Dennis Lehane - a question of morality

Crime novelist Dennis Lehane takes readers into the heart of his native Boston. Photo / Diana Lucas Leavengood

Mystic River author Dennis Lehane tells Jake Kerridge what links bankers with gangsters.

Dennis Lehane is the poster boy for a certain type of 21st century American crime novelist. They are the nicest guys you could meet, but look like they could handle themselves in a fight. They tend to have grown up in tough neighbourhoods and write about people who live in them, the people ignored or patronised in "literary" fiction. Their work is politically engaged; they revel in the chaos and violence on the streets. And most of them have made key contributions to that new mutation of the novel, the long-form television drama (Lehane has written for The Wire and Boardwalk Empire).

What is most notable about them is the excellence of the work they produce, but none quite match Lehane's ability to combine moral depth with a compelling plot. It may be these qualities that have made his work so well-suited to screen adaptation. There have been three hit films based on his books - Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island - that actually do justice to the source material, and how many other eminent writers can match that tally?

Lehane, who turns 50 in August, made his name with books that seemed to take the reader into every nook and cranny of his native Boston. One would have thought the Red Sox were likelier to move out of the city than he, but last year he set up home permanently in Los Angeles. As he talks to me from LA, I ask him how he's finding it there.

"Surreal," he answers, speaking in a deep rumble. "It's just so pleasant. Everybody's very pretty or very handsome, and, yeah, I don't know what the hell to do with it. But my wife and kids love it, I've been outvoted. I do feel exceptionally, exceptionally homesick. Hopefully it's making me a better writer about Boston."

Lehane will be clinging to Boston like a life raft in all his forthcoming books, but it is not the only place that can fire his imagination. His latest novel, World Gone By, is a wonderfully evocative portrait of life in Ybor City, an immigrant neighbourhood in Tampa, Florida, in the 1940s.

The book concludes a loose trilogy featuring one of Lehane's most memorable characters, the tender but ruthless gangster Joe Coughlin. He made his first appearance as a minor character, the young son of a police captain, in The Given Day (2008), a historical epic centred on the 1919 Boston police strike that took five years to write. Next came Live By Night (2012), which showed how Joe got involved in rumrunning in Ybor City and ended up as one of Florida's kings of crime.

World Gone By finds Joe well into middle age - well, he is 37, but as Lehane points out he would have felt exhausted in mind and body: "These guys ate red meat all the time and smoked and drank. Cardio was having a walk while you smoked your cigarette." Joe has taken a step back from the gangster world and is a revered philanthropist, which is why he is puzzled as well as rattled when he discovers that an unidentified enemy has taken out a contract on his life.

It's a short, sharp, shock of a book - so I am surprised to learn that Lehane had originally planned it as an epic in The Given Day vein. "It was supposed to sprawl over the course of about 20 years. But then the book really told me what it was about; it said 'no, this is only gonna take place over a matter of weeks'. There were more starts and stops than with almost any book I've ever written. Because, it sounds so arty but it's the only way I can put it, I fought against the organic truth of this book, I fought against where the book wanted to go. It was like being in a bad marriage."

As with many bad marriages, though, there are no signs on the surface: World Gone By is superbly tuned entertainment, with wonderful whipcrack dialogue. It is also a searching examination of the hypocrisy inherent in the gangster life, as the ageing Joe starts to see through the pieties that have salved his conscience for so long: "We always say we don't go after each other's families, but we amputate them pretty good. We create a lot of widows."

Such hypocrisies are not confined to the underworld, Lehane insists. "The gangster novel in a lot of ways is a metaphor for unfettered capitalism. You can apply all of these moral questions to bankers, to corporations." He vents his fury at the news that fracking is apparently causing earthquakes in Oklahoma and Texas. "Ninety per cent of what we call morality is just fear of getting caught. That's not to absolve a gangster of their moral responsibility by any means, it's to say they're not the only ones."

Lehane writes violent books with a liberal conscience: he is from the school of what we might term badass do-gooders. His interest in social issues stems, he thinks, from his upbringing. "I wouldn't deny there is some survivor's guilt in play, in terms of coming from a place in which I was protected and so many of my friends were not."

This is Lehane's great double stroke of luck. On the one hand so much of his work has been inspired by the teeming, rackety neighbourhood in which he grew up. "People would say, 'Where you from?' and I'd say Dorchester, and they would take a step back. 'Oh, you're from there, the place we drive past as fast as we can on the highway.' From a very early age I saw the world with a different sense of complexity, I think, than if I'd lived in a very nice suburb."

Perhaps Lehane's greatest work is Mystic River (2001), the novel in which he imagines a community such as Dorchester turning its back on a boy who has been sexually abused. It was a very different prospect from the private-eye novels he had written previously.

"But you know, my favourite quote about art comes from Humphrey Bogart. He said: 'All you owe the audience is a great performance.' He didn't say give them the performance they want. I owe everybody the single best book I can write no matter what." It was the novel he had to write, but when his publisher read the manuscript and told him it would be a huge hit, he replied, "You're high."

Clint Eastwood's 2003 film version became an instant classic, and Lehane's status as a front-rank crime writer was cemented when he was recruited, along with fellow novelists Richard Price and George Pelecanos, to write for David Simon's all-conquering television drama

The Wire

.

He admits he doesn't find screenwriting "particularly attractive or compelling". Even a bad marriage with a novel is preferable?

"It's much harder. But at the end you have this finished product that is 100 per cent you and you alone."

World Gone By (Little, Brown $34.99) is out now.

- Canvas, Telegraph