Once Upon a Crime
Ernest Hemingway once said, "Write what you know about," advice that Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane, and the newest generation of Boston-bred novelists have certainly heeded. What is it about this city, especially its most gritty, urban neighborhoods, that breeds not only great crime writers but gripping stories set on the streets of Dorchester, Chelsea, and South Boston? Even the biggest names can't agree.
Mul's Diner on West Broadway in South Boston, with its colorful sign and polished diamond-plate metal siding, has a pleasant throwback diner feel, but not in that Disneyfied, Johnny Rockets sort of way. It still looks like a place where you can imagine someone getting beaten nearly to death with a hammer, which is just what takes place in Boyos, the first novel written by Richard Marinick and due to hit stores next month.
Marinick is a 53-year-old former State Police trooper, ex-Big Dig tunnel worker, and convicted armored-car robber who also happened to earn his master's degree in liberal arts -- with an emphasis on, of all things, children's literature -- from Boston University while serving time in a variety of the Commonwealth's finer prisons. Growing up in Quincy, he heard the stories about his grandmother's native South Boston around the dinner table, and after high school he moved to South Boston himself, where he took up his life of crime that would eventually inspire him to use his neighborhood as the setting for his writing.
Mul's "is an institution," Marinick says while enjoying a breakfast of chocolate milk and bacon, "but if you're not from Southie, it's just a diner. But it's the sound of the word. In fact, I don't even go into great detail about what Mul's looks like. I go with the vibration of words and the rhythm."
Marinick says he is inspired by his physical surroundings and that they have given depth to his storytelling in ways that another, less layered and historic place never could. One of the climactic scenes in Boyos takes place in Dorchester Heights, where a small-time hoodlum, Jack "Whacko" Curran, caught in an underworld gang war, confronts his screw-up younger brother Kevin about his drug use. Whacko Curran had used the Heights as a refuge and a place to think and soothe a troubled mind. Not coincidentally, this is exactly how Marinick used the neighborhood in aspiring to join the growing list of writers with strong Boston roots who look no farther than their backyard to find the gritty richness that defines their style. And their stories.
uried under a never-ending avalanche of bad books, hounded by publicists hawking even more of them, and hiding behind the curtains every time the
Who among us doesn't think he has at least one detective novel in him? Judging from book sales and bestseller lists, it might seem as if, per capita, no city produces writers who crank out plots about their own neighborhoods more than this one. The list, as Fusilli wrote, includes Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane, Linda Barnes, Jeremiah Healy, and Philip R. Craig, to name a few, and now Marinick is looking to join the party.
The city's neighborhoods and their inhabitants have inspired numerous modern crime and mystery classics. Many have made their way from the bestseller lists to the large and small screens, from George V. Higgins's seminal The Friends of Eddie Coyle in 1973 to Parker's Spenser novels and, most recently, to Lehane's Mystic River. The film version of Mystic River was nominated for Best Picture at the 2004 Academy Awards; it garnered Oscars for actors Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, who both portrayed Lehane characters who had grown up in East Buckingham, the author's fictitious hybrid of Dorchester, South Boston, and Charlestown.
It's even possible for an enterprising reader to see an actual murder site from Lehane's Mystic River. All it takes is two trips, an educated guess, and some imagination. Pen Park, where ex-con Jimmy Marcus's teenage daughter is murdered, is actually an amalgam of the old Neponset Drive-In Theater in Dorchester, where the looming abandoned movie screen in the book comes from, and an unnamed park near Lehane's home where he walks his dogs(hint from Lehane: live theater is performed there). Imagination is necessary, because the Neponset Drive-In, which was an appropriately gothic and forbidding place when it was closed and abandoned for years, is now state property, Pope John Paul II Park, and Lehane fans who make the trek to Gallivan Boulevard have to imagine a weed-choked dilapidated drive-in theater where toddlers in sun hats and Elmo sneakers now climb on a shiny new red play structure.
It's places like those that push Boston crime fiction to its heights, but even still, the outright success of the genre is almost a mystery unto itself: With so much fiction gone bad out there, how is it that Boston and its neighborhoods continue to churn out so much of the good stuff? Is it something about the Boston character? Is it the city itself, its brownstones and triple-deckers? The history of so many fantastic true crime stories, from the tales of "Whitey" Bulger to the Boston Strangler to the Irish gang wars to Charles Stuart? Or maybe just the way we talk? In this story, there is no pat ending, no neat resolution. Not even the city's biggest names in the genre agree.
FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS of both the book and film versions of Mystic River, Dennis Lehane is standing on the mountaintop of crime literature. Readers of the 38-year-old Lehane's earlier work know his serialized private eye, Patrick Kenzie, as an archetypal hard-boiled shamus in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Parker's Spenser, and Philip Marlowe, the creation of Raymond Chandler, considered by many as the godfather of crime writing.
Like his fellows, Kenzie is hard as a ball-peen hammer, born to suffer, proudly jaded, deeply fatalistic, an inveterate backer of the underdog, and practiced at the art of self-deprecating humor (if anything, Kenzie sounds like a lifelong Red Sox fan). And if Philip Marlowe never rooted for the Sox, he sure drank as if he did. Ask writers like Lehane, who grew up in St. Margaret's Parish, near the South Boston line, and they'll tell you that there's something about good crime and detective stories that simply resonates with native Bostonians, a mix of comedy and tragedy that appeals to our own contradictory natures.
"The thing that I think differentiates us even from New York is the dark sense of humor that is particular to [Boston's] neighborhoods," Lehane says. "We just accept that God is a prankster. It's this attitude that, `You know, we're all [screwed], can I buy another round? 'I went out with some friends from my old neighborhood a couple of weeks ago, and that humor just came out. They're all getting screwed by their bosses . . . and yet they just have this great wry irony about it. It was hysterical. People in New York aren't funny that way, they just think they are."
Had he grown up somewhere else, Lehane insists that he still would have been a writer (he says he had chosen his profession by the time he turned 8), but he speculates that he would have been "technically proficient but bloodless."
"Would I have been a writer? Sure," he says. "But there is a certain level of emotionalism to my work, and that wouldn't have been there if I hadn't come from this sort of a place."
IF LEHANE IS KING of the new generation of Boston crime writing, the 71-year-old Parker is old-school to the core.
"If anything, I think I would write the same kind of books if I lived in Pittsburgh, which is also gritty and has a lot of neighborhoods," the venerable writer says over a beer at the bar at Rialto in the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. "I know it's almost official dogma that I am supposed to have captured something, the essence of the gritty neighborhoods. I think my publisher is complicit in that, and the ads, and the reviewers. I am just writing stories that take place in a very complex place."
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, educated in London, and lived in Los Angeles, and Parker says he probably would have written the same stories had he lived in Boston. "I think it's the man," Parker says, "not the place."
But then imagine Spenser prowling the streets of Omaha, Des Moines, or even Pittsburgh. Does Parker really believe his protagonist would have become popular enough to support one of the longest-running (Bad Business, the latest Spenser novel, is the 31st) detective fiction series of all time? Even Parker has to smirk when he points out the incongruity of a present-day, former-boxer detective who always seems to be in his 40s, yet who fought in the Korean War and went toe-to-toe with Jersey Joe Walcott, who retired from the ring 51 years ago.
Probably not, Parker says. "Look, if you write fiction, it's good to be concrete about where things are happening, particularly if it's romantic fiction, stuff that's a little larger than life," he says. "This is just where I live."
When she hears about the opposing theories from two legends like Lehane and Parker, Kate Mattes, the owner of Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge and a longtime den mother to fledgling mystery writers, says there may be less philosophical difference between the pair than stylistic. Lehane and other talented local writers such as Marinick, Bill Landay, and Jon F. Merz, she says, are consciously trying to take readers into underworlds that they could never access without a novel as a passport.
Lehane's work, in particular, reveals the complex neighborhood structures, unspoken rules, and relationships of places like Dorchester and South Boston. Merz, in novels such as The Invoker, follows the adventures of Lawson, a detective who is not only a Bostonian but a vampire. "These are worlds that you know exist," says Mattes, "and yet your chances of being part of them are nil."
Parker's Boston, on the other hand, has always been more of a picture-postcard Fodor's Boston, a matte painting in front of which Parker's detective stories unfold. He even offers a walking tour in Spenser's Boston, a photography book published in Japan, where Parker has become something of a literary legend. As the Spenser series has worn on, there's been more and more Zagat to the books as well -- in the latest book, Spenser, a notorious foodie, takes a friend to the Federalist for martinis and Chilean sea bass.
Parker's books "are fun because there are places we know, we can place them in a map, and we know where to find them -- before the Big Dig came along and screwed everything up, that is," Mattes says.
Parker argues that his books would have worked in virtually any city -- Chicago, Milwaukee, even Seattle. "I don't know if it would have worked in Dallas," he says. "What does work in Dallas? Or Houston? Jesus, there's an ugly city."
BUT THERE IS SOMETHING besides aesthetics that Boston has over many other cities, and that's an unbelievably emotional history of strife, tension, and disappointment. From the tea party to the Irish gangs, from the racial battles to the Red Sox, the city's past provides endless layers of material for aspiring writers and helps them build complex characters who ultimately lead to great crime fiction.
