What's it all about, Boston?

The big feature over at the Boston Globe this past weekend was on the state of crime fiction as directly applied to Boston. So, some of the usual suspects--Dennis Lehane, Robert B. Parker--and a couple of newcomers, like Richard Marinick (author of the upcoming, much buzzed about BOYOS), have their say on why they can only write their books in Boston. Or, in the case of Parker, why it doesn't necessarily matter where his books are set:

"If anything, I think I would write the same kind of books if I lived in Pittsburgh, which is also gritty and has a lot of neighborhoods," the venerable writer says over a beer at the bar at Rialto in the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. "I know it's almost official dogma that I am supposed to have captured something, the essence of the gritty neighborhoods. I think my publisher is complicit in that, and the ads, and the reviewers. I am just writing stories that take place in a very complex place."

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, educated in London, and lived in Los Angeles, and Parker says he probably would have written the same stories had he lived in Boston. "I think it's the man," Parker says, "not the place."

Oh, I dunno about that, because Spenser might still be Spenser, but he wouldn't be Spenser, so to speak.

Still, there's one aspect of writing that all comers agree on, as expressed by Lehane:

If there is any agreement among Boston writers of tough fiction, it is that the city and the neighborhoods will provide as long as you are willing to listen carefully enough and soak up the surroundings.

Parker calls his dialogue "Boston music." Lehane says he believes every good writer is given one true gift, and "mine was always an ear."

"But who wouldn't have one, having grown up in that environment?" Lehane says. "I just remember being with friends and one of my mentors, [the novelist and short-story writer] John Dufresne, just trading stories. He turned to me and said, 'I wish I had grown up like you guys.'"

Well said.

Comments

[Dave White]

Since I've only read two of the five of the "best Boston novels," (Mystic River and Promised Land) what do you guys think? Do you agree with the writer's choices or not?

[Charlie Stella]

A friend from Boston wrote me about the Globe stuff. They also mentioned George V. Higgins ... don't forget that guy. I probably would've wanted to choke him in a courtroom, but I worship him as a writer.

[Ron]

I'm actually more curious as to whether Hawk would still have come out the same if not formed in the crucible of 1970s Boston and its racial political dynamic.

[Jim Winter]

Forget Boston. Northcoast noir is where it's at. Winter and Koryta.

And what about Baltimore? Lippman, Bludis, and Cheatham?

OK, this has been your BSP moment for Jim and his friends. Tune in tomorrow when I bemoan the fact that no one's mentioned Jerry Healy in all of this. (No, I don't know Jeremiah Healy; I just think he should be mentioned.)