Dennis Lehane has written over a dozen novels and I bet none of you out there has read one. Or maybe one of you has read one, maybe "Gone, Baby, Gone" or "Mystic River" because those were made into movies. He is a terrific writer and this, his newest novel, is excellent. So good that I had to pace myself in reading it so as to not finish it in two or three days. Had I had a sprained ankle, I could have devoured it in a day.
Why readers discount crime/mystery/police procedure novels is a mystery (no pun intended) to me. Any of you read Elmore Leonard? Don Winslow? James Lee Burke? James Ellroy? Michael Connelly? No? Why not? You think the genre is beneath you? Maybe it is, maybe you don't read a lot of fiction, but you are missing out on great writing. I have written about James Lee Burke many times, he is a poet (in my mind) writing about life in New Orleans as seen through the eyes of an ex-cop. Gorgeous prose, good plots, excellent characters.
Dennis Lehane is right there as well. Gorgeous prose, excellent plots and characters. In this book, "Since We Fell" we have snake charmer characters, rather unbelievable plot maneuvers and it's just a fucking great story. And the story is bookmarked by sentences like this: She marveled at her will, the resolve, the balls it took to become someone else so completely that the battle for dominance between the captive self and the captor self couldn't become anything but unwinnable. Each would surely subsume the other in a forever war, and no matter how it ended up, neither could ever return home.
Or this: She was surprised at how calmly she took in all these souls hurtling toward her, past her, and streaming on tiers above and below her with their aggressive need for goods and services, for the itchy satisfactions to be found in acquisition for its own sake, for human connection and disconnection in equal measure, for someone, anyone to tell them why they did it, why they were here, what separated them from insects moving underground right now in colonies that bore a remarkable resemblance to the three-tiered mall in which they found themselves wandering, roving, stalking on a Saturday afternoon.
Maybe it's just me, but I love sentences like those, where you read them a second time just to get the cadence and the thought into your mind-bloodstream as you continue to follow the story. Those sentences always make me stop, think and marvel at their clarity and their awareness of human weakness, strengths and basic human actions.
As I said in the beginning, Dennis Lehane has written about a dozen novels and I have read all of them over the past 20 years. They are not all crime fiction, he has several that take place in the early 20th century about history and about the formation of underground criminal mobs and the bosses of those mobs, about life in Boston and other East Coast cities, different genres. But all are so well written. If you ever find one of his books in a used bookstore, just buy it. Put it on your shelf. Take it on vacation with you and read it. Or just read it at home. I promise you that reading any one of his books will make you a fan and you will read more.
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