At the close of Dennis Lehane’s Gone, Baby, Gone, the fourth book featuring his private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, things had come to a crisis point in just about every way for the pair as partners and as a couple, as well as for Lehane as an author. Angie was moving out, Patrick was trying to move on and so was their creator. Since the trio’s debut, A Drink Before the War, they’d breathed some new life into the easy to retread old ground genre of PIs with their blue collar Boston backdrop, truly troubling moral dilemmas and the ongoing development of the characters and their relationship over the course of the series, (Darkness, Take My Hand and Sacred being the middle chapters). The series had launched Lehane’s career and made his name synonymous with well written, gritty and commercially viable crime fiction, but the time had come to make a change and the Kenzie/Gennaro saga was indefinitely suspended.
That was okay with me.
I’ve said before that nothing drags down a good series like longevity and the soul searching, gut wrenching stuff that constituted the climax of Gone a was haunting coda for a memorable run.
And there’s more to crime fiction than PIs, amen?
Since leaving the series, Lehane has gotten all ambitious on his public, first giving us the study of three childhood friends gone their separate yet inseparable ways in life, Mystic River, followed by the psychological thriller, Shutter Island, Coronado, a collection of short stories, (featuring one of my absolute favorite shorts ever by anybody – Until Gwen – also included as a play in this book), and the mammoth historical crime saga The Given Day. He’s been a screenwriter on the seminal HBO drama The Wire, recruited along with Richard Price by producer pal George Pelecanos, and his books have become hot commodity in Hollywood, given filmic treatments by Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorcese and Ben Affleck.
So, what’s left to prove? Nada. Alexander wept, yes? I'm curious about the Kenzie/Gennaro return, though. Did he feel there was unfinished business? Were they simply fun? Could it be as simple as cashing a check? Could it be the countless requests by Kathy Bates-esque readers over the years? Why not return to a fan favorite?
After a twelve-year hiatus, Patrick and Angie are back in Moonlight Mile. And not just them, Amanda McCready, the object of their hunt and hurt a dozen years ago is back too. Sort of. She’s missing again and all that heartbreak, and ache and soul searching and second guessing that’s been hanging around since the close of Gone, Baby, Gone? It’s back, Baby, back.
It's been out for a couple weeks now and I'm assuming you die-hards have already read it. Are you happy about this or do you wish Gone, Baby, Gone had been the final chapter? Do you still want more? I wanna know.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
