Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane could be forgiven for feeling cocky. His best-selling book Mystic River is a big-screen smash (adapted by Clint Eastwood, whom he just calls “Clint”) and a buzz film for the Oscars. The film rights to his latest book, Shutter Island, were optioned even before being published to critical acclaim and brisk sales, with The Perfect Storm director Wolfgang Peterson slated to take the helm. Fans have grown attached to Kenzie and Gennaro, the private-eye duo from his first five books. So a little self-satisfaction might be expected, but the thought doesn’t seem to have occurred to Lehane. He doesn’t think much of the hoopla, busy as he is at home in Boston, writing a book about the city’s 1919 police strike.

“I’m very good at not getting caught up in anything I can’t control,” he says, laughing. “It’s one of my only gifts.”

Lehane’s first book, A Drink Before the War, was optioned shortly after publication but never made it to film, so he’s a veteran of the Hollywood shuffle—and it doesn’t impress him. He originally didn’t even want to sell Mystic River, but Eastwood convinced the writer he understood what Lehane was trying to do. That the film was faithful to the book was prize enough. “I just won the writer’s lottery,” he says. “Everything else is gravy.”

With Mystic River, Lehane sought to write a classical epic in a modern urban setting. Shutter Island was an homage to 1950s pulp films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which worked on symbolic and literal levels not discovered until years later (with added historical perspective). He’s building on the work of authors before him—from Dashiell Hammett to what Lehane calls a renaissance of the noir genre that began in the late ’70s with James Crumly’s Last Good Kiss and continued through writers like Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy.

“I think there were a lot of writers who came up in the ’90s who were influenced by that,” he says. “There was a sense of, ‘Oh, we don’t have to play by genre rules anymore. There are no more genre rules.’”

Lehane is attempting to skew the boundary between genre fiction and fiction elevated by the label of “literature.” Some so-called literature, while interesting, may lack story—but Lehane doesn’t buy the argument that having a story makes genre fiction inherently any better, either. He’s at his most compelling when hanging the fundamental elements of literature on the frame noir provides for him, something he does for artistic and practical reasons.

“Some of us who found our way through noir were saying there’s a fusion, maybe. There’s a possibility of a fusion. We can take what we know from great literature about language, about depth of character, about depth of emotion, and we can apply it to a skeleton. The skeleton is noir, because personally there’s nothing ‘high art’ about my reasons for doing noir… I just naturally do not plot well. I need a skeleton, and noir gives me a skeleton—something bad happens, it has to be reckoned with by the end of the book—boom. I can work within that and I can go wherever I want to go.”

This provides a rich landscape for gritty tales of tragedy and loss. Tough guys like Jimmy Marcus from Mystic River or Teddy Daniels from Shutter Island often find themselves in fevered dreams trying to interpret symbols like floating dresses or headstones carved with cryptic messages.

“I like dreams a lot. I like to every now and then indulge a certain bent I have for surrealism, maybe more specifically magic surrealism,” he says. “But I can’t write magic surrealism because it doesn’t fit the world I write about.”

The backdrop is always Boston, where Lehane was born and raised. His short stories are often set in the South, where he went to college and grad school, but he sees no reason ever to set a book outside Boston.

“Ultimately, I’m a tourist there,” he says of the South. “There’s so many stories left to tell in my area that I know very well. Why go away?”