WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Dennis Lehane was always one of the best American writers of genre fiction, but with novels such as "Mystic River," "Shutter Island" and his latest, "The Given Day," a vast historical novel set around the Boston police strike of 1919, he's now generally recognized as one of the best American writers, period.
Lehane, who attended Florida International University as a grad student, will be speaking at the FIU/Hutchinson Island Writers Conference in Stuart Wednesday, one of 14 writers appearing at the conference co-sponsored by the Martin County Library.
A short Q&A with the author:
Most genre writers stay there when they get successful, but you moved out of genre a long time ago. Was that overt ambition, or just the way the cards fell?
There was no rhyme or reason to it. I've never planned anything. I can only write the book I most want to read. Whenever I've tried to write anything I didn't feel, I couldn't do it. Years ago, when I was in grad school, I got a gig to write a business story. I was broke and it paid well, and the writing was sheer agony. And it was a terrible story, too. That carries on.
How did a Boston kid find his way to the writing program at Florida International?
I was just sick of the cold in Massachusetts. I was at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, and got my bachelor's degree there. After Eckerd, I banged around for a couple of years, then went to grad school at FIU. It was another two years to hide from the real world, which was critical. If you want to be a writer, it's important to hang out with geeks who talk about metaphors. Because that ends when you leave school. I took classes from (author) John Dufresne, who was inspirational in the most important way. He lived it, he walked it, he talked it. He's incapable of selling out. I was exposed to a rigorous aesthetic and thank God for that, otherwise I might have written 50 bad detective novels.
Historicals can be difficult because they involve so much research. How did you integrate research with your imagination?
I knew going in (to "The Given Day") I was going to have two brothers on opposite sides of the unionization of the Boston police. And there was a father who was also a cop. And that was all too familiar. But I didn't know what the story was. With the exception of "Shutter Island," I never do.
Did you feel as free to invent with the real people that dot your book - Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, J. Edgar Hoover - as you do with the fictional characters?
I think you've got to stay within your perceptions of who that person was. Now, Babe Ruth was actually pretty skinny in 1919, but I think he was a guy who was always fat in his mind, so I made him fat.
Did you like historicals when you were a kid?
I liked epics. "Lonesome Dove"; "Rich Man, Poor Man"; "Captains and Kings." It's my way of playing with that genre. All of my books are ways of playing with a given genre.
Other people have always written the scripts for the movie adaptations of your books. Don't you want to try it yourself?
I eventually realized that I shouldn't adapt my own stuff. It's like operating on your own child. Richard Price can do it, and Richard Russo can do it very well, but I can't. I have no problem scripting other stuff — I worked on "The Wire" for a while — but there you can be merciless in all the right ways.
When you talk to young writers, what do you tell them that you'd wish you'd known at their age?
I don't. It's useless. Everything you say is what you wish you'd known when you were their age, and their eyes glaze over. I don't like to work with kids, 21-year-olds. The vast majority of them think they know everything, but they don't know s——, and a lot of them aren't even willing to work hard. It's really irritating.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: seyman AT pbpost.com