wasn't like the Point glittered with gold streets and silver spoons…. But people in the Point owned. People in the Flats rented … and the Point and the Flats didn't mix much." While Jimmy and Dave attend a public school, Sean attends private parochial school. Later, Sean goes to college, while Dave has his glory years in public high school as a baseball star and Jimmy becomes an accomplished criminal who is brought down only by another's betrayal.

Ultimately, Dave's kidnapping further emphasizes Sean's outsider status. Sean never goes to the Flats to see Jimmy and Dave. Although Sean does not invite them, Jimmy and Dave visit Sean in the Point. They leave the familiar environment of their neighborhood and, as a result, Dave suffers the consequences of going to an outsider's place. Because he is not in his own neighborhood, the men are able to convince Dave to get in their car.

As someone from a neighborhood where "families went to church, stayed together, and held signs on street corners during election months," Sean makes choices in his life that continue to make him an outsider to those he once knew in the Flats. He graduates from college and while a student, he meets Lauren, the daughter of hippie liberals who served in the Peace Corps. The couple marries and though they have marital problems that create tension, they ultimately get back together and work on their marriage and family.

One of the most important choices Sean makes to cement his outsider status is becoming a state trooper. The cases he investigates take him many places, including the same neighborhoods he has been trying to leave his whole life. Though it is not stated directly in the text of Mystic River, it would seem that Sean made the choice to become an authority figure because of what happened to Dave and how helpless Sean had felt when it happened. Though Sean was too young at the time to investigate that crime, as an adult he can make a difference in other cases. Given his background, it is fitting that he chooses to do so using the upstanding, legal path. As Mystic River unfolds, it is as if Sean must work through Katie's murder case to atone for what happened to Dave. As someone with a personal stake in the case, Sean probably should have pulled himself off the case but could not.

While Sean is an outsider to the Flats, Dave's kidnapping ties him to Jimmy and Dave, and by extension, to their community. Because of his connection to Jimmy and Dave, Sean's participation in the murder investigations of Katie and of August Larson borders on conflict of interest. His partner, Whitey, asks him early on if he is too personally invested in the case, but Sean dismisses his concerns. He is determined to see justice in the case involving his friends, perhaps to atone for what happened when they were children.

The police and other authorities are not exactly trusted in the Flats. The way Lehane writes it, many Flats insiders consider those on the opposite side of the law more trustworthy than the police. As an insider, Jimmy earns more respect in the community for his career choices than Sean does. Jimmy's first job is as a professional criminal, until someone he trusts, Just Ray Harris, rats him out. After an honorable prison sentence—taking the fall so no one else would have to—Jimmy leads a relatively straight life but does so as a neighborhood insider. He supports his family by owning a corner store, an institution that can be the heart of a neighborhood. Though he lives a straight life, Jimmy's in-laws are still criminals, and Jimmy himself still has power derived from criminality in the area.

Early in the novel, insider Dave Boyle complains on several occasions about how yuppies are taking over the neighborhood and causing rents to rise. He worries he will lose his home and perhaps have to leave East Buckingham. He tells Whitey and Sean that the neighborhood needs a good crime wave to make it unappealing to the outsiders who are steadily encroaching. Interestingly, the man Dave murders is a suburbanite who was in the area specifically to have sex with a young male prostitute.

While Jimmy Marcus, a consummate neighborhood insider, shares some of Dave's anxieties that gentrification will permanently change the neighborhood, he is not as hostile to outsiders as Dave. His first marriage was to an outsider, a Puerto Rican woman named Marita. Although she died of cancer while he was in prison, he admits that he loved her more than he does his second wife, who is a neighborhood insider. After his daughter Katie's death, he remembers a time when he and Katie saw a production of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and how Katie spent the next six months expressing her desire to live in Italy after high school. Jimmy was dismissive of her dreams. He considered her a resident of the Flats for life; an insider, just like himself.

The tension between outsiders and insiders contributes to the underlying drama in the novel and helps add depth to the plot. This tension which manifests itself in the character of Sean without much detriment to him, takes a much greater toll on Dave. He is simultaneously an insider and an outsider and cannot reconcile that conflict. While Dave is definitely an insider in the Flats, as an adult he questions that status because of his abduction and its consequences. It is as if he is an outsider because of what happened to him as child. He is the boy taken away from his neighborhood, his mother, and his friends, and abused by two men he dubs wolves. The fact that he struggles with the compulsion to victimize other children, the ultimate betrayal of a community's integrity, makes his status as a solid community member uncertain. By the time he reaches adulthood, his accomplishments on the baseball field in high school have caused people's memories of him as a child victim to fade. As far as most people in the Flats are concerned, Dave is one of them. But he cannot let the incident go.

