Dennis Lehane: “TV is a writer’s paradise”

BarcelonaYesterday, just as BCNegra’s Commissioner Paco Camarasa was introducing this year’s winner of the Pepe Carvalho award, Dennis Lehane (Boston, 1965), Spanish police officers were searching the offices of top elected officials in Barcelona. Camarasa ironically noted that “there are ports in Lehane’s novels and there is a port in Barcelona city”. “Every time we present BCNegra, some crook gets arrested: we ought to suggest holding the event every three months”, he added. On a less humorous note, Lehane is an author with a sharp eye whose work reflects a very real world: a society riddled with inequality and violent, ruthless killers who, nevertheless, desperately seek a modicum of company. His latest novel, World Gone By, has just been published by Salamandra in Spanish (El mundo desaparecido), thus completing the trilogy that began with The Given Day and Live By Night, all of which are set in the first half of the 20th century. Incidentally, Lehane is disappointed with the Spanish translations of his works: “they always ruin my titles and that makes me nervous”, he complained.

Lehane’s stories of poverty, corruption, violence, gangsters, strikes and cops are inspired by accounts he heard from neighbours. The youngest of five children, as a young boy the author used to play in the streets of Dorchester, which was then regarded as one of the most violent neighbourhoods in Boston. “Initially I used to worry quite a bit about what my neighbours would think of my work”, Lehane said, “but eventually I have come to realise that they enjoy it because it deals with the seedy as well as the fantastic stuff. I would have never achieved that, had I not been raised there”, he added.

Like Montalban himself, who created the character of private investigator Pepe Carvalho, the Boston author is a critical voice angered by abuse and inequality. But yesterday he was coy about answering questions on Trump.

Lehane remarked that “if we dislike our president, we can send him home in four years. The shift towards the far-right, though, is not just an American issue because it’s also happening in Europe. It is triggered by a fear of the economy, terrorism and immigration. I am anxious but hopeful, because we’ve been through all this before. I trust the good angels of human nature”. This is the same optimism and the same faith in mankind that Lehane’s books hint at. Yesterday he compared Shakespeare’s heroes to those of crime fiction: “Shakespeare’s kings fall from the top of a mountain while heroes in crime fiction fall from a much lower spot, but they fall all the same and they have as much to lose as a king”.

Dennis Lehane decided to become a writer at age 14. He penned his first novel in just two weeks but did not show it for another four years, and then only after rewriting it many times. A Drink Before the War (1994) won that year’s Shamus Award to the best detective fiction novel. The book’s two detectives, Kenzie and Gennaro, also feature in another four titles of his. Later he wrote Mystic River —which Clint Eastwood made into a movie— and Shutter Island —taken to the big screen by Martin Scorsese—, as well as Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone and The Drop. “I became a writer because it’s all I knew how to do. I’m lucky because I’d starve, if I had to earn a living any other way”, he said.

The TV madhouse

Lehane is also a successful TV writer for some episodes of series such as The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, but he has no desire to direct a film of his own. “I never have a structure in my head. Characters are like pool balls that hit one another and then I picture the end result of the collision”. He also claims that he cannot judge the film adaptations of his books: “there’s a world in your head that cannot be transported to the big screen; it’s merely an approximation”. However, he is fascinated by the world of television.

Lehane’s latest book (Since We Fell) is due to be published in May, with the Spanish translation coming out in spring of 2018. It is a contemporary thriller about an agoraphobic woman who suspects that her husband is leading a double life but will struggle to find out whether her suspicions hold water because is housebound. “Being able to have characters who can use Google and have a mobile phone has been liberating”, he said. “My next novel will also be set in the present time, I don’t feel like going back to the past. And since I must live in LA, my literary life will be set in Boston”.

Lehane admits to still being a young boy. “I feel as if I was still playing in the playground. I am astonished that they would give me an award, pay for my trip to Barcelona and put me up in a nice hotel”. It has been a long time since he last came to Spain, in 1992. “I travelled to Madrid, slept in a hostel above an adult movie theatre and ended up getting kicked out”. Now he claims that he could walk in Barcelona for two weeks: “I am drawn to cities and architecture”. In fact, architecture as a theme keeps coming up in his novels.