In January 1950, a group of Irish gangsters led by Joe McGinnis pulled off what was then the biggest robbery in the history of the US, when they took $2.77 million in cash and securities from the Brinks office in Prince Street, Boston.
Unfortunately, while waiting for the money to be counted, two of the gang stole a lawnmower in Towanda, Philadelphia and dumped it in the boot of their car with the guns used in the robbery. Police searched the car and found the guns, setting in train a series of events which culminated in life-imprisonment for McGinnis. That, in a nutshell, explains why the Irish never really threatened the Italians in the criminal mastermind stakes: $2.7 million in their pockets and they couldn't resist an unattended lawnmower.
Currently, there are only two Irish-Americans from Boston who can reasonably claim to have achieved a certain measure of wealth and fame through crime. The first is James J. "Whitey" Bulger (or Mr Bulger to you), a former associate of the Patriarca crime family and the only possessor of an Irish passport on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Whitey - sorry, "Mr Bulger" - once almost proved the non-existence of God, when he claimed to have won $14 million on the Mass Millions lottery, until the FBI seized his annual cheque amid allegations that he had bribed the real winner as part of a money-laundering scam.
The second of these Irish-American criminal successes is Dennis Lehane, who has probably killed more people in the course of his private-eye novels than Whitey Bulger could ever aspire to bump off in real life. Lehane, a 34-year-old Bostonian with a passing resemblance to the actor Aidan Quinn, is one of the two best US crime novelists under the age of 40. His only real rival is Harlan Coben, author of the Myron Bolitar novels.
Beginning with A Drink Before the War, published when he was just 29, Lehane has followed the changing fortunes and tangled relationships of a pair of Boston private investigators, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, through five novels, including the excellent serial-killer thriller, Darkness, Take My Hand, and the bleak child-abduction story, Gone, Baby, Gone. The latter novel is particularly fine, with a haunting resolution, and was partly inspired by his own experience of working with abused children while in Florida.
"It has an unhappy happy ending," admits Lehane. "It took two years to write and that kind of subject matter is hard to live with. A child was abducted about a mile away from my house while I was writing it and I knew he was dead. I mean, that's all I'd been living with. His name was Jeffery Curley and they found him dead three days later. I was so angry, and I thought it would be an affront for the book to have a happy ending."
Lehane is a first-generation Irish Catholic, the youngest of five children and the product of an education supervised by nuns and Jesuits. His mother was born in Connemara, his father in Clonakilty, Co Cork. Each, independently, emigrated in the late 1940s: they met in Boston and married in 1951.
"But if they come back, I think I'll fly them into Shannon," Lehane remarks. He is back in Dublin for the first time since the mid-1990s and bears the slightly shell-shocked look of a man who has returned home from work to find his house has been pulled down and replaced by a fast-food outlet. Like many Dubliners of a similar age, he finds himself in the unlikely position of being nostalgic for a bygone era while still only in his early 30s. That same nostalgia can be found in his novels: ostensibly set in the Boston suburb of Dorchester, his childhood home, the Dorchester he depicts has ceased to exist since the mid-1980s.
"In the 1980s, Dorchester still had a very pointed identity as an Irish-Polish enclave," he explains. "It was somewhat cloistered. The books, in a weird way, are nostalgic for a place that doesn't exist anymore. It's like the old Dublin versus the new Dublin."
The comparison is an apt one. Dorchester, like much of Dublin, is divided into parishes, with neighbourhood boundaries delineated by churches. The white, mainly Catholic residents of Dorchester had to learn to co-exist with the residents of the black areas, and an uneasy truce existed between the two communities. It's worth remembering that, for all its liberal Harvard credentials, it was in Boston that some of the bitterest school desegregation clashes took place and that the Irish-American community did not always acquit itself well in the struggle.
"The history of Boston in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s was as a completely ethnically divided city," recalls Lehane. "Thank God that's changed, and economics is one of the reasons behind that change. The whole world is becoming more like one big melting pot. Dublin is far less uniquely `Dublin' than it was even four years ago, and true Dubliners probably feel a mixture of emotions about that."
Lehane left Boston in the 1980s and travelled to Florida to study creative writing ("which qualifies you for pretty much nothing") at the tiny college of Eckerd in St Petersburg. It was while completing his Masters programme that A Drink Before the War was sold, four years after he had begun writing it. He returned to Boston and, with the advance from the novel, set out to document, on film, the community in which he had grown up. The result was Neighborhoods, a romantic comedy that he wrote, produced and directed for a total of $35,000, which was all the money that he had at the time.
Filming ended in 1996 and, as the Neighborhoods crew prepared to leave, another film crew arrived to begin work on a similar venture set in the Irish-American area of South Boston. That movie was called Good Will Hunting. The release of Neighborhoods was delayed by editing problems, Good Will Hunting beat it to the box office, and the rest is history. "It broke a lot of hearts," Lehane admits.
The experience didn't sour him, though, because he is preparing to make another, shorter film, this time with adequate funding securely in place. He is also writing a screenplay based on his latest novel, Prayers For Rain, the tale of a man who, rather than murdering his victims, destroys their lives to such a degree that they wish they were dead and choose to kill themselves. Prayers For Rain received a welcome burst of publicity when Bill Clinton emerged from Air Force One with the book clutched in his hand.
Since its publication, Lehane has been dividing his time between completing Mystic River, his first non-series novel, and adjusting to married life with Sheila, his wife of 14 months. In an act of deception comparable to Whitey Bulger's lottery scam, the couple invited all their family and friends to what was believed to be a surprise party for Lehane, only for the guests to find themselves attending the least-expected wedding of the year. Even the hotel had been booked under false names in an effort to avoid the perils of a traditional wedding.
"Well," shrugs Lehane. "It was either that or elope . . ."
Prayers For Rain is published by Bantam, price £5.99