Sun Gazette: Author talks importance of libraries

Bestselling author Dennis Lehane, featured speaker at the James V. Brown Library’s Author Gala, speaks to Christine Kaiser, Williamsport, during a meet and greet time. Lehane entertained guests at the event with his storytelling and memories of his childhood growing up in an Irish family in the Boston area.

October 26th, 2018

By Pat Crossley

Bestselling author Dennis Lehane’s storytelling skills were on display Thursday night as he entertained the crowd at the 16th annual Author Gala of the James V. Brown Library held at Le Jeune Chef.

Growing up in the Boston area, Lehane shared how his Irish heritage influenced his literary abilities and the importance of a library to a young child in that neighborhood.

“We couldn’t afford books in the house I grew up in. It wasn’t that we were so poor we couldn’t afford anything, but books were a luxury. Why would you buy something you could only use once,” he said.

His mother got him a library card when he was 7 years old because he read a book when he was 6 and the nuns said it was for 7 and up. “They told that to my mother and she said ‘this kid is a prodigy.’ “

“What a library says to a kid from the wrong side of the tracks is, when you show up at a library to get a book out it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing, it doesn’t matter where you come from, it doesn’t matter if you were driven up in a Bentley or if you took the subway. That book, that knowledge is yours,” he said.

“What a library says to a kid on the wrong side of the tracks is, you matter, it’s as simple as that. And if the library says you matter, then the people who support it in the town say you matter and if the town says you matter then the city says you matter and if the city says you matter then the state says you matter and if the state says you matter then the country says you matter. A library says you matter,” he continued.

Lehane, who has had some of his works on the New York Times bestseller list, shared some of the secrets of crafting a story he learned from the storytellers in his Irish family.

“I learned that a story should probably be funny because in the end it will be tragic because it’s a working-class story. Stories must begin where their supposed to begin. They must be exciting, they must be compelling, they must be humorous and they must ultimately be kind of tragic,” he said.

The library’s author gala is the group’s biggest fundraiser each year.

Charleston Gazette-Mail: West Virginia Book Festival, Lehane gives quick lesson in writing about what you know

October 20th, 2018

By Bill Lynch

Young writers are often told “write what you know.”

But that can seem impossible, particularly if you haven’t been very far from home and haven’t done a lot, so far.

Dennis Lehane, who appears 3 p.m. Saturday in the Grand Ballroom of the Charleston Coliseum & Convention Center for the West Virginia Book Festival, said young (and older) writers sometimes take the direction as a commandment, which they really don’t understand.

Lehane, who has written more than a dozen novels including “Gone Baby Gone,” “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island,” and most recently, “Since We Fell,” said, “The distinction that often gets lost with the ‘write what you know’ thing — and I speak to this when I teach — is that you’re writing what you know about the human experience.”

He said you don’t have to have grown up in a family of dry cleaners to write about the lives of dry cleaners.

Knowing something about the dry-cleaning business doesn’t hurt, of course, but it’s more important just to know something about people.

Lehane is best known for stories involving criminals and the police. He said he grew up around a lot of cops — and criminals.

“And a lot of people in the middle, who were not quite criminals and not quite law-abiding citizens,” he said. “I saw that spectrum and grew up in an economically disadvantaged world that lends itself to a certain street crime.”

This was the world that was around him and it fascinated Lehane, particularly as he compared what he saw in his neighborhood with what he read in the newspaper or saw on the television news: the disproportionate way justice was often meted out.

“I became fascinated very early by this idea that if you steal a little, you get punished a lot harder than if you steal a lot,” he said.

Small-time criminals robbing houses and businesses could get sent away to prison for years, while white-collar criminals sitting in offices, stealing millions that robbed people of their homes and businesses, could wind up walking away with a lot less time in jail and maybe only fines.

“What’s worse — the violence of a fist or the violence of a pen?” Lehane asked and then said, “I happen to think it’s the pen. The ability to wipe someone’s life out with the stroke of a pen seems to me a far more dangerous form of violence than hitting someone in the face with a punch.”

Lehane knew a little something about cops, criminals and street life, but said it was more important to just understand how people thought.

“I think once you lock into the mindset [of your characters], everything else can flow from there,” he said.

Along with violence and crime, Lehane’s books are populated with traumatized people, some deeply disturbed, but trauma is mostly common knowledge.

“By the time you’re 18, you usually know most of the universal emotional experiences people go through,” he said. “You’ve probably known heartbreak. You’ve probably known disillusionment. You’ve probably known a pain that can’t be cauterized.”

Lehane said most writers don’t feel entirely comfortable in the worlds the grew up in. They may feel like outsiders who are thinking on a different frequency, which may make them better able to empathize with other people thinking on different frequencies like the disturbed or desperate.

At some point, he said, a writer will take these things they know about being human and turn them into characters and a story.

“That’s the rule,” Lehane said. “That’s what writing about what you know means. It’s not strictly autobiographical.”

Lehane didn’t see himself as particularly traumatized. He said he grew up in a stable home with two parents. His father had a good job, working as a foreman for Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Boston, but he said he saw his share of emotional carnage and the aftermath from real physical violence.

“Now, it wasn’t necessarily happening behind the closed doors of my home, but it was happening behind the closed doors of a lot of my friends’ homes,” he said.

