Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, 2003

Your whole life, you wished for something like this. You told yourself you didn't, but you did. To be involved in a drama. And not the drama of unpaid bills and minor, shrieking marital squabbles. No. This was real life, but bigger than real life. This was hyper-real. Her husband may have killed a bad man. And if that bad man really was dead, the police would want to find out who did it. And if the trail really led here, to Dave, they'd need evidence.

She could see them sitting at the kitchen table, notebooks open, smelling of coffee and the previous night's taverns, asking her and Dave questions. They'd be polite, but scary. And she and Dave would be polite back and unruffled.

Because it all came down to evidence. And she'd just washed the evidence down the kitchen sink drain and out into the dark sewers. In the morning, she'd remove the drainpipe from under the sink and wash that, too, douse the insides with bleach and put it back in place. She'd put the shirt and jeans into a plastic trash bag and hide it until Tuesday morning and then toss it into the back of the garbage truck where it would be mashed and chewed and compacted with rotten eggs and spoiled chickens and stale bread. She'd do this and feel larger, better, than herself.

"It makes you feel alone," Dave said.

"What's that?

"Hurting someone," he said softly. ---(pages 68-69)

Although you would be hard-pressed to find two novels less alike in style, tone, setting and story than Mystic River and Case Histories, the two do have something in common. They are both written by authors with strong prose and a "literary" bent who have chosen to tell their stories through the prism of so-called "genre" fiction. In the case of Histories, that genre is the classic private-eye mystery, while Mystic River is a superb homage to the hardboiled police procedural, although it's also a classical tragedy and a character-driven story of loyalty, family and violence.

Growing up in a rundown Boston neighborhood, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle were friends. Their world changes when Dave is abducted by pedophiles, a catastrophic tragedy that will irrevocably impact all three of them.

In adulthood, echoes of the past interfere with a shocking new crime: the brutal murder of Jimmy Marcus's daughter. Sean, now a state policeman, struggles to solve the case, while Jimmy, a reformed criminal, contemplates revenge upon the prime suspect: Dave Boyle, whose average-guy facade masks dark demons.

Lehane handles the novel's twin genres incredibly well: it's a glorious character study, but also a rousing and shocking murder mystery. His plotting is so deft that most of the time you don't even realize that clues are being carefully dropped. The solution to the central mystery is absolutely perfect and completely shocking, even though Lehane leads up to it nicely.

But Mystic River is a lot more than just an effective crime novel. It's a bleak portrait of three very different men and the effect that one act of evil has had on them. Lehane's characterizations are absolutely dead-on. Dave's descent into madness, Sean's wildly dysfunctional marriage, Jimmy's attempt to deny his own inner darkness, all are simply, but powerfully drawn. A scene near the end of the novel provides an incredibly scorching, riveting sequence of drama that could be matched by very few writers. A scene like that brings to mind Shakespeare or Faulkner faster than Hammet or Leonard.

When Lehane's prose is on a roll, he operates at an incredibly high level. Admittedly, I found the hyper-macho tough-guy dialogue to be a bit wearing at times, and I don't think that his portrait of the close-knit urban neighborhood was as effective as some of the other elements, but the moments of literary brilliance more than make up for it. There is some really superb writing going on here, as well as some fantastic plotting.

Not only is Lehane good at high drama and Shakespearean tragedy, but also at the more mundane details that make his world convincingly real. The logistics of dealing with enormous amounts of forensic evidence, the difficulty of lying to a police officer, the need for grieving people to surround themselves with food. Most thriller/mystery authors present a glossier worldview; Lehane's is recognizable, material and human, which only serves to make the crime-fiction elements of the story realer and scarier.

By the end of Mystic River, Lehane has thoroughly fulfilled the novel's promise, delivering a tight, masterful plot along with gobbets of gorgeous prose and some moments of character arc resolution that are jaw-dropping in their perfection, such as Jimmy's chilling acceptance of himself as an evil person. None of these moments could have been reached as effectively in a "standard" literary novel with no violent conflict. When it comes to literary versus genre fiction, Mystic River definitively proves that you can have your cake and eat it, too.

NEXT UP: A Storm of Swords, the third Song of Ice and Fire novel.

Soft Touch by John D. MacDonald

Soft Touch by John D. MacDonald, 1958

John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) is not a showy author. What he does, and does incredibly well, is tell a story and wind it tighter and tighter. His tales of crime and suspense are short and simple--MacDonald's plots are typical of his era's pulp fiction--but incredibly effective.

Soft Touch is the story of Jerry Jamison, a middle-aged married man trapped in a dull suburban life and a loveless marriage to an alcoholic floozy.

Enter his old war buddy Vince, who has a proposition: an easy two-man heist that will leave him and Jerry with over three million dollars in cash, no strings attached.

Jerry goes through with the robbery and gets his share of the loot, only to see his life fall apart in a tangle of greed, betrayal and even murder.

The story itself is not highly original, but MacDonald handles it like a master. The novel is incredibly brief, only 160 pages. I usually like a thicker book, but it's just the right length for the paranoia-inducing story.

Jerry himself is an interesting character to base the story around. He considers himself one of the good guys, at least until he gets his first glimpse of the money. His lust for wealth leads him down a very, very dark path and he eventually murders both Vince and his wife in the novel's most disturbing segment.

MacDonald doesn't cater to the thrill-a-minute crowd. Even though the novel is very brief, Jerry only faces down thugs at the very end. MacDonald, unlike so many other mystery/suspense authors, understands that it's tension, not action that really makes a novel riveting.

Despite his reputation as an author of pulp fiction (most famously the Travis McGee series), MacDonald's prose is tight, yet packed with wit and insight:

A one-dollar bill has a humble and homely look. A five-dollar bill has a few meek pretensions. A ten is vigorous and forthright and honest, like a scout leader. A twenty, held to the ear like a seashell, emits the far-off sound of nightclub music. A fifty wears the faint sneer of race track. It has a portly look, needs a shave, wears a yellow diamond on the little finger. And a hundred is very haughty indeed.

Then there is quantity. A wad of ones in the bottom of a grubby pocket, or fanned between the fingers in an alley game. Or three frayed fives in a flat cheap billfold. Then there is the flashy billfold, padded fat with ones and fives and tens and twenties. Next step is the platinum bill clip, with its dainty burden of twenties and fifties, crisp and folded but once. After that is the unmarked envelope with its cool sheaf of hundreds, slipped from hand to hand in the corridor of a government building. (page 48).

The novel doesn't have pretensions of its own. None of MacDonald's work does. He clearly understood what he was doing. He was a storyteller, and he was an excellent one. Soft Touch is a good read, not as excellent as MacDonald's The Only Girl in the Game (1960), but probably the equal of his A Bullet for Cinderella (1955).

Soft Touch is currently out of print, which is too bad. MacDonald's crime novels are boiled-down little masterpieces of the genre and Soft Touch is no exception. It's a good novel, written by an excellent author.

NEXT UP: I'll be reviewing Ian McEwan's modern classic Atonement.