MYSTIC RIVER BY dennis lehane

Reviewed by Tim Wohlfort

A small group of younger American mystery writers have recently been gaining a lot of attention. I speak of Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, and George P. Pelecanos. These writers are regularly hitting the New York Times Best Sellers List, getting stand alone reviews in the Times, and breaking into the movies and television. Not that they are really youngsters. Mid-forties would be my guess. But when compared with the likes of Ed McBain, Robert P. Parker, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky, they are the new guys on the block.

We can group them together as the nouveau noir school. They could also be called hardboiled writers. However, you will not hear them so defining themselves for one of those quirky marketing reasons. Noir sells today while hardboiled does not. They all share a dark and gritty worldview. Crais and Connelly write about Los Angeles, Pelecanos sets his stories in Washington, D.C.'s African-American neighborhoods, while Lehane has discovered just as gritty turf among Boston's Irish.

Not one of these writers is "noir" in the Woolrich or Cain meaning of the word. Typically they do not write from the criminal's point of view, nor do their stories end with the total destruction of all concerned. Truth be told, they all write traditional PI stories. Connelly's Bosch is such a dysfunctional cop that he can be considered a PI on the City's payroll. There is the white knight (in Pelecanos' case a black one.) A crime is solved. The reader is left with a glimmer of hope.

Yet the critics see them as new, fresh, different. And the critics are not wrong. They have mined the rich detective story tradition, but discovered their distinct voices. For example:
"Brendan Harris loved Katie Marcus like crazy, loved her like movie love, with an orchestra booming through his blood and flooding his ears. He loved her waking up, going to bed. Loved her all day and every second in between. Brendan Harris would love Katie Marcus fat and ugly. He'd love her with bad skin and no breasts and thick fuzz on her upper lip. He'd love her toothless. He'd love her bald."

Not Hammett, nor Chandler or MacDonald. Certainly not Spillane. It's Dennis Lehane in Mystic River.

The writers in this group write damn good character-driven prose. And they are structurally innovative. Pelecanos' Derek Strange is a rather typical PI with a black skin and a corresponding fondness for soul music. Nothing particularly innovative there. However, Pelecanos avoids the usual first person voice of such yarns. He chooses a multiple third person narrative so complex that you can be in the minds of two different characters within the same paragraph.

Lehane has written a PI series featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. First person and traditional. He sees series books as chapters in an ongoing epic of limited length. That length is determined by what there is to learn new about the protagonist. Certainly not the approach of Sue Grafton or Robert P. Parker. This perhaps explains why Lehane decided to write Mystic River as a stand alone peopled with new characters.

Mystic River has the sweep and length of a mainstream novel. The story is set in two adjoining Boston neighborhoods, one poor and the other poorer. The year is l975 and we meet three young boys - Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle. Sean and Jimmy's fathers work together in a candy factory "and carried the stench of fresh chocolate back home with them." Sean's dad is a foreman and lives in the slightly more upscale neighborhood. Jimmy's pop loads trucks. The two kids are close friends. Dave Boyle is a hanger on.

One day, while the three kids are playing stickball in the street, a car pulls up with older men inside. The men entice Dave Boyle into the car. They kidnap and sexually abuse him.

The story shifts to the year 2000. Jimmy, who had been a smalltime crook and spent time in the penitentiary, now owns a small corner store in his old neighborhood. Sean has become a detective in the Massachusetts State Police. Jimmy's beautiful daughter, Katie, is brutally murdered the night before she planned to run away and get married. Sean is the detective in charge of the case. Dave is a suspect. He is the tragic figure of the novel.
"Fate had played a hand in Dave Boyle's life before... but it had never felt like a guiding hand before, more like a pissy, moody one. ... Dave, alone late at night in the days afterward, would hold out his hands as if speaking to a jury and say ... softly to the empty kitchen: You have to understand. It wasn't planned."

The story ends darkly. One of the original trio dies. Another is clearly doomed. The third will be haunted for life by the events.

The river in the book's title doesn't make an appearance until the end. It's not a pretty sight. "The first thing he saw were weeds. Then water. ... He could hear the traffic honking and banging away on the bridge above him. ... On his left someone had piled a stack of rotting pallets and rusted lobster traps, some of them with ragged holes as if they'd been attacked by sharks. ... Beyond the piles was a chain-link fence, as rusty as the lobster traps and strangled in weeds." That's about as much of the "oily Mystic" we get to see. It is enough.

Classic noir. More so than Lehane's PI stories. The book is a portrait of the world of poor whites in South Boston. A world that is fast disappearing as the area experiences gentrification. It has the sweep, structure and literary feel of a mainstream novel.

This is Lehane's goal. He wants the reader to really know his characters, to understand the way they live, feel and think. He wants to chronicle their world while it still exists. Before it is destroyed by high real estate values and the technology boom in Boston.

Does he succeed? In large part, I believe he does. But the story fails to live up to one promise: To describe the impact of the changing neighborhood on its inhabitants. One section of the book is entitled "GENTRIFICATION." Yet none of the characters come from the yuppie invading class. Jim, Dave and Sean are caught up in a world that stubbornly resists change. A small weakness in such an ambitious book.

There is much that Mystic River isn't. To write a saga with literary pretensions, Lehane had to sacrifice the pacing and visceral excitement of the traditional hardboiled. There is something to be said about short novels featuring tough guys who batter their way down the mean streets after the bad guys. They don't think or feel much, certainly not search their souls for the meaning of life. But they live. Yes, they can live in a vivid way that brings color to the black and white noir world. Lehane's characters remain among the shadows of grey.

There's room in the noir genre for both kinds of books. It's all a matter of expectations. Mickey Spillane, Lehane ain't.

Copyright© 2003 Tim Wohlforth

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TIM WOHLFORTH has had twenty-five short stories accepted for publication in the recent period. His stories have appeared in Futures, Detective Mystery Magazine, Orchard Press, Hand Held Crime, Plots With Guns, Mysterical-e, Without A Clue, Hardluck Stories, and StoryOne. His writings also appear in six anthologies, including Fedora (2001) and Hardbroiled (March 2003.) Another short story will be part of a CD-ROM issued by Mysterical-e. He co-authored the non-fiction book, On The Edge: Political Cults Right and Left, published by M. E. Sharpe (2000). Wohlforth participated in a panel on short mysteries, chaired by Ed Hoch, at Bouchercon. He moderated the short story panel at Left Coast Crime (LCC) in Portland and was on the flash fiction panel at LCC in Pasadena. He is the author of three novels. Dark Savior is a thriller that takes the reader into the underground world of environmental terrorism. Dynamite is based on the 1886 Haymarket Tragedy. No Time To Mourn is a contemporary California noir PI story set on Jack London Square at Oakland's waterfront.
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Read an extract from Tim Wohlforth's No Time To Mourn