The Bostonian

Novelist Dennis Lehane is drawn to restless characters who aren’t quite sure where they fit in. It’s a feeling he can relate to. 

- David L. Ulin

DENNIS LEHANE moved from Boston to Southern California “three years, nine months, and two days ago,” he says, and the specificity of his answer gives him away. He knows it; he’s not hiding anything. But he is feeling a bit unsettled. It’s a brisk Friday afternoon in Santa Monica, and he has no obvious reason to be at loose ends: His 14th novel, Since We Fell, is due out any minute; he’s working with David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Big Little Lies) on a ten-episode adaptation of Stephen King’s 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes; he’s got a vacation to Hawaii coming up, and he has nothing pressing he needs to finish. And yet that’s the problem, or one of them. “I have a very hard time not working,” he concedes, in a voice that bears a trace of Boston, where he was born and where nearly all his most celebrated books, such as Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, take place. “You don’t want to be around me if I’m not working. I start to lose my identity fast.”