His Days of Crime May End Real Soon
LIVE BY NIGHT
By Dennis Lehane
401 pages. William Morrow. $27.99.
Dennis Lehane
“Live by Night” is Crime Noir 101, as taught by the
best of its current practitioners. “Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf
of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement,” Dennis Lehane
writes in this perfect specimen of an opening sentence. In the same paragraph
he lets Joe realize “that almost everything of note that had ever happened in
his life — good or bad — had been set in motion the morning he first crossed
paths with Emma Gould.”
There is an inviting degree of mystery to this
paragraph full of foreshadowing. You can wonder what Joe did to earn himself
the cement-on-a-tugboat treatment. You can see that Joe’s life, “good or bad,”
has spanned a wide moral spectrum. And you can notice that “set in motion” and
“first crossed paths” are odd ways of hinting at the connection between Joe and
this mysterious Emma. Cryptic, doomy, romantic yet ominous, this opening salvo
signals the most important thing about Mr. Lehane’s latest: precision. All of
“Live By Night” is written with that same degree of cleverness and care.
“Live by Night” is nominally a follow-up to Mr.
Lehane’s powerhouse “The Given Day.” That was a Boston-based historical novel of epic scope and
gut-wrenching emotion. This is a narrower genre piece and a Tommy-gun salute to
vintage noir style. Joe is one of the last remaining members of the Coughlin
family, which loomed so large in the first book’s tumultuous account of 1919.
As the main story of “Live by Night” begins, Thomas Coughlin is still an aloof
high-ranking Boston police officer and a dauntingly cruel parent. Joe is 19,
taking his first steps into a serious life of crime.
Joe meets Emma Gould in the midst of a stickup in
1926, with Prohibition in full swing. He and two cronies have made the mistake
of hitting a speakeasy owned by a powerful bootlegger named Albert White. Joe
compounds his troubles by falling hard for Emma, who was a waitress at the
speakeasy and comes from a tough Charlestown family, so unlike the elite Boston
Irish Coughlins. “Charlestown,” Joe chides himself. “No wonder she hadn’t
gotten rattled with a gun pointed at her. In Charlestown, they brought .38s to
the dinner table, used the barrels to stir their coffee.”
Once Joe falls (hard, of course) for Emma, he faces
the further problem that she is Albert White’s girlfriend. Albert does not like
being either robbed or cuckolded, so he is happy to see Joe sent to prison
after a wild shootout at the new Statler Hotel. Joe’s story shocks Boston, not
just because of the violence, but also because Thomas Coughlin allows his
officers to brutally attack Joe. “Failing to raise your child properly was one
thing,” Mr. Lehane writes about the public’s perception of Thomas after that.
“Ordering him beaten into a coma was quite another.” At this early point in
“Live by Night” the Coughlin family begins bringing the Corleones to mind.
Thomas, the patriarch, has an eerie experience in his beloved garden. Meanwhile
Joe, behind bars, begins to hone his powers of intimidation and takes on a
cool, commanding style. He remains an immensely appealing character even after
Mr. Lehane has ushered him into the land of ruthless intimidation and deadly
crime.
“Live by Night,” an echo of both Nicholas Ray’s
1949 film “They Live by
Night” and Raoul Walsh’s
1940 “They Drive by Night,” is a title meant to explain what drives Joe in this direction. As
readers of “The Given Day” know, his was not an easy childhood. He sees himself
as a nocturnal outlaw, living outside of the ordinary.
But a funny thing happens after Joe gets out of
prison and heads for Ybor City, Fla. He becomes successful enough to wonder
where his old credo disappeared to. He sees something in himself “that was
starting to live by day, where the swells lived, where the insurance salesmen
and the bankers lived, where the civic meetings were held and the little flags
were waved at the Main Street parades.”
Mr. Lehane gives shades of gravitas to “Live by
Night” by focusing on questions of conscience, morality and faith. Joe
frequently wonders about an afterlife. He questions whether he’s right to live
entirely in the moment. He wonders whether the ingenuity and purposefulness of
his scheming make it any better than garden-variety brutality. Eventually he
will know three women who embody the yearnings that tug at him.
One is a Cuban beauty named Graciela (“Paradise,”
Joe thinks upon first seeing her, “is dusky and lush and covers limbs that move
like water”) who values strength, not power, and wants to do some good in this
world. “She believed in fairness, essentially, a concept Joe was certain had
left the earth about the time the earth left diapers.” Another, whose
reputation Joe ruins a shockingly heartless way, is reborn as a saintly
evangelist but still struggles with doubt. The third, who first made the
nighttime ethos look so good to Joe, is the original troublemaker, Emma.
Much of this story unfolds in Ybor City, where
racism, Prohibition, bootlegging and gangland violence collide in surprising
and awkward ways. (The Ku Klux Klan’s reasons for approving of Prohibition are
a narrative element.) And much of it consists of well-rendered crime episodes,
not the soaring battles of principle that Mr. Lehane took on with “The Given
Day.”
Yet his idea of plain old crime is sophisticated, literary and barbed
enough (“How does anyone become so callous?” “Takes less practice than you’d
think”) that it makes this book a sentence-by-sentence pleasure. You are in the
hands of an expert. And you’ll know it.
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