In a 2003 interview on Fresh Air, novelist Dennis Lehane joined Terry Gross to discuss his best-selling novel, "Mystic River." Lehane revealed that the main character arc of his Boston-based crime story was inspired by just a single line of dialogue.
"I drove the whole book towards that line," Lehane told Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA."
The line, if you're curious, was: "It occurred to him as he was shaving, that he was evil."
When asked if his new Southie saga, "Small Mercies" had a similar genesis, Lehane admits it did not.
"With 'Small Mercies,' I just had her," he said.
The "her" Lehane is referring to is Mary Pat Fennessy. She's unlike any other protagonist Lehane has created. Mary Pat is a single mom that is not only from Boston, she's from Southie. Not only is she from Southie, she's from a housing project in Southie.
It's like a Russian nesting doll of toughness.
"I just saw this dynamo in my head. I had this picture of her. She's even described as, you know, she came out of the womb looking like she was auditioning for the roller derby."
Lehane said Mary Pat was inspired by several women he knew growing up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston during the '70s.
"These were women who literally could go toe-to-toe in a fist fight with a man. They might not win, but they would certainly hold their own for a little bit. And they were all chain smokers. They were all foul-mouthed. They were all usually alcoholics, functioning alcoholics," Lehane said.
"As time went on, I began to realize that these types of women had an inherent sadness at their core. You don't get to be that tough unless your life is that tough, unless poverty's been grinding you down, unless there's, you know, significant abuse, whether it's from a husband or from a father. And I feel I wanted to pay tribute to that type of person," he said.
Lehane doesn't gloss over the faults of these types of women, either. "Small Mercies" is set at the tail end of summer in 1974 during the Boston bussing riots, where forced school desegregation led to severe protests and a racially ugly upheaval.
"I would have found it almost impossible to believe that Mary Pat wasn't a racist. And so, I start the book with her in a bit of denial about it. But, gradually that's the journey of the book as she comes to understand how pervasive her racism is and how she passed it down as a destructive legacy to the people she loves," Lehane said.
Lehane was 9 during the bussing riots and states that he had a front row seat for the "cataclysmic event" that surfaced an underlying and unidentified rage in him once he began writing this novel.
"Here you are, and you're looking at somebody who you admire, you like, maybe you love, and the good people with good hearts and yet what this event did was scratch at a part of them, which was a virulent, virulent racism that you might not have been privy to otherwise and once it came out of the box, it wasn't going back in for a very long time," he said.
Lehane said that writing this book wasn't necessarily therapeutic, but it helped him identify the source of that dormant rage.
"I had a just a wellspring of anger in me. And it certainly wasn't from my parents who were quite loving and protective, and it wasn't from any trauma in my childhood that I could point to. But then, when I started to write this book, I began to go, 'Oh my God, I'm angry. I'm extremely angry for that kid,'" he said.
"It felt as if how could you align with somebody who was OK with people who threw rocks at busses filled with children. How can you make sense of that when you're 9 years old? Maybe some 9-year-olds can, but I sure couldn't."
"Small Mercies" captures that racial and historical tension with a raw and frank perspective. Lehane said that was due to a heavy amount of research and sourcing detail. He leaned a lot on the pictures of Eugene Richards, who documented much of the unrest. One of Richards' photos graces the cover of the book.
"He was the sort of war photographer of the bussing crisis. He took everything, took so many pictures. And there's no hiding from what he shot. The graffiti, the signs in the windows. It was horrific," Lehane said. "It did feel like I was aware that maybe people would try to push back and rewrite history with this book and say, 'It wasn't like that. It's being overdramatized' or whatever. So, I sourced everything."
The story opens late in the summer with Mary Pat and her daughter Jules grappling with the city's decision to send Jules to one of the newly integrated schools in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Mary Pat is involved with a women's group protesting the move, but it's being ghost-led by the neighborhood's Irish mob.
Then, Jules doesn't return home one evening. It's the same night that a young Black man has been murdered in their white neighborhood. As Mary Pat sets out to find her missing daughter, she discovers more about who Jules was with the night she went missing and unveils who might really be behind both incidents. She begins to receive both help and warnings from her neighbors.
Readers familiar with Lehane's past work will no doubt see some echoes with the distraught parent hunting a missing child and of course, the south Boston setting. But it's this tension of the neighborhood as both friend and foe, savior and threat that is the true through line in his work.
"I write about tribalism. I think I've been writing about tribalism consistently since my first book," he said. "Tribalism, when it exists to survive, is a good thing. Every immigrant culture does it. But when tribalism continues past the point of its usefulness, once that tribe is kind of safe and entrenched, then it becomes a very ugly thing. And I think the ugly aspects of it are what I explore in this book, I think more than any other book I wrote."
Like much of Lehane's work, "Small Mercies" is already slated for an adaptation for Apple TV. Lehane himself will serve as showrunner. Past that, the author said that any novel that comes next will only be there once the inspiration strikes.
"'Small Mercies' came out of the place my earliest work did, which was a very pure place of 'I need to tell this story.' It has to come out. And that's where I always want to write novels from, from this point forward," he said. "So, if I need to write another novel, if I feel it possess me, then I'm going right in writing a novel because I love writing novels. But if I don't and I'm just going to continue making fun quality television, then that's what I'll do, too."