In Golpe de gracia (Salamandra), the novel with which he has returned after six years of absence, Dennis Lehane describes with all the ets and uts a humble Boston neighborhood in the seventies, whose inhabitants, mostly immigrants Irish, they struggle with menial jobs and lives suffocated by alcohol and drugs, while trying to keep the neighboring black community, made up of workers as broken as themselves, at bay.
There are many echoes of his childhood in a neighboring neighborhood who today is much more than a successful writer with fifteen published novels, including some adapted for cinema such as S hutter island, Vivir de noche, Mystic river or Desapareció una noche . Lehane is also an accomplished television screenwriter and creative producer, responsible for Black Bird, the series that won Paul Walter Hauser the 2023 Golden Globe and paved the way for an exclusive contract with Apple that Lehane supports to develop new series, including an adaptation of Colpe de gracia in which he will make the decisions. However, whoever receives La Vanguardia in his elegant house in a middle-class neighborhood of Los Angeles does not forget his status as the son of Irish immigrants or how hard he has to work to achieve his dream of being a writer: “I I was very lucky”, he admits. “I was born with the right color in the country and at the right time, with the right sex. Talent is a gift, work is not, to get there I had to break my back”.
What drove him to write a novel when he can tell the same story in a miniseries?
They are different things. The truth is that during several years of relative tranquility I could not write. I tried three times. I had a lot of fun writing screenplays, I love the social aspect of a screenwriter’s work, and I thought that maybe After the Fall would be my last book, since I finished it because I had a contract with the publisher. I went to New Orleans to work on my first series when covid started. He was at the head of a multi-million dollar project and felt that everything could go to waste. That’s when my brain split as a protective measure and I sat down to write Coup de Gracia. A form of self-control. The novel flowed amazingly. I could write in the old house where I was staying, in the trailer, at night, during the day… Everything flowed.
Why do you think it was given?
I owe it all to Mary Pat. I immediately knew it was special, and so I connected it to the summer of 1974. I found myself in a unique place. These are rare moments. It happened to me with Mystic River, I felt it with La entrega and to a lesser extent with Desapareció una noche. You feel that you are the only one who can write that book. For example, as original as it sounds, Shutter island could have been written by someone else. But coup d’état, no: it was an exorcism in which I was able to get all my anger out. But I had fun, as dark as the book is.
Anger?
All my life I was burdened with a frustration that I could not define or understand. It is not an autobiographical novel, I am not talking about my home, where there was no abuse of any kind. On the contrary, he had adoring parents. That’s why I couldn’t explain it, but it was always there. And when I got down to writing Coup de gracia , all this feeling came out of nowhere and I realized that this was what had made me so angry: to have witnessed so much hatred and all that venom at such an early age started something about me For the next ten years I lived in a world where there were many racist people. Not being one was like being a spy in foreign territory. That experience gave me the tools I needed to be a writer, and this book is the culmination of many things I’ve written about throughout my career.
Are you referring to when you saw the racist demonstration you describe in the book when you were 9 years old?
Yes. When you see something like that there is no way you forget it, I saw people screaming and especially the torches. One loses trust in adults. He no longer respects them. I think being there completely transformed me, because I saw the danger in that crowd, which could have ended badly, and luckily it didn’t. Witnessing that really puzzled me.
At some point Mary Pat realizes that she inherited her parents’ racism and passed it on to her daughter. When did you find out it didn’t happen to you?
From the beginning I grew up in a mostly immigrant community. My parents were Irish, my neighbors Polish and Italian. They all talked about the other groups in the same way as it happens in Europe. When you hear it all the time and you see that they say it without malice, which is an imported idea, it takes you a minute to realize that when they talk about black people the tone is different. No one reacted to these comments. I saw graffiti on the walls in 1973 or 1974 that said: “All immigrants must be killed” and the presence of the Ku Klux Klan was felt. It never seemed to me that all this made sense, on the contrary. I couldn’t understand it.
In a series everything is prepared in advance. When you write a novel, do you know where you’re going?
I’m making it up as I write. In the case of Coup de gracia, I was revising my first sketches, because it was going to be called Old calling, which is one of the housing plans in Boston. It was only three pages. And most of it stayed in the book, with the exception of Bobby, who appeared out of nowhere. He also didn’t know what the end would be. Only it would have something to do with Augie Williams’ funeral.
Was Mary Pat in that initial sketch? What did you discover about her in the writing process?
Yes. What I discovered, and I was surprised, was her vulnerability: the women like her that I knew in my childhood were very tough, and they raised tough children. I thought they were strong because they looked like that, stoned smokers, tireless drinkers, capable of punching you if you scared them. But they were tragic figures, who would have been beaten by girls and who married men who beat them. They were trapped in a cycle of poverty. Cycles that did not end in South Boston for several generations who grew up in the housing plans.
What separates writing a book from directing a series?
The pride you feel is different. When you write a book you are God, you control every detail. But being God can be a huge headache or a wonderful thing if things work out. It may be my last novel, and if so, it will be all right. If I write another book, it will have to come like this, from a pure place. It was something I needed to write.
