Dennis Lehane - Photo by Diana Lucas Leavengood
Lehane, 56, is known for his viscerally cinematic descriptive skills and acute ear for authentic street speak, both of which have been apparent in the film adaptations of his work: Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island, in addition to aforementioned Mystic River.
CityBeat recently phoned Lehane to discuss his most recent novel — 2010’s Moonlight Mile, his first Kenzie-Gennaro effort in a dozen years — the origins of his storytelling skills and the voices in his head.
CityBeat: HarperCollins recently announced it is going to introduce a Dennis Lehane Books imprint. How did that come about?
Dennis Lehane:
They approached me. We have a very long and fruitful relationship. I’ve
been with them 17 years, so when they came to me with this idea, I said,
“Oh, that’d be cool,” because I’m one of those geeks who lives to
recommend. I’m the guy who is always making mix tapes — not when I’m
trying to score with you, but just to send you cool music — and I’ll
watch a movie for the ninth time just to see it with a friend for the
first time. I thought this could be cool because I’m always heralding
writers who no one has ever heard of, and now I get to do it from the
ground floor up.
CB:
The press release says the imprint will focus on stories with a “dark
urban edge.” Why has that type of story or genre always interested you?
DL: When I’m
teaching, I say this to writers who are trying to find their voice:
“There are a million writers you can admire” — my favorite writer is
Gabriel García Márquez, but I don’t write anything like him — “but there
are some writers when you read them you feel like you’re coming home,
like they’ve walked through your front door.” I say to my students,
“Those are the writers you want to emulate, because those are the ones
who are speaking in some approximation of what will be your voice.” For
me, those writers were always urban novelists: Richard Price, William
Kennedy, Elmore Leonard’s Detroit novels, novels that are about cities.
CB: You’ve always, even as a young child, had this voracious appetite for books and stories.
Where does that come from?
DL: I
don’t know. My mother was a reader. That could be a genetic issue right
there. Where the reading came from I can’t explain; where the writing
came from I think is a little clearer because I grew up in such a
storytelling culture. I grew up in an Irish culture and I grew up in a
bar culture, so the premium was on a good story well told. And if you
told the same story five times in a six-month period, that’s fine, too,
as long as you could make it interesting.
CB: I’ve been reading various things you’ve said about the decision to go back Patrick and Angela for Moonlight Mile,
and one of the things you kept doing was referring to the characters as
if they were independent of you, as if they were friends or
acquaintances or actual human beings. I’m curious about this phenomenon,
which seems to afflict many writers.
DL: Yeah, they
are definitely these kind of alterna-humans. I’m not sure where that
comes from. I always know when a book is working when I expect to see
one of the characters walk through my door. Truly, honestly, I’ll have
that moment. I remember being in a bar one time — I think I was writing Gone Baby Gone,
and I was hip-deep in the book by that point — and the door opened. I
remember turning my head and looking down the bar and hoping and
expecting Patrick and Angie to walk through the door, because I wanted
to hear what they were going to say — I had just left them an hour
before and we were in the middle of something very interesting. If you
try to talk about this you sound like you should be locked up, but it’s
when you know a book is really singing.
CB: The Given Day
was a pretty big departure for you. Was the process of writing that,
which I’m sure took a lot of research, one of the reasons you decided to
go back to Patrick and Angela?
DL: I want to be
really clear on this: There is never any conscious decision for me on a
project. It’s more like something kind of feeds my imagination and I
say, “OK, I have to do that.” With Moonlight Mile, it was that
Patrick started talking in my head, and I said, “Oh, he’s back.” Then it
became this issue of, OK, I want to revisit them through the one case
that haunts the most, and I want to see who they are now in this era,
because so many of my friends are private contractors, and I watched
them just get leveled during the 2008 (economic) meltdown. And then I
just couldn’t escape the fact that we had this situation where it’s very
clear to the entire country exactly what caused the meltdown, and yet
we turned around and blamed unions and public service workers. I just
thought, “Wow, that’s stunning, I have to somehow investigate that.”
That led me to Moonlight Mile. I’m sure my publisher wishes there was more of a rhyme or reason to how I choose my projects, but there really isn’t.
DENNIS LEHANE appears 2 p.m. Saturday at the Books by the Banks festival, which runs 10 a.m.-4 p.m. at the Duke Energy Center. Buy tickets, check out performance times and get venue details here.
