c) 2002 by The Drood Review |