Miracled Away

The bell that went missing

Their office is the bell tower of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Edward Everett Square, Dorchester, about five miles and half an hour from the centre of Boston. Patrick Kenzie got it the day after his investigator’s licence came through, when the pastor, Father Drummond, asked him to sit up there at night and catch whoever kept stealing the chalices and candlesticks. The priest’s summary of the situation was that this had better stop. He offered three meals a day in the rectory. Patrick held out for the belfry until he could afford somewhere real, and the priest gave in so quickly that Patrick understood why the moment he saw the room, unused for nine years. He and Angie got two desks in there. Two chairs as well.

There is no bell. Nobody will tell him where it went. The older nuns at the parochial school next door simply do not answer the question; the younger ones find it funny. Sister Helen told him once that it had been miracled away. Sister Joyce, who grew up with him, says it was misplaced, and gives him the sort of grin nuns are not supposed to be capable of.

Sixteen years and six novels later, the office goes the same way. When the Archdiocese of Boston finally had to start paying for decades of covering up the rape of children by priests, an appraiser came round to value St. Bart’s, and Patrick’s rent-free belfry vanished exactly as completely as the bell had.

That is the whole series in one detail. The crime these six books are actually about is the crime that eventually takes his office away from him.

What parish?

In this city the question is not where you are from, it is what parish, and Lehane is the only crime writer who has ever made that the engine of a series rather than local colour.

Patrick is asked by a State House power broker why, given his fees, he still lives in the old neighbourhood. He tries to think of something about roots and knowing where you belong, and ends up telling the truth, which is that his apartment is rent-controlled. The man likes that answer better.

And Lehane will not let the neighbourhood be sentimental. In the first novel Patrick lays out the two Dorchesters that share the same name, and he does it from inside the white one. In his Dorchester you stay for community and tradition, in a comfortable and somewhat poor life where little changes. In Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester you stay because you have no choice. His own square sits on the boundary; cross Edward Everett Square heading south, east or west and you are in the other one, which everybody he grew up with insists on calling the ’Bury, as though somebody had merely forgotten to update the maps. He quotes a childhood friend’s furious speech about having grown up poor too, and nobody giving him anything, and not picking up an Uzi over it. Then he says the thing that makes the book better than its argument: there is truth in that, however narrow, and the truth scares him. Driving through his own streets he sees poor. Driving into hers, he sees poverty.

Meanwhile downtown is another country. Patrick spends whole days in the financial district looking at buildings, where glass towers sit on top of Florentine palazzos and Corinthian pilasters and good New England granite, and on his more optimistic days it strikes him as a working model of how to live in the world, all those incompatible perspectives leaning on each other and somehow holding up. On his less optimistic days he would still like to demolish City Hall.

Patrick and Angie

They have known each other since childhood and they have been in love with each other for just as long, which everybody can see except them.

The diagnosis, when it finally arrives, comes from the worst possible source. Angie spent twelve years married to Phil Dimassi, who beat her, and who by the second novel has stopped drinking and is trying to be a decent man too late. Sitting in her mother’s kitchen, in her mother’s chairs, Phil explains his ex-wife to Patrick better than anyone else manages in six books. Angie cannot say goodbye. Not to anything. It is why she still lives in her mother’s house with her mother’s furniture and her mother’s pots in the pantry. It is why a woman that clever and that beautiful has never left the state except on her honeymoon. It is why leaving him took twelve years when anyone else would have needed six. And then he tells Patrick to face himself for once: you have been in love with her since kindergarten, and she with you.

Phil is killed shortly afterwards, in a fight that was never his. Angie leaves the day after the funeral, and her verdict is that he loved us too much and we didn’t love him enough. Patrick consults a psychiatrist in December, is told he has clinical depression, agrees, and fires him inside the hour on the grounds that he does not take advice from strangers.

They find their way back. They lose it again. In the fifth book, lying on a jungle gym in the playground at two in the morning with their faces almost touching, she asks him why he loves her, and he tells her about waking at five with her smell still on the pillow and reaching across for someone who is not there, and lying in the white sheets with the birds starting up outside, wishing he did not feel like dying. It is the most undefended thing in the six novels and Lehane has the sense to give it to him lying on a climbing frame in a Dorchester playground rather than anywhere respectable.

By the sixth book they are married, they have a daughter, and they are broke. Angie is back in school. Patrick wears a suit and subcontracts for an old-money firm on the twenty-eighth floor of a tower he describes as sleek and heartless as an ice pick. Whether that is a happy ending is left entirely to you.

The choice

Everything above is preparation for the fourth novel, which is one of the few crime novels that genuinely earns the word tragedy.

A four-year-old named Amanda McCready vanishes from an unlocked apartment in Dorchester while her mother is next door watching two sitcoms and a television movie. When Patrick and Angie come to interview her about her missing daughter, Helene asks him to move a little to the left, because he is blocking the television.

What they eventually find, after two hundred pages of horror, is that the child was taken by people who love her, into a warm house with a good woman and a decent man, and that the theft was arranged by a police officer who has watched too many children die to care about the law any more. Angie stands in the trees outside that house and begs Patrick to walk away and never speak of it. Patrick says the child does not belong to them; she belongs to her mother. Angie asks him the only question that matters, which is: then whose right is it?

He does it anyway. He gives Amanda back to Helene, and the last time he sees her she is watching television with the same pewter light on her face that was on her mother’s, and she says goodbye without looking up, and he cannot tell whether she is even talking to him.
Angie packs. Bubba carries the garment bag down the stairs and asks Patrick what he did to her. Patrick thinks of the child asleep on a porch bench in another woman’s arms under a blanket, and answers: “Broke her heart.”

Lehane never tells you who was right. He arranges it so that Patrick is arguably correct and unarguably destroyed by it, and then he refuses to resolve the argument in the next book, or the one after, or in the sequel he wrote eleven years later. That is what your instinct about these novels is picking up. This is not a series where the detective is vindicated. It is a series about two people with an enormous amount of potential for happiness who keep encountering situations in which no available choice is a good one.

Where to begin

At the start, and in order, because this is one continuous story about two people rather than six cases. A Drink Before the War (1994) won the Shamus for best first novel and lays out the two Dorchesters. Darkness, Take My Hand (1996) is the one some readers cannot finish, and the one where Patrick’s own father, a neighbourhood hero and a monster at home, moves from background into the plot.

Then Sacred (1997), which is the lightest and a genuine relief. Then Gone, Baby, Gone (1998), which is the book people mean when they say Lehane. Then Prayers for Rain (1999), which has the jungle gym in it and a villain who kills people without ever touching them.

And then, after an eleven-year silence, Moonlight Mile (2010), in which Amanda McCready turns up again at sixteen and Patrick finally has to answer for the decision he made when she was four. Lehane did not have to write that book. That he did is the measure of him.

Read them for the plots, which are strong. Read them for Bubba Rogowski, who is the funniest and most frightening friend in the genre. But read them mainly because Lehane is doing something the form usually will not permit, which is refusing to let anybody win an argument, and refusing to let a good decision have good consequences.

There is no bell in that tower and the nuns will not say where it went. In the end the office goes the same way, and so does the neighbourhood, and very nearly the marriage. Not destroyed exactly. Just gone, with nobody willing to tell you how.
Miracled away. Every time.

Go to the meeting.