“A Drink Before The Wars” Captures Dennis Lehane Finding His Gritty Voice

“She looked into my eyes and hers were swimming with alcohol and exhaustion and ghosts. She said, ‘Civilization seems to be something we choose when it fits our purpose.’”

“Not much I could argue with there.”

“Fucking whole country’s filled with nasty, unhappy, confused, pissed-off people, and not one of them with the brain power to honestly deal with their situation.”

Having read a number of other Dennis Lehane works, I figured it was high time I took a crack at his first novel, “A Drink Before the War.” His initial foray also represented the introduction of the Patrick Kenzie-Angie Gennaro detective partnership/dynamic. Parts of their relationship reads like “Encyclopedia Brown”-meets-‘tween-flirt-paperbacks, but there are enough good parts to let you know that Lehane is a budding crime writer to be taken quite seriously.

This quick read gets a bit self-righteous on the sidebars and race talk, but Lehane is quite clever in how he weaves the plot through a number of explosive variables. “A Drink Before the War” is a bleak, pessimistic read on how big-city politics runs roughshod on the disenfranchised and marginalized in society.

Tackling gang violence, race wars, cultural chasms, political intrigue, child porn, blackmail and daddy issues feels like a bit much for a book of this scope, but Lehane doesn’t shrink from the challenge. The Kenzie-Gennaro interactions take on all sorts of submeanings, and Kenzie’s relationship with his father overhands the entire book. There’s also a well-crafted twist that succeeds in tying the entire novel together.

The result is a promising first effort, and fast-forwarding to the present day, we can see that Lehane capitalized on that promise with tremendous works such as “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island.” The author now seems engrossed with the pursuit of big-screen success, but seeing him digging into the mud that comprises his roots is a welcome throwback.

“L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it’s simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won’t have to hear the screams of the drowning.”