Gritty 'Shutter Island' the Latest Thriller from Dennis Lehane

By Peter Schmidtke
 
U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels can't help but feel cagey as he stares at the bare cement walls of the closet-sized cubicle at Ashcliffe, a hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island off Boston Harbor. It's the early 1950s, and Daniels and his new partner have been sent to the island to track down a murderess who escaped from the room in question, an assignment that gives the two marshals the jitters. 

The warden and the staff aren't cooperating, a hurricane is brewing, and to top it off, Daniels thinks a little more patient-intervention may be going on at Ashcliffe than just routine psychiatry.
 
This forms the basis of Boston writer Dennis Lehane's seventh novel, Shutter Island, which became available in bookstores nationwide in April. 

Lehane, who is first-generation Irish and hails from Dorchester, a southern borough of Boston, was on hand recently at Mystery One Bookshop on Prospect Avenue in Milwaukee and Schwartz's Bookstore in Mequon to sign copies of his new novel.

At Mystery One, a large banner behind the counter projected the cover of Lehane's new novel, a forlorn image of the fictionalized institution of Ashcliffe atop craggy cliffs by which the patients and staff are held back from the icy Atlantic.

Lehane traces his inspiration for this setting to a childhood visit with an uncle to a former mental institution on Boston Harbor's Long Island when he was 8 or 9-years-old.
 
"He took me there and told me about it in spooky, boogedy-boogedy terms," Lehane said. "And 27 years later, the idea just kind of popped into my head when I was walking on a beach — so you never know which idea will be the one you'll write."

While the action in his new novel takes place on a fictional island, Lehane said that he looked extensively at texts to research both the physical descriptions of the 34 islands off Boston Harbor and the past use of drugs on schizophrenics in American institutions.

Lehane said he boarded a ferry to one of the islands to have a look around, but was unsuccessful. "I seriously tried to, but the boat broke down."

Shutter Island is staged in the 1950s, and Lehane adeptly includes appropriate slang and events important to that era, including references to the aftereffects of World War II and Korea and the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests.
 
"But I'm very much a less-is-more writer in those terms," Lehane says. "I didn't want to overload you with language and context, so I thought I'd try to slip something in every 20 pages or so. What I really wanted to capture was the mood of the time, which was paranoia." 

In terms of the conflict that emerges at Ashcliffe, Lehane said he immersed himself mentally into his scenes, thrusting himself virtually into the different locales

"I say to myself, 'OK, what would be going on here?' There would be power struggles and things like that, but I wanted the world to be a little to the left of reality. I was attempting a Gothic, so I didn't want to be locked into any kid of hyper-realism."

While he says that he doesn't like to 'map out' the plots for his books, a technique practiced by many mystery writers and novelists, Lehane said that he was forced to do so with Shutter Island.

"The mechanics were so complex that I had to write it down-it was such a high-wire-act, that one wrong move and the book collapses."

Along with a plot that will keep readers guessing, fans of the author's novels will take pleasure in the platter of rich characters he has laid before them in Shutter Island. 

Lehane details the head federal marshal's sobering flashbacks to both his military action in WWII and his relationship with his father, a fisherman who was lost at sea in a raging tempest. The reader receives a glimpse of Daniels' own person life — when the marshal is forced to confront a troubled female patient on the island, Daniels thinks back to the night before he left for the war that he met his own wife, Dolores, at a local dance. 

And even for Daniels' partner, Lehane provides details about him including his sudden transfer to Boston as a result of his marriage to a Japanese woman, an unpopular action in the '50s. Dr. Cawley, a psychiatrist at Ashcliffe, is also given the full treatment by Lehane when he is introduced to Daniels and his partner: 

Dr. Cawley was thin to the point of emaciation. Not  quite the swimming bones and cartilage Teddy had seen  at Dachau, but definitely in need of several good  meals. His lips and nose were as thin as the rest of  him, and his chin appeared squared off to the point of  nonexistence. He had an explosive smile, however,  bright and bulging with a confidence that lightened his irises."
 

Like all good novels, the author's dialog in Shutter Island helps move the plot forward and shed light on the nature of the Lehane's cast of players. One of just many occasions in which Lehane showcases his mastery for dialog can be seen when Dr. Naehring, a psychiatrist on the island whom the marshals detest, grills Daniels and his partner about their backgrounds:

"You father is dead, yes? And yours as well, Marshal Daniels? In fact, I'll wager that both of you lost the dominant male figure in your lives before your fifteenth birthdays."

