World Gone By - by Dennis Lehane

I don’t usually blog about two books in a row.  But, this is summer and my hands are never empty when there’s a good book around.

Dennis Lehane’s tale of wartime gangsters in Tampa falls into the page-turner category.  World Gone By reads like a well done TV series.  Think of the Sopranos, or Boardwalk Empire. Complex characters.  Twists and turns that sugarcoat nothing and make it hard to sleep.

It’s 1943 and Joe Coughlin is a fish out of water, but essential to the mob’s operations in Tampa and Cuba.  Yep, he’s Irish and from Boston, but he has a knack for making money.  Heaps of it.  That makes him important to his Italian-American bosses and gets him a place on the Commission, where every important decision, from business to killing is made.

He’s safe, right?  No longer.  Somebody, for reasons unknown, has threatened his life, or at least that’s the rumor.  It’s a rumor loud enough to get his attention.

Complications drive a plot and give depth to characters.  In Joe’s case, the complications run in his veins, right back to his childhood.  His background and choice of professions, and ability to keep the cash flowing make him “one of us.”  At the same time, being a non-Italian keeps him outside the fold.

With a Lehane book (Shutter Island, The Drop, Mystic River) nothing is ever exactly as it seems.  World Gone By is an onion begging to be peeled chapter by riveting chapter.  Friends are friends, or are they?  Enemies?  Friends?  Hard to tell.  What day is this?  Mutations occur with every passing hour.  It’s like trying to keep up with a basketball game when every player wears a different color jersey and shoots at both nets.

Lehane added something more.  He carefully hid a morality play inside a crime novel.  Everyone’s actions have consequences, even yours and mine.  The characters in this book wrestle with deeds done and undone, just as much as we do.  The ‘business’ is important.  Friends are more important.  Family is the most important, except perhaps when money steps in.

But, Joe has a quick mind.  He’s a member of the walking dead, sudden resurrected.  Wait a minute.  Nothing’s settled.  He has to protect those he loves and to do that he must first protect himself, while keeping his value among stone cold associates.  Feed and water the tigers, but don’t get forget they are tigers.

Edgy is not a word I use carelessly, but World Gone By is a razor that you have to balance on, even as the blade cuts into your feet.

You like gangster books and films?  Don’t miss it.  You’re more attuned to morality plays?  Don’t miss it.  You just like a good story?  Lehane never, but never disappoints.

Hungry for more?  The Given Day, and Live By Night are two previous Joe Coughlin novels.

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane

“Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement.  Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard…And it occurred to him that almost everything of note that had happened in his life – good or bad – had been set in motion the morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould.”  So begins Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane.  You may have heard of him, or read Shutter Island, or seen the movie.  Dark.  Deep and dark, yet his characters grab you with their stretched equations of right and wrong.  With their flickering, daring lives.  

One thing that annoys me is when a book breaks its promises.  Sometimes it’s just poor writing.  Sometimes it gallops until the horse dies and the author just keeps flogging.  With Lehane, there’s no chance of either.  His prose races clean and crisp, his characters are razor sharp.  And the plot sizzles like a lit fuse.

The setting is Boston, in the middle of the Roaring Twenties.  Always wondered about that name.  Was it the 3-4 and 4-4 time jazz that rambled from speakeasies and leaked out onto the streets?  Or the shuffle of flappers bouncing along, doing the Charleston?  Maybe it was the illegal flow of the devil’s potions that nobody, not even the Congress, or the strong arm of the law, could dam up.  I think it was the roar of gunfire that swept the streets of every major city, including Boston.

Joe Coughlin was in the middle of it.  And when you live outside the law, there’s no coming back.  The police want to kill you.  Your partners want to kill you, but most of all your competition wants you cold and dead.

Lehane is right on target with Live by Night.  This book shoves you into the epicenter of danger and corruption, love and betrayal, good, evil, and everything in between.

If you liked Puzo’s The Godfather, you’ll sink your teeth into Live by Night.  Take a trip back to Boston in the 1920s.  Taste the rotgut booze, ogle the easy women, smell the cordite. Run for your life!