Q&A with Dennis Lehane
How Boston became the cradle of the new American noir
(Ed Quinn/Corbis)ON OCT. 23, 1989, a flower-delivery man pulled up at the corner of Huntington Avenue and Francis Street. In the idling van, he checked his list and smoked a cigarette.
An hour later, Charles Stuart - soon to become one of Boston's most infamous murderers - drove toward that same corner. He and his wife Carol had just attended a birthing class, and now Stuart was looking for a spot where he could shoot his wife.
After it was done, Stuart claimed that a black man had jumped into his car at the corner of Huntington and Francis, firing on both himself and Carol. The lie sent almost a hundred cops rampaging through the streets of Mission Hill, shaking down African-American residents; an innocent man nearly took the murder rap. When the truth came out, Stuart plunged to his death in the Mystic River.
And Dennis Lehane - the delivery guy who had parked on that controversial corner - started writing crime novels, many of them influenced by the Stuart case. These "Boston noir" stories imagine the city as a dark empire, rife with political machines, ethnic mobs, and clouds of racism.
Hollywood has brought his vision to the big screen with two major films based on Lehane books - "Mystic River" and "Gone, Baby, Gone." Meanwhile, "The Departed" also springs out of the fictional world Lehane created (though the film is not based on his work).
This trend is a startling break from the past. In the 1980s and early 1990s, TV shows and films portrayed Boston as the cutest of cities; it invariably appeared as a pastiche of cobblestones, brass rails, Brahmins, and a bar where everyone knows your name.
Now there's not a cobblestone in sight. Lehane might be considered the man who rebranded Boston.
IDEAS: How is the underbelly of Boston different from the underbelly of other cities?
LEHANE: We take the idea of fatalistic humor to the nth degree. We think God is a comic. The universe is cruel in a jokey way. It's not just plain cruel; we're not Finns. Bostonians are fatalistic but also funny. God's got a punch line and you may be it.
IDEAS: Right now, another one of your books - "Shutter Island" - is being produced as a major Hollywood film. So what are they saying about Boston out there in Beverly Hills?
LEHANE: They're anthropological. {hellip}They're like, "What do you mean you don't live in a $7 million mansion?"
IDEAS: You're an exotic to them?
LEHANE: Yeah. I think what's going on with this surge of Boston noir in films is this: there's a sense of discovering something just as it vanishes. The Irish gangster tribal culture is going to vanish in the next 40 years.
IDEAS: In some ways, the films already feel out of date. You wouldn't be able to dump a body in Somerville nowadays without hitting a luxury condo.
LEHANE: When I was working on "Mystic River," I was inspired by a line I wrote in my journal in 1993: "What happens when the pizzeria turns into a
IDEAS: The crooks are being laundered, like their money.
LEHANE: Exactly. I don't have kids yet, but when I do, I'm not going to be able to show them the world that I grew up in. The mom-and-pop store will not be there anymore. There's so much that's bad about that insular working-class world, but there are good aspects that are being lost. That world is vanishing, but maybe it will be replaced somehow. Maybe bodegas will pop up in Allston. Maybe really cool outposts of Cape Verdean culture will appear in Dorchester. I don't know.
IDEAS: For a Bostonian, the location shots in "Gone, Baby, Gone" are a lot of fun. In the movie and the book, the Quincy quarries become a landscape of pure evil. Of course, these days, the Quincy quarries are full of harmless, rock-climbing nerds.
LEHANE: If you grew up on the south side of the city that was a rite of passage - you jumped into the quarry. You were told by the older kids about some guy who dove in and took a car aerial in the eye. That was the last thing you heard before you jumped. I jumped once. It was terrifying.
IDEAS: But now the quarries have been filled in with Big Dig rubble.
LEHANE: Yeah, the present always wipes out the past.
IDEAS: Your forthcoming novel is about the Boston police strike in 1919?
LEHANE: It's about the entire year, actually. It was one of the enthralling years in American history, from World War I to the police strike, and the pandemic flu. After the North End got ravaged by the flu - just as they were recovering - they had the molasses-tank explosion. It killed 16 people and did the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars. It was originally deemed a terrorist attack.
IDEAS: Just when you think it can't get any worse, you drown in molasses.
LEHANE: Yeah, 50-foot waves of it.
IDEAS: No wonder Bostonians think that they're the punch line to God's cruel joke.
LEHANE: Exactly. So the book goes from the outbreak of the great influenza until [Babe] Ruth was traded to the Yankees. That's the movement of the story. The Boston police strike was the first attempt of labor to fight big money. And they lost.
IDEAS: Why did you decide to jump so far back in time for this book?
LEHANE: When I learned there was a cavalry charge down Beacon Hill, I figured I needed to write about that. Literally. Cavalry. Da-dump-da-dump-da-dum. They rode right into Scollay Square. The state Guard and then the Army came in, because the entire city rioted after the police walk-off.
Back then, domestic terrorism was at an all-time high. We had just come through an unpopular war and no one could explain why we were there. And [Alexander] Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general of the United States, began an assault on civil liberties.
Nothing changes. There is something life affirming about that - and something so depressing.
Pagan Kennedy is the author of nine books, most recently "The First Man-Made Man." She can be reached through her website, home.comcast.net/~pagankennedy.
