By Dennis Fischman

Dennis Lehane is well known in the Boston area. A Dorchester native, he began his career with the well-written but more conventional mysteries featuring private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. Then, he reached beyond the genre, still holding onto the dark vision of his original series.

Mystic River was a psychological thriller and a literary journey into the secrets that tight-knit communities can hide. (Remarkably, the movie was just as good as the book!) Shutter Island was a similarly taut horror story set in the 1950’s. And then Lehane jumped back to 1919 for The Given Day and wrote his masterpiece.

“The Given Day” by Dennis Lehane.
William Morrow, 2008, 704 pages.

What was happening in Boston in 1919? In short: everything. There was the Great Molasses Flood, something that sounds like a joke until you read actual accounts of the disaster. There were police being deployed to put down striking workers, and then police going on strike themselves. Babe Ruth was still playing in Boston. Calvin Coolidge was still Governor of Massachusetts. Socialists and anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti were making a serious bid at revolution in the U.S. All this while the nation was still reeling from the so-called Spanish Flu, which was no more Spanish than the coronavirus was Chinese.

In the midst of all this, you see young policeman and son of a police captain Danny Coughlin going undercover to sniff out plans for violence by the growing labor movement. Will he succeed, and if he does, will he really be able to turn on the people whose cause moves him more and more (including the woman he is obsessed with)?

Just as important, you see a young black man, Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa (two years before the Tulsa Race Massacre would destroy “Black Wall Street”).  Luther works for the Coughlin family, and his point of view throws them into better perspective. It also allows us to learn of the early NAACP in Boston and what civil rights struggles looked like when Rosa Parks was just a girl, and a decade before Martin Luther King was even born.

I reread this book while Somerville and most of the country were still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic in Spring 2020. It was almost eerie to read the early sections of the book that dealt with the influenza of 1918-9. Our systems are better, but we are not. We still reel and totter in the direction of certain death – suffering it and dealing it out – and that is a major theme of this book.

On second reading, The Given Day is still a marvel, evoking the time and place like no other book I know. Lehane writes about Irish men, barely holding onto their claim to whiteness, unselfconsciously claiming as their own a city and a country that had grudgingly accepted them not that many years ago. He portrays Black men in a convincing way, too. Luther Laurence starts out less shallow than Danny Coughlin, and he ends up with a better life (though it takes an unexplained act of grace from a gangster to get him there).

Two things bothered me about this book. First, we never get the interior dialogue of any of the women. They are distinct people, and at moments I can feel for them, but I never really get to know them from their own point of view. (Tessa is especially opaque. Is it because she’s Italian? Does Lehane have sympathies across the color line but not across the Irish-Italian divide?)

The other thing that bothers me is the lyrical quality of the scenes of violence in this book. It’s not that the author romanticizes violence. Far from it. But he keeps coming back to it as if it were an unanswered question in his life. I’d rather be around men who can’t imagine such things in such detail.

The Murder Mystery Book Club of the Somerville Public Library will be discussing The Given Day by Zoom on Wednesday, May 29, at 7:00 p.m. Come and discuss it, whether you’ve finished the book or not! Register here: https://somervillepubliclibrary.assabetinteractive.com/calendar/mystery-book-group-31/

Dennis Fischman is a member of the Somerville Public Library’s Mystery Book Club and an inveterate reader.