Dennis Lehane’s childhood ended in the summer of 1974. He was nine. After more than two years of deliberation, Judge W Arthur Garrity jnr had ordered the immediate desegregation of Boston’s public schools by busing students to different districts. Furious protesters from the largely Irish-American enclave of Southie took to the streets. One hot evening, driving home to their neighbourhood in nearby Dorchester, Lehane’s father took a wrong turn into the middle of a protest.
“We got sort of buffeted along for about 10 blocks,” Lehane says. “Some were screaming very legitimate slogans about not having a vote, but then other people were screaming racist slogans, and were burning the main architects of busing in effigies. They were hanging these big, long dolls from poles, and then lighting them on fire. I’m a nine-year-old kid in a car looking up at this, and it felt...” He pauses, hovering for a moment, before landing, hard, on “medieval”.
Neighbours and friends immediately became strangers to him, he says. It was a paradox he has struggled to reconcile ever since. “Suddenly these people who you saw in church, some of whom you were very close to, some of whom you loved, were, if not actively throwing rocks at buses, certainly having no problem with it, because their rage, their hatred, trumped decency.”
He came from a happy home – the child of immigrants originally from Clonakilty, in Co Cork, he describes his father as a tough Irish farmer – yet the incident became “the wellspring of a lot of rage that has been swirling around in me for a very long time”. Lehane has been wrestling with this rage, and the fallout from Boston’s racial and class conflicts, in fiction since his 1994 debut, A Drink Before the War, featuring the private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.
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He returns to this theme in Small Mercies, his latest novel, set during that same tumultuous summer of 1974. His protagonist Mary Pat Fennessey, a woman who “looks like she came off a conveyor belt for tough Irish broads”, has been fighting for as long as she can remember. “She loves how she feels,” he writes. “Bruised and scabbing up, the taste of blood in her mouth that some describe as bitter but she’s always felt was kind of buttery.”
Mary Pat Fennessey has passed hate down to her children, and has to come to terms by the end of the book with the fact that this has led to some terrible things befalling her children
Mary Pat is a classic Lehane character: a woman possessed of a jagged, jaded loyalty to her hard-knocks, working-class Southie neighbourhood, despite knowing it has failed her.
Two husbands later – the second left her with the words, “Your hate embarrasses me” – Mary Pat works as a hospital aide at Meadow Lane Manor in Bay Village, “a neighborhood that can’t decide if it’s white, black, or queer”. Her son made it home from Vietnam only to die of a heroin overdose, and she fears for her teenage daughter, Jules: “Every inch of her is soft and feminine and waiting on a broken heart the way miners wait on black lung – she just knows it’s coming.”
As the novel opens, Jules goes out with friends. She doesn’t come home. That same evening a young black man whose mother Mary Pat knows is found dead in a subway station, struck by a train in circumstances that vary depending on which so-called witness is talking. Although these two events are deeply connected, the reader’s journey is with Mary Pat as she searches for her child, a reluctant guide through the ugly inheritance of her own upbringing and the dark heart of Irish-American racism.
Lehane wrote Mary Pat as a walking paradox, he says. “She’s absolutely an unquestionable racist. She has passed hate down to her children, and has to come to terms by the end of the book with the fact that this has led to some terrible things befalling her children.
“And yet she is, in her own way, a victim of abuse, of poverty, of never being given a fair shot at things, and she’s angry. She’s exactly who you’d want in your corner if she loved you.” Mary Pat knows how to fight yet has never learned, as the local detective Bobby Coyne observes, that it’s okay to quit.
The story is primarily told from Mary Pat’s perspective, but Lehane hands the narrative reins over to Bobby for a crucial segment. He never intended Bobby to be such an important character in the book, “and then he walked in. Like my all-time favourite characters – they happen to me every once in a while – he walked into the book, and he said, I think I’m sticking around.”
Lehane uses both Mary Pat and Bobby to explore another recurring theme: the impact a parent has on their child. He describes Mary Pat’s reflections on her own upbringing as some of the best work he’s done. “All parents know failure,” he says. When Mary Pat is told about something terrible Jules did, she replies, “I guess that’s my sin.” One of the most heart-breaking moments in Small Mercies comes when Mary Pat wonders why her truculent niece, all dead eyes and listlessness, is no longer the joyous girl she once was. She wonders, what is it that robs children of inner light? – only to realise it is their parents, including her.
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Small Mercies isn’t long by his standards, yet Lehane originally was planning a much shorter book. Having not read short fiction since “forever”, he has been drawn back recently by his “complete literary crush” Claire Keegan. Her writing is luminous, he says, adding that he feels overawed by her ability “to pull such depth of emotion out of such small novels”.
The current within Small Mercies is strong; the story flows without missing a beat. Which makes it even more remarkable that Lehane wrote the book “under extremely crazy conditions” while making Black Bird for Apple Studios. Based on James Keene’s memoir In With the Devil, this excellent, pacy series centres around an inmate whom the FBI persuades to befriend a serial murderer. It stars Taron Egerton as Jimmy Keane – picture him playing Elton John in Rocketman; now picture the exact opposite – with Ray Liotta, in one of his final roles, as his father.
As showrunner, Lehane was over every aspect of the series. “I needed to put a wall up between that part of my life and another part of my life. So that is exactly what happened: I created another story to tell,” he says. “When you’re on a film set there’s a lot of setting up for the next shot, a lot of lighting issues, so I would be in my trailer going, ‘I wonder what Mary Pat’s up to…’”
He has been writing for television for years, including stints on two seasons of the HBO megahit The Wire. Currently living in southern California, he is about to start commuting to Vancouver, more than 1,500km to the north, in Canada, to work on a new (currently untitled) television series inspired by the podcast Firebug, about the most prolific arsonist in American history, and also starring Taron Egerton. Lehane is developing, writing and executive-producing the show for Apple Studios.
He recalls a study he came across that explained “the reason most people are unhappy in relationships is because you don’t choose your mates because they’ll make you happy, you choose your mates because they’re familiar. So what you think you’re chasing is love, and what you’re actually chasing is what you knew in childhood. Those two things may be completely counteractive to each other.” He laughs. “I’m doing a show about people who just can’t get out of their own way.”
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Lehane has published more than a dozen novels, including Mystic River, from 2001, of which he now says, “That was written from a really personal, raw place. It was very much about where I was at 34. I think it would have been a very different book now.”
These days he’s happy to concentrate on screen rather than print. “I’m not under contract any more with any publisher. It’s wonderful! Free and clear for the first time in 25 years. I can take my time. If I never write another book I’m okay with it. If I do, it’ll come from a pure place. It won’t be because I have to make the deadline. It won’t be because they paid me a bunch of money. It will be because I want to write a book, and that’s a wonderful luxury to have.”
Lehane is great company, frank and good-humoured. That he’s funny always surprises people, he says. “If what you write is melancholy, dark, people expect you to be like that in person.”
His storytelling power is at full throttle in Small Mercies, so with luck it won’t be his final novel. For all its unflinching rage, Small Mercies has moments of optimism, kindling for a fire that may yet take. Lehane’s own favourite line of the book is when Bobby says, “Maybe the opposite of hate isn’t love, it’s hope.” Hate takes a lifetime to build, Lehane says as our conversation ends, “whereas hope can come cruising right around the corner when you’re not even looking.”
Small Mercies is published by Abacus; Black Bird is on Apple TV+