Dave's kidnapping raises an important related question: What if the incident had happened in front of Jimmy's home? Would the Flats, depicted as being more close-knit than the Point, especially in 1975, have been quiet enough for this incident to occur? After the kidnappers force Dave into their car, Sean's street becomes "empty again … gone mute with the slam of the car door." Furthermore, only one witness heard anything the night of Katie's murder because the street it occurred on was empty, burned out, and lost in the urban shuffle; only one old woman lived there. In 1975, the street had been more vital. While Sean's street was not exactly vacant, Lehane depicts those who live in the Point as more concerned with their own well-being than that of the neighborhood as a whole. When Dave returns to the Flats after his kidnapping, the narrator compares the lively block party he receives with what might have occurred in the Point: "They had block parties, sure, but they were always planned, the necessary permits obtained, everyone making sure everyone else was careful around cars, careful on the lawns…."

In the Flats, neighbors are the same as family; people who live there are less concerned with the privacy of others. Flats residents are insiders because their community encourages it. They possess a unified identity of extended family. Point residents appear to have no community to be inside of at all, and therefore are a neighborhood of outsiders. When Dave returns, it seems everyone who lived in the Flats attends his party. Although crime and violence seem to be commonplace in the Flats and the Point neighborhood may contain more law-abiding citizens, the investment that Flats insiders have in their community may have made it a safer place to live.

Source: A. Petruso, Critical Essay on Mystic River, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

In the following essay, Dunn visits the south Boston neighborhoods on which Mystic River's fictional Buckingham is based to learn about Lehane's impetus to write and how his experiences in those neighborhoods inspire his fiction.

Dennis Lehane did not want to work for Boston Gas. Nor did he want to work for Boston Edison or the post office. He had no ambitions to enter the priesthood or politics. Instead, he wanted to write. His parents (who emigrated to Boston from Ireland in the 1940s) were duly horrified.

Fortunately, Ann and Michael Lehane's son seems to have made the right decision. Mystic River, his sixth novel, finds the author transcending the genre label of crime novelist that his earlier books have earned him, placing him at the intersection of crime and literary fiction. Mystic River is a mystery novel that pushes up out of the genre, a book that uses the whodunit premise to delve deeply into the conundrum of how people who are supposedly "close" are actually as far from one another as distant planets whirling through the void. The book which has strong backing from publisher William Morrow, is a Book of the Month Club Main Selection and has had its foreign rights already sold in five countries—could put Lehane's rising literary star into a whole new orbit.

Not bad for someone whose most lucrative job, not so long ago, was parking cars.

Lehane's journey has had its snags. Prior to the publication of his first novel, the path of his writing career resembled a bungee jump from Massachusetts to Florida, with the recoil snapping him back: "I went to two colleges, two different majors, and dropped out of both of'em," admits Lehane, who at thirty-five still looks like a frat boy lost on the way to the party. "I was twenty and I said, 'I really suck at everything. The only thing I've ever been good at is writing."' His parents wanted their restless son to settle into a more secure profession. "It's the immigrant dream," Lehane says, slouched in a chair in what is best described as a writer's fantasy office: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, wall-to-wall desk space and no telephone. "Get the secure job. Get the pension. Lock it in. Until a couple of years ago, my father was still telling me when the postal exams were, just in case."

While Lehane was growing up, South Boston and neighboring Dorchester (where he lived) were reeling from poverty, street violence (particularly against forced busing), lethal street drugs (cheerfully supplied by the notorious Irish-American gangster James "Whitey" Bulger and his ilk) and an alarming suicide rate.

Yet both South Boston and Dorchester were some of the most tight-knit, closed neighborhoods in the city, where outsiders were distrusted and visitors unwelcome. Over beer, and under the eyes of his two faithful bulldogs, Lehane explains the dynamics of Dorchester in the 1970s in a subdued but frank voice. "When I was growing up it was, 'We are all Irish, we are all Polish, we are all Catholic—all others, stay the f—k out.' Boston's neighborhoods went through explosive tensions, not always racial. A lot of times it was just, 'Outsiders, go away.'" That grim take on neighborhood communality forms the backdrop of Lehane's serial novels, as well as the fictionalized world of Mystic River.

