Mystic River Returns

If anyone can track him down, it's his characters. " Mystic River " gently rapped on the window for five or six years, he told Terry Gross in a National Public Radio Fresh Air interview.

In 1999, it began banging on the door. "What was the message as it was banging?" Gross asked. "Make a hole, make it wide, let us in," Lehane said.

He wanted " Mystic River " to be a tragedy of epic proportions about regular people-the kind of story he loves to read-epics like "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or "The Count of Monte Cristo."

The book, set in working-class Boston, begins in 1975 with three boys fighting in the street. Two men claiming to be cops stop to break up the fight. They are actually child molesters, and they abduct one of the boys. He returns home four days later, traumatized. The story picks up again in 2000, when a terrible event reunites the childhood friends.

"I wanted [the book] to be a hybrid of my major influences, which are really the extremes of high art and low art. Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard, way too much Shakespeare, the Russians. And then I wanted to pay tribute to my literary giants--Richard Price, William Kennedy, Pete Dexter and James T. Farrell. Also, when I was little, I used to watch Jimmy Cagney double features, the old Warner Brothers gangster melodramas of the '30s.

"So it was all that, thrown into a pot," Lehane says, with the deadpan delivery of one of his characters.

" Mystic River " became a bestseller. It was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and it won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award in fiction. It became the now-famous film by Clint Eastwood, which won Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins.

When Lehane finished the book, he sent it to FIU's John Dufresne, his thesis advisor, and said, "Will this do?"

What's Next

Lehane never expected to make a decent living at writing.

"I thought it would be kind of cool to make enough money to buy a small house. But if you're writing for the money, you should get your head examined. Be a stock broker. There's a lot of easier ways to make money."

He writes full-time now and teaches a class at Harvard. His next project is "either a trilogy or a quartet" that begins in 1918 with the Red Sox winning the World Series and covers the Boston police strike of 1919.

He penned an episode for the HBO series "The Wire," which will air in October. And his seventh book, "Shutter Island ," came out last year. It's a psychological thriller, completely different from anything he has done before.

"It truly felt diabolical," he says about " Shutter Island ." "But I'd never do it again."

Somehow, that seems exactly right.

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