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 Interview with award-winning author Dennis Lehane, a powerful and popular author who has won a Shamus, a Dily and the Nero Wolfe awards. His latest book Prayers For Rain even made the US President’s summer reading list in 1999. Read our review of Prayers For Rain.Feature by PJ Nunn PJ NUNN - Dennis, you know you're one of my all time favorite authors. Prayers for Rain was a sort of breakthrough novel for you. Now you're working on a standalone, Mystic River. Tell us a little about it, without spoiling anything. Any idea when we can expect it to hit the shelves? DENNIS LEHANE - Thank you very much for the compliment. The tentative publication date for Mystic River is March/April 2001. I say tentative only because I’m still working on it. It’s a book I’ve had in my head for about seven years or so. It’s about three men who were once friends during one year when they were boys, until one of them was abducted for four days, and the horror of the incident destroyed the friendship. Now as adults, one is an ex-con whose daughter has been murdered, one is a cop investigating the murder, and the third (the one who was abducted long ago) may or may not be the murderer. Beyond the plot, it’s a book about dying urban enclaves and survivor guilt and the sometimes high price of even the simplest of decisions. It’s been a long, sometimes grueling writing process if only because I’ve nurtured it in my head for such a long time that I’m trying to make it as close to perfect as I’m able before I let anyone see it. That sounds intense! Why did you decide to go with a standalone at this point? For several reasons, really. I thought Patrick and Angie needed a break - they’ve been physically and psychologically traumatized over the course of five books, and it just seemed like they needed a rest. Another reason was to go back to writing in the third person. Until I wrote A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR, I’d almost never written in the first person voice, so it was odd to discover that a voice I rarely felt comfortable with became the voice with which my work was associated. And finally, MYSTIC RIVER has been trying to push its way out of me for a few years now, and it finally got to the point where it was all but screaming in my head and refused to let me think about anything else. So, I guess you could say it won the battle and forced me to write it. Does the widespread acclaim for Prayers for Rain put additional pressure on you for writing the next Patrick and Angie episode? What are your plans for that? PRAYERS FOR RAIN got a number of good reviews but also a lot of less than stellar reviews, I’d say. Which is perfectly fine - I don’t expect to please everyone. But I don’t feel any pressure regarding the next in the series. I don’t write for critics or the audience, really. That’s a good way to drive yourself insane because it’s impossible to predict what will please people, and often what does please one annoys another. A friend of mine who’s a golfer says he never competes against other golfers; he only competes against himself. That’s pretty much the approach I take to writing. Any pressure comes from within. I know you've also written several short stories. Are you still doing that? Where can readers find those? I used to write a lot of short stories. That is in fact what I studied to be - a short story writer. The novels came along by chance which I am eternally grateful for - but by chance nonetheless. The problem with my short stories was that I was a bit of a perfectionist, and I’d work them through a dozen drafts - and then never send them out because I was certain they still weren’t good enough. Since becoming a published author, I’ve written one short story called Running Out of Dog which was published in Otto Penzler’s Murder and Obsession anthology, now available in paperback. It was also published in a recent anthology called The Best American Mystery Short Stories of the Century, which was quite an honor. However, a mistake was made at the publishing house and they published the story with the first page missing. No lie. They’ve promised me the mistake will be rectified for subsequent editions and the paperback version, but the current first edition hardcover has this version, which I beg all readers to skip in favor of all the other great stories in there. The story will also be published in The Best Mystery Short Stories of 1999 which comes out in the fall. No one is more surprised by all these honors than I am. It takes me years to decide if I like something I wrote, so I don't even know if I'm worthy of the accolades. As for writing other short stories, I’m hoping to do one by year’s end. We’ll see. How has your writing evolved over the years? I hope for the better. There’s a kind of cutesy self-consciousness that I see in some of my early work that I hope I’ve learned to avoid. I also think that the older I get, the less I see clear-cut answers to a lot of societal problems, so the books have become successively grayer in terms of moral resolution. Do you see any specific trends developing in the mystery/hardboiled genre? Not really, but I don’t keep up with it the way I used to. One of the downsides of writing mysteries is that I rarely read them anymore. Having said that, the one thing I have noticed when I do read in the genre is that the quality of craftsmanship is soaring. If you look at the pure writing ability of people like George Pelecanos, Daniel Woodrell, SJ Rozan, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, Minette Walters, Boston Tehran and James Hall to name just a few - all that talent is kind of mind-boggling. Has your writing won any awards? I have won a Shamus and a Dily and the Nero Wolfe awards. The selection of "Running Out of Dog" in both "best of the year" and "best of the century" collections was quite humbling and gratifying as well. When are you finally going to set up a website? I don’t know if I ever will. I leave the promotional aspect of writing to the publicity department at Harper Collins/Morrow. I’m simply not comfortable doing any more; it could be the Irish in me. I’m very superstitious, and anything that pulls me away from the actual writing and into the business of writing just freaks me out, to be honest. I worry that if I expend juice over there, I’ll have run dry when I need it here - working on a novel. No complaints here. Your fans are glad that you’re busy writing. Who are you when you're not writing? What are your hobbies? I’m a pretty boring guy. I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous. As for hobbies, I like to play pool and tennis. I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I’m just awful. I think my handicap is six or seven thousand. I play poker a lot with guys I grew up with, and occasionally go out to catch live music in small clubs. My wife Sheila and I watch a lot of old movies and play with our two English Bulldogs, Marlon and Stella. Outside of a serious addiction to watching football during the autumn, that’s about it. Who or what has most influenced your writing? It’s a tough call. Graham Greene and Richard Price were hugely influential. Elmore Leonard’s Detroit novels and Parker’s Spenser books certainly had an effect. Two short story writers -Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus - set bars I keep trying to reach as well. As a writer, where do you see yourself in 10 years? With less hair and carpal tunnel syndrome. What do you enjoy most about writing? The 'zone.' That place you reach sometimes where every cylinder is firing, every word comes out exactly right, and your blood is fairly humming with prose. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, nothing comes close. I’d trade Super Bowl tickets for that feeling. What do you find most difficult? Being original about the mundane - trying to find a new way of saying "Joe walked to his car" for example. What is your best advice for new writers? It’s been said to death but read. Read everything, good and bad. Read until it’s spilling out of your ears and eyes. Read the kind of books you want to write and then read books about writing: John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction or On Becoming a Novelist; Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction; Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel - for example. And take classes. Learn how to write. Wanting it isn't good enough. You’ve got to earn it. You have to put in the time. I wrote for ten solid years before I produced anything publishable. Yes, it beats selling shoes, but it’s still very hard work, and nothing is more insulting to someone who apprenticed hard and gave everything they had to the craft, than to meet some wannabe-writer who hasn't read much, hasn’t studied much, and yet still thinks he’s entitled to publication simply because he wrote down whatever was in his head and slipped in a few chapter breaks. Ask yourself if what you truly care about is to become a good writer or simply to get published. These are two very different things. If what you want is primarily to be published and make a boatload of cash, there are so many easier ways to make money. The best advice I ever got from a writing teacher was: No one cares. It sounds so harsh, but it’s true. No one cares if you write or not. The world would have gotten along just fine without my contributions to literature. If you realize this, and I mean truly face it, and you then push forward - there’s a good chance you have something to say and will become a good writer. Ultimately, you have to love the process of writing. Otherwise, it’s too lonely a profession and too rarely a profitable one to be worth the effort. |
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