"Dorchester is one of many built-in neighborhoods in Boston, and sometimes neighborhood pride has a dark side," says Lehane's high school friend Chris Mullen (whose name Lehane used for a drug dealer character in his fourth novel, Gone, Baby, Gone). "Not quite a Charlestown code-of-silence pride, but akin to that. My family moved out of Dorchester during busing. Dennis' didn't, and I think from his point of view, there was a constant tension. Within a block of his home, things got very dicey during the busing era—for a while that whole neighborhood was going in the wrong direction. I can see the basis for some of the crimes he writes about. I think that when Dennis portrays the neighborhood in his books, and especially when he writes dialogue, his voice rings truer to me than many other writers, because he was there."

Lehane convinced his worried parents that he'd be able to take care of himself as a writer. "I'd been doing it since I was eight. I said I wanted to major in writing, that I could get a degree and teach, so I could always make a living doing that." Lehane got a scholarship and left crowded Dorchester, heading south to Eckerd College, a small school on the Gulf of Mexico in St. Petersburg, Florida—an area he now refers to as "paradise." "I remember stepping on the campus and thinking, This is it. This is my life. All I wanted to learn was how to be good."

Eschewing the concerns typical of many young writers, Lehane hunkered down in his newfound paradise and began to do the hard work necessary to become a "good" writer. "I didn't care about publishing. I didn't even like hearing about publishing in workshops—it's putting the cart before the horse. I still get annoyed by that. It's a very simple theorem: Learn how to write, write a good book, it'll get published. You'll get published—just learn how to write first. There's no other method that I know of."

Lehane's early attempts involved short stories, which he believed to be his niche. Some of his teachers and classmates encouraged him to send some of his best to The New Yorker; he decided against it and continued working on his craft, a decision he does not regret. "I look at people who can do it well—like Andre Dubus or Denis Johnson or Thom Jones or Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore—and there's still a little part of me that wishes I could do that. But I've always been lucky in that I have a very good instinct and very little sentimentality about seeing my own limitations. I thought, If I can't write a short story as well as Dubus, then why the hell am I doing this?"

While earning his MFA at Florida International University, Lehane casually tried his hand at mystery writing, a genre he always enjoyed as a reader. The book he began to write turned out to be the first draft of A Drink Before the War, the debut novel of his highly successful Kenzie-Gennaro detective series, which centered on a brutal gang war with nods to the Charles Stuart race killing. It took him three weeks to write (but months to rewrite before it was ready for publication).

"Coming from the world I was in, writing very esoteric short fiction, when I wrote a mystery, I knew exactly what boundary I was step ping over. I was leaving one camp and stepping into another, and I had no illusions about it," the author says.

After receiving his master's, Lehane returned to Massachusetts, where he found work best suited for someone of his qualifications—parking cars. "I needed to do that," he says. "I got ragged on a lot—'Hey, how's that master's workin' for ya?'—but it was fun. It was my last little-kid job." By the time Lehane's first book had been published, he had upgraded to being a chauffeur—a job he says is well suited for writers. "I wrote a lot of Darkness, Take My Hand and most of Sacred from the front seat of a limousine," he chuckles.

Lehane laughs a lot, which, given the course of events in his life, is not surprising, though it does belie an intensely serious creative drive that has seen him through six books and innumerable short stories.

Lehane's first novel, A Drink Before the War, was followed at the pace of about one per year by Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Prayers for Rain (all of which share Dorchester and South Boston as common settings). After the success of Prayers for Rain (film rights for which were purchased by Paramount Pictures, with Lehane writing the script), the author decided he needed a break from the Kenzie-Gennaro detective series. He wanted to go deeper into the streets and secrets of the neighborhood of his youth than he ever had before.

"When I first started writing short stories, when I was around seventeen, I'd come up with this little world in my head, which I discarded sometime in college. I thought, OK, if we're going back to third person, just step back as a writer to a place I'd once been very comfortable, let's go all the way. Let's do Buckingham."

What may have been plain boredom with the first-person point of view of his earlier books gave way, unexpectedly, to something far richer: the world of Buckingham, a fictitious amalgam of the Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, South Boston, Charlestown and Brighton, described in Mystic River as "a neighborhood of cramped corner stores, small playgrounds and butcher shops where meat, still pink with blood, hung in the windows."

