Live By Night

There may be no other time period in American history that appeals to writers like the "Roaring Twenties," when Prohibition allowed organized crime to flower. The books, TV, and movies that cover it, and gangsters in general, is too large to even comprehend. In The Godfather it was the perversion of the American dream, but in Dennis Lehane's novel, Live by Night, he posits another reason: "this was why they became outlaws. To live moments the insurance salesman of the world, the truck drivers and lawyers and bank tellers and carpenters and Realtors would never know. Moments in a world without nets--none to catch you and none to envelop you."

Of course, it's a much easier life to live vicariously, as any day someone could put a bullet in your head. As Lehane has his characters say: "'I've got nothing against noble people, I've just noticed they rarely live past forty.' 'Neither do gangsters.' 'True,' he said, 'but we eat in better restaurants.'"

Live by Night is the story of Joe Coughlin, son of a Boston police detective, but one who always pursued the other side of the law. He starts as a common hoodlum, and gets busted for robbing a bank. He does time, and becomes the henchman of a fellow con, a Sicilian mob boss. He gets sent to Tampa to run the rum business there, and along the way faces a variety of enemies. But he has a soft spot that could get him into trouble. We know he will, because the book begins with his feet in cement.

Coughlin is an interesting character, in that he doesn't come up the old Jimmy Cagney way--he consciously chooses crime as a lifestyle. But his decisions are often colored by emotion rather than pure business, such as his love for a woman who is also the moll of a rival crime boss. When she dies he plots his revenge, which is why he aligns with the Sicilian. But he lets live a man who crossed him, out of a sense of loyalty, and when a young woman evangelizes and ruins his chance of opening a casino in Florida, he can't bring himself to have her killed.

Lehane admires Coughlin, even if he does kill others easily. Everyone Coughlin kills has it coming, especially in a turf war with the Ku Klux Klan. When his gang robs a U.S. armory, the only soldier killed is the one who tries to rape the woman who will become Coughlin's wife.

The book is fun, but at times the narrative gets away from Lehane. There's a bit too much violence, if that is possible in a book like this. The body count is pretty high, and he packs a lot into a relatively small space. But there are some fun, noir lines, like: "You get your retard from your mother, by the way. Woman couldn't win a game of checkers against a bowl of fucking soup," or "Joe sipped his lemonade. He wasn't sure it was the best he'd ever tasted, and even if it were, it was lemonade. Hard to get fucking excited about lemonade." A person is described as being "dead as Thomas Jefferson."

For fans of Prohibition-era gangsters, this will be manna. I liked it fine, though it could have used some tightening and maybe not so much romanticizing of the main character.