A 1920s gangster faces eternity
Dennis Lehane's new crime thriller opens with a gripping scene. "Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement," Lehane writes. "Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the e
Live By Night
By Dennis Lehane
Morrow/HarperCollins. 402 pp. $27.99
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Dennis Lehane's new crime thriller opens with a gripping scene.
"Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement," Lehane writes. "Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern. And it occurred to him that almost everything of note that had happened in his life - good and bad - had been set in motion that morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould."
Hard to top that for getting your attention.
Joe Coughlin and his father, Thomas, a high-ranking Boston police official, appeared in Lehane's earlier novel, The Given Day. I've not yet read that book, but I don't think one has to read it first to understand and enjoy Live by Night.
The Given Day covered the 1919 Boston police strike, and Live By Night takes place in the 1920s. It was a time - the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age - that left images of flappers, speakeasies, bootleggers, gangsters, and gang-busting feds.
As a youngster in the 1960s. I grew up watching The Untouchables on TV, as well as old Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart gangster films, which led me to read the real history of an era that still fascinates me, as it clearly does Lehane. (If you want an introduction to the world where Live by Night unfolds, check out the exhibition "American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" at the National Constitution Center through April 28.)
A few years before his tugboat ride in the Gulf, Joe Coughlin had been the wayward youngest son of Boston's deputy police superintendent, a petty criminal who teamed with a pair of Italian American brothers, Dion and Paolo Bartolo. The three had been together "since they'd joined forces to knock over newsstands when Joe was thirteen."
Then, just before Joe's 20th birthday, the three rob a poker game in the back of a South Boston speakeasy that, to their chagrin, turns out to be operated by local crime boss Albert White.
As if that were not a bad enough career move, Joe becomes instantly smitten with White's young and beautiful girlfriend, Emma Gould, who is waiting on the poker players when a masked Joe and his accomplices barge in. After the robbery, Joe tracks her down and begins a relationship with her - a very risky relationship, but one that seems to be going somewhere good: "He turned twenty years old that winter and he knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He wanted to become the one man Emma Gould put all her faith in."
Then everything goes bad.
Joe Coughlin and the Bartolos rob a bank in Pittsfield, Mass. Two cops are killed in a car crash chasing Joe, who is in one getaway car. The Bartolo boys, fleeing in another car, kill a third officer. The police later kill Paolo, Dion gets away, and Coughlin ends up in prison, but only after his father has his officers viciously beat his "cop killer" son.
Thomas Coughlin is demoted when the press gets hold of the story, yet the father uses his influence to broker a lighter prison sentence for his son.
Lehane vividly describes a brutal life behind bars that Joe survives by becoming connected to Maso Pescatore, an Italian mob boss who continues to run his organized crime family from prison.
When Coughlin is released from prison, Pescatore sends Coughlin to Florida, where he reunites with Dion and takes charge of the rum-running and bootlegging operation there, with great success. The second half of the novel is set mostly in the Ybor City section of Tampa, Fla., where Coughlin encounters Klansmen, evangelists, Cuban revolutionaries, corrupt cops, rival gangsters, and a beautiful woman whose impact outweighs Emma's.
Unlike his friend Dion, who kills without conscience, Coughlin is reflective, seeing the evil in what he does, even if he's unwilling to turn away from it. He describes himself as an "outlaw" rather than a "gangster," a semantic distinction based on a misguided moral code, it seems to me. Basically, Joe tries not to kill people in cold blood, if he can help it.
Live by Night is fast-paced and well-written, although not in the same class as Lehane's earlier fine novel, Mystic River.
If you're fascinated by the Roaring Twenties, Live by Night is your doorway into the era. Just tell them Lehane sent you.