Live by Night
by Dennis Lehane
Summary
Joe Coughlin is a police captain's son who has chosen the other side of the ledger: Boston, the twenties, Prohibition running the city's real economy, and Joe a talented stickup man who calls himself an outlaw rather than a gangster, a distinction the novel spends its length dismantling. The mistake that makes the plot is Emma Gould, a speakeasy girl who happens to belong to Albert White, the mob boss whose card game Joe robs, and the affair's discovery costs Joe a beating, Emma her apparent life, and the reader the first of the book's several worlds: he goes into Charlestown Penitentiary, where survival requires the protection of Maso Pescatore, the Tampa rackets chief who reaches inside the prison walls through a bargain with Joe's father, and whose price is service.
Released, Joe is sent south, and the novel opens into its great middle: Ybor City, the Latin quarter of Tampa, where he builds the Gulf Coast's rum empire out of Cuban molasses, corrupt sheriffs and nerve, builds a life with Graciela, a Cuban revolutionary with her own ledger of causes, and wars with the Ku Klux Klan, whose local franchise objects to his workforce and his church donations alike. Lehane runs the rise and reckoning at full period scale, boat chases, gun battles, the Depression arriving like weather, and keeps the moral accounting exact: every rung of Joe's ascent is paid for by somebody, and the bill collector the book sends in its final movement comes from the one direction love left unguarded.
Around four hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the Prohibition epic done as literary crime, Coppola territory at Lehane's sentence level craft.
Historical Context & Significance
Live by Night won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2013, Dennis Lehane collecting the genre's top prize at the exact point his career had outgrown category: Mystic River and Shutter Island had become Oscar bait cinema, The Given Day had launched his Boston historical trilogy, and this middle volume's win read as the crime establishment claiming its emigrant back.
The Coughlin saga bracketed it, The Given Day before, World Gone By after, the trilogy tracking an American family from the 1919 police strike through the rackets' golden age; Ben Affleck's 2016 film adaptation, directed, written and starred in by the Gone Baby Gone alumnus, arrived expensively and sank, one of the decade's noted prestige misfires, the book's reputation unscuffed.
Lehane's subsequent move into television rooms, The Wire behind him, Black Bird ahead, made him the model of the crime novelist as multi platform craftsman; the Edgar stands as the print career's formal summit.