Coronado: Stories by Dennis Lehane

I'll admit right up front that I am pretty fan girly about Dennis Lehane, so I was happy to get my hands on a preview copy this past weekend.

Coronado is a collection of short stories due out in September of 2006. There are five of them and a story based on the final one. The stories are: Running out of Dog, ICU, Gone Down to Corpus, Mushrooms, and Until Gwen. Coronado, A Play in Two Acts (based on Until Gwen) completes the collection.

Lehane is noirish writer. His characters are that mixture of good and evil that defines humanity and Lehane doesn't blink when investigating those inconsistancies. Emblematic of that is the first story: Running out of Dogs. Elgin Berg is back from the Vietnam and has taken up with Jewel Lut, an old schoolfellow. That she's married to Perkin Lut, and not about to get divorced, causes him a twinge or two but nothing that stops them from enjoying themselves.

There is a fourth side to what should be a standard triangle: Berg's best friend Blue. Blue's favorite pastimes include burning cockroaches and shooting stray dogs in the head. Blue, says Lehane through his main character Berg, "ain't never grown toward nothing. He's just been dying real slowly since he's been born." Blue worships Jewel, creating her as a creature of purity and beauty in his mind. This odd balance of characters tilts into an conflagration when Perkin hits Jewel in front of townspeople and Blue requires revenge. The end is both inevitable and surprising.

ICU is the story of a man being pursued. It is only in the tertiary a story of crime, instead it's strength is it's exploration of what human connection actually is, and how it matters. Going Down to Corpus is about the nihilism of vandalism and Mushrooms is a tale of crime and revenge.

Until Gwen is the penulitmate story, on which the play which titles the collection is based. Bobby and Bobby's Father are two characters working out their relationship in the context of lives lived outside the margins of society. Lehane writes in his introduction to the play that "I've created villians before, but most are tortured or misunderstood and a lot less villainous than we might prefer in terms of our comfort level with the human race as a whole." Bobby's father, however, is irredeemable as he picks up his son from jail so that his son can find and give him the jewelry that Bobby had stolen at his father's behest, whatever it takes.

Coronado is not Lehane's best work. I think this may be because he works better on the larger canvas that a novel provides but I enjoyed it. It is a quick read and even in these pieces he is able to limn out the arches of lives so that the narratives are a natural and believable outcome of the intersection of the characters.

Especially in crime fiction, this is a rare feat.

~ mel