Book Around the Corner

A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane. (1994) French title: Un dernier verre avant la guerre.

There is a war going on. It’s happening in playgrounds, not health clubs. It’s fought on cement, not lawns. It’s fought with pipes and bottles, and lately, automatic weapons. And as long as it doesn’t push through the heavy oak doors where they fight with prep school educations and filibusters and two-martini lunches, it will never actually exist.

Once again, I’m late. Late with writing this billet about a book I read a couple of months ago and late to the Lehane party. Why didn’t I read him sooner? I’m glad that his coming to the Quais du Polar festival prompted me to read his first book, A Drink Before the War.

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are childhood friends and run an PI agency. We’re in South Boston, Dorchester where the Irish neighborhood and the black one are near one another.

Jim Vurnan, Senator Sterling Mulkern and Senator Brian Paulson hire Patrick and Angela to find confidential and compromising documents stolen by Jenna Angeline, their cleaning lady.

They don’t fool Patrick, he knows they’re using him and the documents are not what they claim they are. Or, as Patrick deadpans: “They’re elected officials. The day they tell the whole truth is the day hookers put out for free.”

Patrick and Angela embark on a chase that goes beyond retrieving stolen documents. They land in the middle of a family feud between gangs led by father and son. They put their nose in the upcoming drug war, they but heads with politicians, with the mob and with the FBI. There are a lot of deaths and we’re only in 1994, there aren’t as many machine guns as today.

Two things are obvious in A Drink Before the War: Dennis Lehane is a gifted writer, there’s no fumbling in his debut crime fiction novel. The plot is solid, the social commentary thought-provoking and the characters are well-drafted. A brilliant writer.

According to his interviews and talks at Quais du Polar, all the themes of his literary work are already there. How politicians don’t care about working classes, and poor neighborhoods, how they let drug dealers invade places and how racism in ingrained in the white population. You get the picture in a few sentences, when Patrick speaks about his friend and journalist Richie Colgan:

Everyone loved Richie Colgan—until they ran his picture over his byline. A good Irish name. A good Irish boy. Going after the corrupt, fat party bosses in city hall and the Statehouse. Then they ran his picture and everyone saw that his skin was blacker than Kurtz’s heart, and suddenly he was a “troublemaker.”

As I said, the social commentary is excellent.

I also loved that Patrick and Angela aren’t the usual badass PIs. Their personal bond goes way back and their professional association. He’s half in love with Angie, who’s married to an abusive husband, also a childhood friend. He wishes she’d leave him for good. He had a complicated relationship with his father and he’s not a good shot.

My gun is, as Angie would say, “not a fuck-around thing.” It’s a .44 magnum automatic—an “automag,” they call it gleefully in Soldier of Fortune and like publications—and I didn’t purchase it out of penis envy or Eastwood envy or because I wanted to own the goddamned biggest gun on the block. I bought it for one simple reason: I’m a lousy shot. I need to know that if I ever have to use it, I hit what I’m aiming at and I hit it hard enough to knock it down and keep it there.

This quote gives a good overview of Patrick’s character. A decent and complex guy who does what he has to do and tries to remain true to his values.

Dennis Lehane explores grey areas. In politics. In family relationships. In friendships. In terms of moral compass. In life in general. A Drink Before the War shows the reader that grey areas are everywhere, that looking at the world with black and white glasses and armed with stickers to put everything and everyone in neat categories is fruitless. It’s fruitless because it’s not real.