"Five of diamonds," Teddy said.

"I'm sorry?" (Naehring) Hunching ever forward.

"Is that your new parlor trick? Teddy (Daniels) said. "You tell me what card I'm holding. Or, no, wait-you cut a nurse in half, pull a rabbit from Dr. Cawley's head.

Given Lehane's use of dialog, plot, and social commentary, mystery fans who pick up Shutter Island will be getting much more than a standard 'who-dunnit.'

"I did that with a couple of the series books, and I had a desire to do a Gothic, to pay homage to the great pulp films of the '50s," Lehane emphasized. "Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and movies that indirectly addressed what was going on in the country, when directors and writers couldn't overtly address these problems."

But, Lehane says, if people want to say that he's just writing mysteries, that's fine too.

Upcoming Projects and New Releases
Mystic River, his previous novel which won the Anthony Award, the Barry Award for Best Novel, and the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, was also produced as a film by Clint Eastwood and will be in theaters next October. 

Although Lehane did not write the screenplay, he said that he was included in the process with Eastwood and his production company, Malpaso. 

"I can honestly say I've never heard of any writer being treated as well as I was," Lehane pointed out. "I was informed at every step of the production, and then I was on the set. And I hung out with Eastwood and watched 84 musicians score the music for the film- incredible."

And Lehane has a collection of short stories set in South Carolina, Texas, and Florida that will be published next year. 

Concerning upcoming novels, Lehane says that from this point on, he will return to the urban, working class neighborhoods for which he is known. 

"Shutter Island was definitely the furthest a field I've ever gone, or will ever go," he confided.

Lehane as Writer
Lehane has been crafting fiction since he was 8-years-old, but it took dropping out of two colleges for him to understand this.
 
"I realized that I just wasn't good at anything else, and I might as well take this seriously," he said. "And I set my sights on it."

From then on, Lehane wrote continuously until he worked with sexually and physically abused children for two years after graduating in 1988 from Eckered College in St. Petersburg, Fla.
 
"That was the only time I couldn't write," Lehane said. "That was one of those jobs that you definitely carried home with you."

Shortly thereafter, Lehane entered the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and graduated with his MFA in 1993. His first novel in his Kenzie-Gennaro crime-fiction series, A Drink Before War, was accepted by a publisher a month before he finished the program, the happenstance of which pleased the author.

"It was great," Lehane says with a raised eyebrow, "because I didn't know what the hell I was going to do." 

Despite this early success, he continued chauffeuring and parking cars at the Ritz Carlton in downtown Boston. 

In 1996, when he got a contract for his third book, Lehane came to the realization that what he was then making as a writer was exactly what he earned as a chauffeur,"

"So I quit," he says matter-of-factly. "But I put this in perspective by saying that almost no one could have quit on what I quit on- I had two roommates, low rent, a crappy car and no kids or a mortgage."

This may sound risky, but a quick chat with Lehane reveals a writer who is focused on writing. 

"The beginning is torture for me," he explained when asked about his writing process. "I start very slowly- then it gains momentum, and by the end I'm pulling really long days and not even noticing it."

For the past two years, Lehane has also taught a writing course at the University of Southern Maine at Stonecoast and will be teaching this September at Harvard. He has taught at a number of writer's conferences, including the Seaside Institute Writer's Conference in 2002.

Irish Roots
 Both of Lehane's parents came to the States from Ireland in the mid 1940s. His mother, Ann, arrived from a small village outside of Galway and worked for the United Services Organization (USO), in New York. Lehane's father, Michael, grew up in the village of Clonakilty outside of Cork. He and Ann met in Boston. 

His parents are now both retired...his dad as a foreman at Sears and Roebuck, and his mother as public school cafeteria worker. Lehane's folks now divide their time between Cape Cod and St. Petersburg, Fla. 

Lehane has been to Ireland several times. Because his father had 17 brothers and sisters, and his mother had "only slightly fewer" siblings, many of his relatives can still be found in Ireland. Lehane himself has three brothers and a sister, all of whom, with the exception of one brother, live in Boston.