The Take-away from “Given”

Last weekend, Britain’s Telegraph Magazine featured a lengthy profile of American novelist Dennis Lehane, whose latest book, The Given Day, is finally due out in hardcover on this side of the Atlantic at the end of January. The piece wasn’t originally available on the Web (though highlights could be read here). However, we can report that it is has now been made accessible online.

In it, reporter Richard Grant describes Lehane and recalls how the author came to write The Given Day:

He is 43 years old with a stocky build, rounded cheekbones, pale-blue eyes and close-cropped ginger-apricot hair. His manner is direct, confident and good-humoured, and, to borrow a phrase from his first book, he looks as Irish as a potato famine. The son of immigrants from Cork and Galway, he grew up in a heavily Irish neighbourhood in south Boston and first heard about the [Boston] police strike as a teenager in a Catholic high school. ‘It lodged in my brain, you know, the idea that the entire police force--it was actually 95 per cent--just walked off the job. It didn’t seem possible and I couldn’t find anyone who knew anything more about it. It was this vague thing that happened way back in the mists of history. Later I looked it up and found out about the riots, which the city seems to have completely erased from its memory banks, and perhaps understandably.’

Civilisation in Boston in 1919 turned out to be a very thin veneer indeed. Would it be any different, one wonders, if the police went on strike in London or Manchester next week? News of the impending strike (a response to below-poverty wages, no time off and vermin-ridden police stations) was all over the front pages, and when the police finally walked out the rioting began within 15 minutes. Huge mobs formed and looted all the shops in their path (except the ones guarded by men with shotguns), smashed windows with extraordinary zeal and thoroughness, and set fire to hundreds of cars and buildings. They poured into bars and saloons, brawled and gambled and fornicated in the streets. It went on for three days. There were multiple beatings, stabbings, shootings, muggings, burglaries, and dozens of women were raped.

‘The events happened almost exactly as I describe them in the book,’ Lehane says. ‘If you read about such-and-such department store window getting smashed at such-and-such a time, that’s what happened. Obviously I’ve got my fictional characters there and I’ve made up what they’re doing and saying, but the city fathers really did arm the Harvard football team and send them out, machineguns really were turned on the crowd and the National Guard really did lead a full cavalry charge down Beacon Hill. That was the image I couldn’t get out of my head, the thing that made me write the book. It was straight out of a western movie but it happened in Boston in 1919, through all the narrow streets and old buildings. I knew exactly the route they were taking. I could hear the hoofbeats on the cobblestones.’

You can read the Telegraph piece in full here. And don’t forget that Dennis Lehane is scheduled to make a rare visit to London next month, together with Tess Gerritsen.