After high school, Lehane left Boston and moved to Florida, where he attended Eckard College and then Florida International University, studying creative writing.

Lehane’s first book, “A Drink Before the War,” about a pair of Boston private detectives trying to retrieve missing documents while dealing with their own personal problems, was published in 1994 when the author was 28.

Success wasn’t instant.

Even after the first book, Lehane worked at the Ritz-Carlton as a valet and then a chauffeur until his second book in 1996.

Lehane explained that the pattern for getting published is often the first contract with a book publisher puts most of the financial burden of the book on the shoulders of the writer.

In sales, the publisher gets most of the money, including profits. Book sale advances to authors are really just loans and if the book fails to perform well enough, the publisher will want that money back.

With that second contract, Lehane said, the money isn’t usually very much, but it’s better.

When he got the new contract, Lehane said he compared the pay with what he made as a chauffeur.

“The numbers were pretty much the same,” he said.

Having two jobs sounded like more work than he wanted, so Lehane turned in the keys to his chauffeuring gig and just wrote.

It still wasn’t easy.

“The first couple of years, my girlfriend was still a waitress and a couple of times, she had to cover the rent,” he said. “Progressively, it was about four books in when I began to say, ‘Oh, I think I can make a living at this. I don’t have to go back to bartending.’”

Success was a great feeling, but it was a huge risk for him and Lehane said it might not have been possible if he’d settled down earlier, if he’d started a family and had other responsibilities.

“But I was a classic arrested development American male,” he said.

Since that first book, Lehane’s career has branched into television and film. Some of his own books, like “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island” and “Gone Baby Gone” have been turned into films.

He’s also worked on television shows, like the critically-acclaimed HBO drama “The Wire” and “Boardwalk Empire.” Lately, he’s a writer and producer for “Mr. Mercedes,” a show based on the novel by the same name shown the Audience network.

Much of his work draws on his understanding of how policemen see the world, which sometimes goes against how people wish they did.

“That cop who sits there and says, ‘I’m going to find the killer no matter what,’ he doesn’t exist,” Lehane said.

It’s a job. It’s a difficult job, but, at the end of the day, the police have homes and lives to go home to.

“If they allowed any more than one case in their lifetime to haunt them, they’d go crazy,” he said. “They don’t get emotionally invested. They’re professionals. They do their job.”

Lehane added that police officers still have emotions, but suppressing what they feel is a survival mechanism that lets them keep showing up for work day after day.

Private detectives, however, were a different matter, he said.

“So, if I have to do emotion, it’s going to be the private detective, not the police officers. That’s just one little distinction,” Lehane said.

The TV and film work kept him busy — too busy for his fans, maybe.

Lehane’s latest book, “Since We Fell,” came out over a year ago and no new book is on the horizon.

“Unfortunately, no. I got nothing,” he said and laughed. “I’ve been too busy lately.”

He’ll get back to it, eventually, of course. In the meantime, he wanted to mention that “Since We Fell” is now available in paperback.

The Hollywood Reporter: Sony Developing Real-Life Crime Thriller ‘Storming Las Vegas’ (Exclusive)

September 21st, 2018
‘Shutter Island’ author Dennis Lehane is adapting the story.

Sony is in development of real-life casino robbery movie Storming Las Vegas.

Dennis Lehane has been hired to adapt the 2008 book, from John Huddy, that looks at a series of daring Las Vegas casino robberies masterminded by Jose Vigoa.

Over the span of 16 months, the Cuban-born Vigoa and his crew evaded police as they stole millions from some of the biggest players on the strip — MGM Grand, the Desert Inn, Mandalay Bay, Bellagio and New York-New York — through robberies of armored trucks and casino heists. Lt. John Alamshaw (a 23-year police veteran) was in charge of Vegas’ robbery detectives, and was tasked with bringing Vigoa to justice.

Storming Las Vegas was previously set up at Summit Entertainment with Antoine Fuqua attached to direct.

Lehane is best known as the author of the novels behind films such as Shutter Island, Mystic River and Live by Night. He is repped by CAA, Echo Lake and Hansen Jacobson.

Meet Dennis Lehane on Tour!

May 15, 2017 6PM Cambridge, MA / Harvard Bookstore at The Brattle Theatre

May 16, 2017 7PM  NYC / Barnes & Noble Upper East Side

May 18, 2017 7:30PM – Philadelphia, PA / Philadelphia Free Library

May 19, 2017 7PM – Holyoke, MA / Odyssey Bookstore presents at Gateway City Arts Center

May 20, 2017 6PM  – Washington, DC / Politics & Prose

May 22, 2017 6:30PM – Houston, TX / Murder By the Book 

May 23, 2017  7:30PM Los Angeles, CA / Los Angeles Public Library ALOUD series held at the Writers Guild Theatre in Los Angeles. Interviewed by Attica Locke

June 4, 2017  3PM – Salt Lake City, UT / The Kings English Bookshop

June 5, 2017 7PMSeattle, WA / Elliott Bay Book Company

June 6, 2017 7PM – Beaverton, OR / Powell’s Bookstore Cedar Hills Crossing

June 12, 2017 7PM  – Parma, OH / Cuyahoga County Public Library