Shots Magazine were delighted that Dennis Lehane agreed to
answer a few questions following our recent
review of his novel SMALL
MERCIES, which has been released to great
acclaim from within the industry.
Shots Magazine have been long-term readers of the work of
Dennis Lehane, discussing
his work on his visits
to the UK, promoting his
work
– and as we stated in our review of SMALL MERCIES – “I postulate that this
is his most vibrant work, a truly exciting, engaging and enraging narrative.
There is an echo of Mystic River, the beautiful [though dark] novel that was shortlisted
in 2010, as the greatest crime-novel of the decade via Deadly Pleasures
Magazine’s Barry
Award [narrowly missing out to Stieg Larsson’s The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at Bouchercon 2010 hosted in San Francisco]”
Early Review copies of SMALL MERCIES were accompanied by a
letter from the author, giving some context to this extraordinary novel -
Dear Reader,
At the end of summer 1974, when I was nine
years old, we were heading home through South Boston to Dorchester when my
father took an errant turn and we found ourselves on Broadway, Southie’s main
drag, as an anti-busing protest consumed the neighbourhood. It was night, and
flaming effigies of the most well-known supporters of school desegregation—
Garrity, Kennedy, Taylor—hung from street poles, the yellow, blue, and red
reflections of the flames sluicing up the windshield and along the windows of my
father’s Chevy. The mob chanted slogans—some violent and racist, some not—and
my father’s car was rocked and buffeted as it crept through the ocean of
furious bodies. No one seemed to notice us, and yet I’d never been so terrified
in my life.
This is a novel about those times. And maybe
about the times we live in now. It’s about a mother’s search for her daughter
in those crazed last days of summer in South Boston in 1974, when a first day
of school unlike any first day of school in the city’s history loomed ahead and
felt—depending on which side of the issue one stood—like either the culmination
of a long-delayed promise or the punch line to joke no one found funny. It’s a
story that finally puts into words, I hope, what a terrified nine-year-old
tried to make sense of when his father took a wrong turn straight into the
heart of a community’s rage.
Sounds strange to say, but I hope you enjoy it.
Dennis Lehane, Los Angeles, CA, July 27, 2022
After reading SMALL MERCIES, we had a few questions for the
author [which despite his busy schedule] Dennis Lehane replied -
Ali Karim: Dennis,
welcome to Great Britain’s Shots Magazine
Dennis Lehane: Good
to be here.
Ali: You have been very loyal to your
Literary Agent Ann Rittenberg and your Film Agent Amy Schiffman from the ‘get
go’. Can you tell us a little about how these professional relationships came
about, and how they matured over the years [with perhaps an anecdote or two],
and why they remain so strong?
Dennis: Ann was the first agent who believed in
me, when I was 26, and she fought the good fight for two years to get my first
novel accepted by a reputable publisher. We’ve been together 31 years now. I
never saw any reason not to be loyal. Amy was my second book-to-film agent. The
first was not a good fit. After I parted ways with him, I spent two years
searching out an agent who had the kind of integrity and loyalty I value. I
like to work with people whose word is their bond. People who can be trusted.
And people who will put up with—and even support--my resistance to “branding”
or pumping out a book a year. Ann and Amy have done that.
Ali: I pictured James
‘Whitey’ Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang of 1970s Boston, when I imagined your
gangland boss Marty Butler and his henchmen in Small Mercies. Would my
imagination be aligned correctly on his influence upon
many crime thrillers?
Dennis: I
avoided writing about him for many years, despite dozens of offers, because I
saw nothing “Shakespearean” in the story of him and his politician brother,
Billy. Whitey was an informant for the FBI who got innocent working men killed
and flooded the housing projects where his mother lived with heroin. He
enslaved an entire generation of “his people” to drug addiction. Oh, and he was
a virulent racist. To the degree that Marty Butler and his crew may (or may not)
resemble Whitey Bulger and his crew, it’s in the pure heartless amorality, the
complete lack of a conscience, the standing for nothing but your own unquenchable
greed.
Ali: For me, your novels
are all about Character. You delineate them in the grey light of reality; warts
and all. Two of my favourite characters in terms of how you have written them,
are Luther Laurence [from THE
GIVEN DAY] and Rachel Childs [from SINCE
WE FELL]. Could you tell us a little about their
genesis and how they changed over the course of those novels [because they both
embarked upon journeys]?
Dennis: Luther
was never supposed to stick around The Given Day. He was meant to show
up in the first chapter and walk back out again. But he refused to leave the
stage. (Bobby Coyne did the exact same thing in Small Mercies.) Outside of
Luther being African American and born about 75 years before me, we had a lot
in common, he and I. He reminds me a lot of me in my 20s—restless and
constantly searching for indefinable things. He values nothing so much as
movement and it leads him into a lot of trouble. But he’s a very good man (or
boy-trying-to-be-a-man depending on your perspective), and I loved his journey
to become a father, essentially, and a husband worthy of his woman’s love.
Rachel is a lost soul, desperately flailing about to understand an abandonment
that happened before she can really remember it. That’s something she shares
with Luther, actually; both of them were abandoned by their fathers as babies.
In the end, they each have to make peace with the idea that they, themselves,
have to be enough. Because no one’s coming to the rescue.
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