What better place to set a crime novel than amid the various crime scenes one has witnessed in childhood? The day after the original interview, Lehane offers a drive through "Buckingham," a tour that would likely never pass muster with Boston's tourism bureau.

Various points of interest include the bleak, sloping grounds near St. Margaret's Church, where one childhood acquaintance murdered another over a pair of sneakers, and the Southie convenience store where a friend's night shift unexpectedly ended with a shotgun blast at pointblank range. (The store sits in the middle of a busy intersection, and no one claims to have seen a thing.) Lehane refuses to stop or even slow down his truck when we come upon the Old Colony housing projects, still a major source of South Boston's drug trade. We drive slowly by the intersection of Gannon and Bakersfield streets, site of the child abduction at the outset of Mystic River that reverberates throughout the lives of its three protagonists.

Our final stop is by the tangled girders beneath the Tobin Bridge, where even full sunlight cannot reach through the maze of steel. Lehane describes this final destination as "a good place to die."

Clearly, he has no shortage of background material from which to draw Buckingham. But he believes there was enough room in Mystic River to explore such deeper issues as marriage, parenthood and self-determination. The three protagonists struggle to make sense of a sudden murder in their midst (which takes place in a theater in a park that Lehane still refuses to enter alone), and proceed to make a fine mess of it. These thematic interests, as well as Lehane's extraordinarily fleshed-out characters (whom Claire Wachtel, his editor at William Morrow, calls "ten-dimensional"), will signal to attentive readers early on that Mystic River is no workaday whodunit story.

The novel also breaks from Lehane's previous books, with its stark attention to real-life details within real-life situations. "The private-eye novel is limited to a certain structure," he says. "You're dealing with an archetypal form; it's basically what replaced the Western. There are certain laws to that form, and the more you write about those characters, the less they can do, the more confined they become." Gone are the wild shoot-outs and chase scenes from the Kenzie-Gennaro series. With help from Trooper Robert Manning of the Massachusetts State Police Homicide Bureau (a connection arranged by Lehane's brother-in-law, Sgt. Mike Lawn of the Watertown Police Department), Lehane was able to depict the police investigation in Mystic River with incredible detail and accuracy: "I think Dennis, without speaking for him, was looking for concrete specifics on how a case is completed from start to finish, instead of some fictionalized account that's dramatized," Manning says.

Lehane's attention to detail forced him to revisit some difficult experiences of his own. While still in school he drifted into social work and eventually worked with abused children. "Every summer and Christmas I'd come home, and all my friends were working with the handicapped, because overtime wasn't a problem. Eighty-hour weeks weren't a problem." Lehane does not elaborate much on his short career working with abused children, save to imply that the overall experience was unpleasant. But it reverberates throughout his serial novels, culminating in Mystic River's Dave Boyle, a man with a secret of childhood abuse that is slowly and horrifically resuscitated over the course of the novel.

The fragmentation and denial within Dave's mind is illustrative of what happens to everyone in Mystic River. The murder at the heart of the book sets the stage for a collision between the novel's three main characters, themselves childhood acquaintances and witnesses to a terrible crime twenty-five years earlier that tore their friendship apart. As adults, they are adrift and isolated, from themselves and everyone around them, ever since a car that "smelled like apples" rolled down Gannon Street, changing things forever.

"I have an obsession with innocence lost," Lehane says. "I try to get rid of it, but I can't. What I can do, as a craftsman, is not repeat the details. Pedophilia is done. I've done it in three books. Now I've said all I have to say about it. There's a fine line between writing about some thing and exploiting it."

With Mystic River flowing on course, Lehane's thoughts are with his next novel, in which he plans to return to the Kenzie-Gennaro series. "The series isn't over, but I thought that the characters needed a break," he says. "In Prayers for Rain, I wrapped up some character lines that have been hanging there since the first book."

The new Kenzie-Gennaro novel will be the second in a five-book contract with William Morrow, of which Mystic River was the first. Lehane seems on firm ground with his direction. "The perfect balance," he says, "would be to do a series book, then do a standalone and so on in that sequence. It keeps the characters fresh."

Source: Adam Dunn, "A Good Place to Die," in Book, Vol. 52, March 2001, p. 52.