Review: Dennis Lehane's 'Moonlight Mile'

Much of the surprising darkness of Lehane’s writing may be explained by his own past. Before becoming a full-time writer, Lehane worked as a counselor with mentally handicapped and abused children. That work gave him uncomfortable insights into the darkness that can envelop so many young lives, and that tragic and often terrifying note has been a consistent theme in his work to date.

Before he became a writer Lehane also held many of the signature blue collar Irish gigs like waiting tables, parking cars, driving stretch limos, working in bookstores and loading tractor-trailers. His one regret, he says, is that no one ever gave him a chance to tend bar. But it’s not likely that he needed to do the research, since he grew up surrounded by Irish pubs and their fast talking denizens in Dorchester.

“The world I grew up in had the most influence on my writing,” Lehane recently told the press. “It was very verbal and extremely comic in a gallows humor kind of way. It was also a world I didn't see too much of in books or film or TV and the few times I did see it, they tended to get it wrong.”

If you’ve read Gone, Baby, Gone or seen the film, you’ll know that Lehane gets the details of the world he’s writing about right. Especially when it comes to the very conflicting emotions of his central characters.

Taking on another missing Amanda case in Moonlight Mile is not something that Lehane’s detectives Kenzie and Gennaro, who are now married with a child of their own, do lightly.

This time, though, they vow to each other that the outcome will be different for the young woman whose safety they want to ensure. With the stakes this high, Lehane knows the reader will be immediately hooked.

And it’s not hard to see why Hollywood has become so enamored of each new Lehane book too, because the truth is that his cinematic writing already does most of the heavy lifting for them.

Few of his contemporaries have Lehane’s near obsession with the telling detail (and getting them precisely right), and he’s also quietly emerging as one of the greatest writers about class and its consequences that America has produced in decades.

But its Lehane’s tough as nails characters (who are almost always more than usually flawed) that fascinates the actors who play them. They’re Irish in the best sense, in that they live, love and express themselves so vividly they could only really come from an Irish American stronghold like Dorchester in the first place.

By keeping his locations close to his Irish American home and staying close to his own origins, no matter how successful and rich he’s become (he has moonlighted on the writing staff of HBO’s The Wire, bringing his own brand of carefully observed local color to the show) Lehane stays true to the Irish American neighborhood where he was raised.

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Nster.com