Dennis Lehane’s P.I. duo Patrick Kensie and Angie Genarro still  live in the blue-collar Irish and Italian neighborhood where they grew up.  (Photo by Ward Rinehart)

Dennis Lehane: They're reacting really well. It's surprising. None of them had ever read a mystery, no American crime fiction, except for one student who read a few Ellroy's, some Hammet, Chandler. For the most part they're novices.  

The class is becoming very much about the Seventies and Eighties. So many of the books are very much about the Seventies, when everything went wrong with the peace movement and the counterculture just ran out of gas. Ellroy's Black Dahlia is about the Forties, but you can tie it to the time it was written [1988]. So it's very much about the 80s -- downsizing, corporate takeovers, corporations in bed with politicians, who are in bed with the media, who are in bed with the police, in a country run by a former actor. I set the bar pretty high by starting out with The Last Good Kiss, a book which easily can take six hours to teach and plumb the depths of. So they've run with it since then. 

Crescent Blues: Are you going to give them a final, or let them write a paper? 

Dennis Lehane: They have a paper based on a pre-approved list of books which they did not study in class. 

Crescent Blues: What does that list include? 

Dennis Lehane: It includes certain authors. They could read any books by Mike Connelly, James Lee Burke, S.J. Rozan, Ellroy, Patsy Cornwell, Hammet, Chandler. I also gave them selections from authors as diverse as Elmore Leonard, Robert O'Connor's Buffalo Soldiers -- which I think is one of the best novels flat out of the Nineties -- and Don DeLillo, Vicki Hendricks, Susanna Moore's In the Cut. There's a whole list of books that they can choose from, but if they go off that list they have to talk to me first. 

Crescent Blues: George, you're also involved in movies and, given our talk about violence, it seems both of you were making distinctions between books and movies with violence in them. Am I stating correctly what you both said?  

Dennis Lehane: I think there is a difference. There's a difference in the form of entertainment. 

George Pelecanos: That's right. It's also like pornography, you know it when you read it. You sort of know when you watch a movie what the intent was. I mean, I will defend Oliver Stone's right to make Natural Born Killers because of the ripple effect that happens when you don't defend it, but that's a movie made with one purpose -- the exploitation of violence. You can call it a satire, a black comedy or anything you want to, but that's what it was. 

Crescent Blues: What movies with violence would pass the test that the violence is not just for violence's sake, but for the story's sake? 

George Pelecanos: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver. 

Dennis Lehane: I recently saw a film set in Boston, among gangsters in Charlestown. It's a very violent film. If anybody walks out of that film thinking violence is good, they're nuts. 

Crescent Blues: What did you both think of Trainspotting? During the last election Bob Dole condemned it as a way of luring kids into drugs.  

Dennis Lehane: I saw it in England before it before it came out in America. I was in London, and it's all they were talking about. This is two months before it came out in the States. We went and saw it, and it was absolutely electric. That was a watershed film for me of the Nineties, made me feel like a kid again seeing a film. I felt just so exhilarated walking out of there.  

But this is a film in which a baby is smothered, is found dead; a film in which the DTs are shown to be one of the most horrific things in the world; in which a guy climbs into the shittiest toilet in Scotland; one guy dies of AIDS. How do you look at that, unless you're a complete moron, and say, "Boy, I'd like to do heroin."  

George Pelecanos: How does that inspire you to...? I don't think Dole ever saw that movie, come on! 

Dennis Lehane: There's a big difference between movies like The Basketball Diaries or Rush, movies which just don't get it. What Trainspotting showed was both sides of the coin. Movies about heroin usually show it as this really depressing, nod-off thing, which just makes people curious, because they're thinking that's not the real deal, or everybody wouldn't be doing it. Trainspotting shows you this stuff is fantastic and it's also not fantastic, it's horrible, but the movie showed at least the rush of heroin. That was, to me, honest artistically. 

Crescent Blues: Did you see it, George? 

George Pelecanos: Yes. 

Crescent Blues: What did you think about the film? 