Whacko Curran "is kind of a history buff, and he would go up there and look down at the harbor where the English frigates were [during the Revolutionary War]," Marinick says. "You can still imagine them down there, the patriots bombarding them with cannons from where you're standing." That juxtaposition of conflict on conflict, the mundane on the historic, lends the confrontation scene a weight it wouldn't otherwise have had if it were just an argument over drugs between two brothers, Marinick says. "It's a monument to war. And there is a war going on in the book."
Yet anyone who has ever driven down a side street in Dorchester or Jamaica Plain at 2 a.m., and noticed the way the triple-deckers seem to rise taller and loom over the street in the vertical light of the street lamps, knows that the ordinary here can still be the dramatic, and that a neighborhood description, or an ordinary conversation between two people sitting on a front porch, can be turned into so much more in the hands of someone like, say, George V. Higgins.
Higgins burst on the scene in 1970 with a novel way of treating crime dialogue. His first book, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, turned the traditional ratio of narrative storytelling to dialogue on its head and inspired a new generation of crime and mystery writers to expand and reshape the genre. Quotations in Higgins's books go on for pages, not paragraphs. Elmore Leonard, the acclaimed Detroit author of such classics as Get Shorty and Jackie Brown, once said of him, "He doesn't learn from me, I learn from him."
One of Higgins's closest friends was Marty Nolan, a former Globe reporter and editorial page editor. The pair attended Boston College together, where Higgins edited the literary magazine. After trying his hand at journalism, he earned a law degree and then a job at the US attorney's office in Boston, where he would prosecute cases by day and then return home to Hingham at night to work on The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Nolan says it's a popular misconception that Higgins learned dialogue from listening to tapes of wiretaps and bugs of criminals in the US attorney's office, even though there is little doubt that Boston's rich history of actual crime has been a source of inspiration for so many fictional murders.
Before his death in 1999, in fact, Higgins had attended the historic US District Court hearings on the Boston FBI informant scandal involving fugitive South Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger and based the protagonist in his last book on the real-life mobster. Bulger's dark, looming criminal presence has become something of an icon in local crime fiction, appearing in Marinick's book as Marty Fallon and in Michael Fredrickson's 2001 potboiler, Witness for the Dead, as Tommy Crimmins.
But Nolan says Higgins learned more about dialogue just from driving a
If there is any agreement among Boston writers of tough fiction, it is that the city and the neighborhoods will provide as long as you are willing to listen carefully enough and soak up the surroundings.
Parker calls his dialogue "Boston music." Lehane says he believes every good writer is given one true gift, and "mine was always an ear."
"But who wouldn't have one, having grown up in that environment?" Lehane says. "I just remember being with friends and one of my mentors, [the novelist and short-story writer] John Dufresne, just trading stories. He turned to me and said, 'I wish I had grown up like you guys.'"
Sin City: Five of the best Boston crime novels
MYSTIC RIVER
By Dennis Lehane
This is Dorchester native Lehane's masterwork about three boys from fictional East Buckingham (an amalgam of Dorchester, Charlestown, and other Boston neighborhoods). The story tells how one tragic event tears them apart and how another puts them back on a collision course with one another.
THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE
By George V. Higgins
This 1970 novel, Higgins's first, is considered a seminal work that helped usher in a new era of stripped-down crime stories driven by dialogue and free of genre conventions. The story follows a small-time Boston hoodlum, Eddie Coyle, trying to make a living in the gun-running business and stay alive.
PROMISED LAND
By Robert B. Parker
Published in 1976, this is the fourth, and widely considered the best, of Parker's series of novels about his fictional detective Spenser. The action stretches from Boston to Cape Cod, and we get to meet Hawk, Spenser's tough-as-nails friend and sometime partner in mayhem, for the first time.
THE BIG DIG
By Linda Barnes
Most of Barnes's mysteries featuring detective Carlotta Carlyle are set in and around Boston, but The Big Dig is actually set underneath the city in everyone's favorite construction nightmare and boondoggle. Carlyle is a tough former Boston cop who sometimes drives a cab to make ends meet.
SO LIKE SLEEP
By Jeremiah Healy
John Francis Cuddy, Healy's private eye, grew up in South Boston, served as an MP in Vietnam, and lost his wife to cancer. In his third Cuddy novel, Healy taps into Boston's well-chronicled racial tensions as his hero helps a black college student accused of killing his white girlfriend.
Ralph Ranalli is a Globe staff writer. His e-mail address is rranalli@globe.com. 