Lehane is laughing, but he’s not kidding. It’s his stories he obsesses over, not facts. So when he gives you a windshield tour of working-class Dorchester, the Boston neighborhood that supplies the turf of his six crime novels (not to mention the turf of his own childhood), the 35-year-old author makes it clear that the Dorchester in his books is not on any map. “This isn’t sociology,” he says. “That’s not a writer’s job. You try to do a representation of a feeling, the character of a place.”
Nobody does that better than he does. He’s got near-perfect pitch when it comes to capturing the rage that fomented racial war in the ’70s and today fuels the resentment of working-class residents being driven out of neighborhoods like Charlestown and Dorchester by skyrocketing property taxes and rents. Bleak. You bet. The word gritty could have been invented just to describe Lehane’s people, places, plots–hey, the butter is gritty in his books. Mercifully, he’s also got a sense of humor. One of his characters in “Mystic River” is named Just Ray not because he’s wise or judicious, but because all the colorful neighborhood nicknames–Crazy Ray, Psycho Ray–were already taken.
“Mystic River” is Lehane’s best book by far. Like all his writing, it shimmers with great dialogue and a complex view of the world–what Lehane likes to call “comic fatality”–where every hero is a little soiled and more than slightly compromised. When ex-con Jimmy Marcus’s daughter Katie gets killed, the investigating officer is Jimmy’s childhood friend Sean Devine. And when their old pal Dave Boyle becomes a suspect, the present is further haunted by the memory of the day, years before, when 11-year-old Sean and Jimmy watched Dave abducted by two child molesters. OK, not a sunny book. Lehane says point blank that it’s a story about “the futility of fighting your nature. There’s a lotta anger in this book, ‘cause people have been burying stuff, and it’s gonna come out, man, it’s gotta come out.”
So why’s a guy who started out in grad school as a Raymond Carver wanna-be writing hard-boiled crime fiction? For the same reason, Lehane says, that serious readers have made crime fiction the dominant genre on every best-seller list in the country. “We’ve become disillusioned with so-called literary fiction,” he says. “People don’t want to be told life sucks and let’s read about it for the next 250 pages. They kinda know that, that life is mundane, that life is very boring. But they’re not just reading for escapism. They’re reading to work stuff out, and for that they’re looking for stories a little larger than life–characters going through extreme situations, grandly passionate and tragic things. And mysteries do that better than anything.” They do when they’re written by Dennis Lehane.