George Pelecanos: I liked the film. It made me sick about drugs, but I still loved the film. Let's put it this way, I'd let my kids see it in a heartbeat and not worry at all about how it would affect them. I know it would affect them negatively in a way I want them to be negatively affected. There's no romanticism at all about doing drugs in that picture. 

Crescent Blues: George, the company that you work for, Circle Releasing, put out the Coen brothers' films… 

George Pelecanos: We produced three of their films. 

Crescent Blues: Which ones? 

George Pelecanos: Raising Arizona, Noah's Crossing and Barton Fink.  

Crescent Blues: How do you think of their films in terms of violence? 

George Pelecanos: I don't think of their films as being particularly violent. They're so stylized. Again, you'd have to be a pretty stupid person to take it the wrong way.  

I distributed John Woo's The Killer. There're more guns going off in that movie, with the exception of The Wild Bunch, than in any movie ever made. The Killer, however, is like a comic book. Because it's film, the beauty is in the way it's shot and its presentation. It's almost poetic. That's not going to influence anybody to do anything wrong. And if I can speak for Dennis, I think if either one of us thought we were involved in anything that would get that kind of reaction, we wouldn't touch it. 

Dennis Lehane: Recently, and this is very strange, my wife and I watched Babe, Pig in the City. I heard that this film was a titanic bomb, almost sank a studio, cost a lot of people jobs, because it was just too dark for children. We were sitting there watching it, going, "My God, who would show this to their kid?" This movie is so twisted and dark and depressing. It's very Dickensian; it is Oliver Twist to the nth degree.  

I was thinking about the movie for days; it totally rooted in my head for days. It's an incredibly dark picture, and I was just thinking about the shock of it. Then it occurred to me, when I was four I saw Oliver Twist, the movie version, and I still remember Oliver Reed as being one of the scariest [characters]. He played Bill. He murdered Sally, the prostitute, and that was a horrific scene. It's Dickens. You're talking about a poor child -- an orphan -- who's wandering this horrid, ugly metropolis that's always dark. Nobody loves him, everybody treats him like crap, and I thought, wait a minute, that film didn't adversely affect me.  

Babe, Pig in the City, is going to be the first film my kids see. I want them to understand the world is this way. One of the reasons Babe, Pig in the City was so disturbing was that when a dog, for example, falls over a bridge and he's tied to something, he almost drowns. You get the full effect in the sense this dog this going to drown -- this movie can go anywhere, and it's horrific. If more kids saw how horrific violence is and were brought into it as a point of true pain, I think there'd be less of it.  

What's worrisome is not movies like Mean Streets, which are very disturbing in their depiction of violence. What's disturbing is movies like Schwarzenegger's, where he kills 70 people. It's like shooting targets and no big deal. They die -- so what, ha ha! It didn't seem all that painful, and the hero's fine. It teaches kids you can walk through a room with 70 people shooting automatic weapons at you and you kill all 70 people without getting touched yourself. The 70 people don't matter because they're not human beings. Nobody's human. 

I'd rather see a film like Good Fellows, which opens up with a guy getting stabbed and shot in a car. This is horrific and nobody's going to be sitting there going, "Ha ha, that's funny. That's a cartoon." No, that's horrific, that guy's being stabbed with butcher knives in the back of a car. That to me is real violence.  

They talk about [violence] in the wake of Columbine. Well, Japan has the single most violent programming in the world -- far more violent than America's. They take all our imports, plus their cartoons, which are horrifically violent, plus their video games, and they saturate their TV airwaves with it, so they're getting the same stuff. The difference is that they watch it with their families, and their families explain it to them. I think that matters. 

You don't see Japanese kids -- well, A) they don't have guns and B) their society's structured so they still respect their elders. There's a family unit around them, and I think that has a lot to do with it. 

Crescent Blues: Did either of you see Old Yeller when you were kids? 

Lehane and George Pelecanos: Yeah. 

Crescent Blues: How did the end of that movie affect you? 

George Pelecanos: Poor fellow! Made me sad. Made me sad. 

Dennis Lehane: I didn't cry though. I was a man. 

Lynn I. Miller