Q: Who or what has most influenced your writing?

I think the world I grew up in had the most influence. It was very verbal and extremely comic (in a gallows-humor kind of way.) It was also a world I didn't see too much of in books or film or TV and the few times I did see it, they tended to get it wrong. The exceptions to this rule, of course—people like Richard Price and William Kennedy and Pete Dexter—would become the writers I most admired.

Q: What do you love most about writing?

When you're first working on something, what you have in front of you is a sticky morass of characters and plot threads and lines you've wanted to use for some reason you don't understand, and none of it makes sense. You have no idea why you're writing what you're writing. And then a moment occurs in which two or maybe three of these seemingly disparate things click. It's almost an audible click, a snapping sound in your head as these pieces slide into each others slots and mesh. That moment is special.

Q: What do you consider most difficult?

Getting started.

Q: What is your writing routine?

It's pretty scattershot, but predominately I write in the early morning or very late at night. There's a sense that no one is going to call or drop by at those times and that allows my imagination to stretch. I've found that I get a lot of ideas when I walk my dogs along the river in the morning, so that's become a new routine of mine. Otherwise, I write long hand first; I've tried writing directly onto computer, but I end up getting stilted, self-conscious prose and leaden characters. Something about a smooth-flowing pen allows me to loosen up.

Q: Do you ever play music while you write?

The kind of music I play—or whether I play any at all—is dictated by what the mood is of whatever I'm writing that day. If it's a sad scene, I play sad songs. I listen to a lot of soundtracks and old blues. I was trying to sustain a high energy level in the language of Mystic River, so I listened to a lot of high-energy stuff while I was writing it—The Clash, Springsteen, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Moby.

Q: Do you write full time now? What jobs have you held in the past?

I write full time. In the past I've been a chauffeur, parked cars, loaded trucks, worked in bookstores, counseled abused children and the mentally handicapped, worked for a rental car agency...it's a long list.

Q: What contemporary writers would you recommend?

I'd start with the three I mentioned above—Price, Kennedy, and Dexter. I like Don DeLillo a lot and JM Coetzee, Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos. Toni Morrison's a genius, I think, and Martin Amis dazzles me on a pretty consistent basis.

Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Read. It's the oldest cliche in the writer's handbook, but it's the only solid truth—if you don't read well, you won't write well. The only other thing I'd say is that you have to love the process—the rewriting and messy drafts and scribbled notes in the margins and pages of wrong turns and stretches in which you couldn't write a passable grocery list. You have to be in love with all that in some perverse way, because, otherwise, man, there are just a thousand easier ways to make money.

Q: What are your hobbies or favorite pastimes?

I don't have many, really. I like walking my dogs and playing tennis occasionally. I enjoy shooting pool and playing poker and lately some friends have dragged me out on a golf course a few times and I don't hate it, though I suck at it. Basically, though, writing was what I always did when I could disentangle myself from life long enough to get a few pages in, so now that it is my life, I'm perfectly happy not to really need hobbies.

Q: How did Mystic River come to be—what was your inspiration?

I had written a novella for my graduate thesis in which the neighborhood of Buckingham existed, as did a cop named Sean Devine, and the title was "Mystic River." I always liked the title and I'd enjoyed creating this fictitious neighborhood with its own history and politics and street names and geography. And for about seven years the title and the neighborhood and the main character stayed with me, just lightly rapping on the door every now and then. About three years ago, a sentence—"Brendan Harris loved Katie Marcus like crazy, like movie love. . ."—started echoing in my skull, and it merged with some of the properties of the Mystic River idea (which had been sort of elbowing its way into pole position in my head) and everything coalesced, I guess.

When I was really young, my family would go over my uncle's house every Saturday, and he and I would watch the Jimmy Cagney double-feature they ran weekly on a local station while the rest of the family was socializing and whatnot. I was really young, maybe seven, but those films—particularly the gangster films like The Roaring Twenties and Public Enemy—had a huge impact. Since then, I think I've wanted to tell one of those types of stories—the friends who grow up to choose different paths and ultimately reap the rewards and suffer the consequences of those choices. So in Mystic River you have these three men we first meet as boys, and 25 years later, Sean is a cop, Jimmy is an ex-con, and Dave is deeply disturbed. And the death of Jimmy's daughter will put them on a collision course that in a way was set in motion back when they were nine or ten years old. On a second and third tier in terms of plot you also have Dave's wife, who begins to think he might be a murderer, and then the high tragedy of the victim and her boyfriend whose young love was destroyed in full bloom, and all of these plots and subplots were ideas I've played with at various times over the years, never realizing I'd pack them all into one novel.

Q: After a five-novel series—why did you decide to explore a stand-alone novel?

For a long time, I think I'd wanted to write a book about small-scale people living in a small-scale place whose lives—once they've been disrupted by an enormously traumatic event—play out on a kind of epic, if not operatic, stage. It probably goes back to those Cagney movies and too much Shakespeare and Russian Lit in college, but I'm undeniably attracted to large-scope stories. It's probably why I never succeeded as a short story writer. If a character must fall, I want them to fall from the highest altitude possible. If a love must die, then it will be the most passionate love of all time. As a reader, I love large-themed, epic stories that are also bawdy and funny and lusty and adventurous—like One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Count of Monte Christo. So, after writing five novels in a series, I was thinking how battered my main characters were, how much they needed a little R & R after gun fights and car chases and a multitude of injuries both physical and emotional, and I knew that if I did write a stand-alone I couldn't just write the same thing I'd been writing with similar characters who have slightly different names and income levels. So I decided to attempt a quasi-epic about normal people thrust into circumstances far beyond them and forced to deal with questions—about love and loyalty and friendship and family, vengeance and blood lust and the evil within both themselves and the world around them—that they would prefer never to confront. And unlike the series, if a main character has to die, he dies. If a "good guy" turns out to be far less good than we thought, so be it. The rules no longer apply.

Q: Would you ever consider a follow up to Mystic River?

I can certainly see setting another novel in the neighborhood of East Buckingham and maybe having some of the characters from Mystic River float through that world, but in more minor roles. I don't see ever writing another novel in which Sean or Jimmy is the main character because their stories seem as if they've been told now. But you never know.

Q: Do you consider the Boston you describe in your work to be an accurate portrayal or have you fictionalized it?

I think it's accurate insofar as my corner of it is concerned. My Boston is the Boston of someone who grew up in the neighborhoods. Someone from the outlying `burbs would probably have a much different take. It's all a matter of perspective and mine is just one of many.

Q: Have you decided whether your next novel will be part of your Kenzie-Gennaro series or a stand alone?

Honestly, I wish I knew. Writing Mystic River took so much out of me, my brain's wiped clean.

Keep checking www.dennislehanebooks.com for updates.