"Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard."Thus opens Live by Night. It is 1926, years before this flash-forward. Joe is 20. Though his father, Thomas, is a senior police commander, Joe has been a practicing criminal since the age of 13, and he's very good at it. He's also easy to like. The novel follows him from his days as a small-time crook through his involvement in first one Boston gang, then another, to his rise as the crime boss of the Gulf Coast answering only to "the boys" (Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky) in New York. The action shifts from Boston to Tampa to Havana, dwelling on his involvement with an engaging young prostitute named Emma Gould to his marriage later in life to a brilliant and beautiful Afro-Cuban woman named Graciela. The story is written with a sure hand: action-packed, full of surprise shifts and revelations, and populated with credible characters, including not just the bosses but the spear-carriers, too.In The Given Day; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Shutter Island, the literary phenomenon Dennis Lehane laid bare the dark underbelly of Boston society, peopling his novels with complex and conflicted characters and finding the good in bad people and the bad in good. Live by Night, his recent, Edgar Award-winning novel, picks up the tale of the talented Coughlin clan where The Given Day left them, following son Joe, who featured in the earlier tale as a young boy.Live by Night is crowded with smart, thoughtful gangsters with whom Joe finds himself on the losing side more than once despite his obvious intelligence. Joe is tested in more ways than one, struggling with his Catholic upbringing as he rejects the existence of God and Heaven ("You didn't die and go to a better place; this was the better place because you weren't dead.") and pondering whether he can be certain of anything except his own, elusive certainty. "Things weren't ever what they were supposed to be; they were what they were, and that was the simple truth of it, a truth that didn't change just because you wanted it to."The title of this superior crime story is shorthand for the environment in which Joe and his counterparts carry out their trade. As Emma tells him, "We're not God's children, we're not fairy-tale people in a book about true love. We live by night and dance fast so the grass can't grow under our feet. That's our creed."Joe Coughlin is a small time gangster in Boston in the 1920s, at the height of Prohibition. Joe robs banks with the Bartolo Brothers, Dion and Paolo. The all work for the gang run by Tim Hickey. Hickey's main rival is Albert White. Joe and the Bartolo brothers are stealing money from one of Albert's speakeasy bars, when Joe meets Emma Gould, a waitress at the speakeasy. He falls in love with her immediately, despite the fact that she is Albert White's moll. The real trouble begins for Joe when hefs driving the getaway car for the Bartolo brothers during a bank robbery, two cops end up dead, and Joe is hurt but survives, as does Dion, Paolo, who shot one of the cops is killed Joe takes the money from the bank robbery and stores it in a bus station. At the same time, Albert finds out that Joe has his money, and is sweet on his gal, so he sends members of his gang to finish Joe off. Joe is gsavedh from death at the hands of Albert's gang by Thomas Coughlin, a high ranking, but corrupt police officer who happens to be Joe's father. Thomas may take the occasional bribe, but he doesn't like his sonfs profession, nor the fact that Joe is now an accused cop killer, so he lets his men on the force beat Joe up, as an object lesson to Joe, and to cover his own tracks as a corrupt cop. The gangsters in Albert White's gang take Emma away, a wild chase ensues and Emma is persumed dead. Joe only gets five years in prison, at Charlestown state penitentiary, because of a plea from his dad to the D.A.In Charlestown, Joe meets Maso Pescatore, a big time gangster. Maso wants Joe's father Thomas to order a raid on one of Albert White's warehouses. Thomas orders one of his underlings to hit the warehouse, and it is destroyed. In return for the favor, Maso gives Joe protection offers Joe a job when he get out of jail. Joe is now head of rum distribution in Tampa, he brings Dion along from his old gang for protection, and leans on some of the people who control the distribution of rum to end the bottlenecks, but in order to really control the supply routes of rum distribution in Florida, he has to win over Esteban Suarez, to do that, Joe has to steal guns from a US warship to foment a revolution against President Machado of Cuba. The raid would also impress Graciella Corrales, a Cuban exile, who Joe has developed an incredible lust for. Incredibly, Joefs gang pulls off the raid on the warship, Joe and Esteban become partners, and Joe and Graciella become lovers. From then on, Joe takes on anyone who seeks to unseat him from his growing rum empire, the head of the local Klan, to the Bible thumping fundamentalist daughter of the local sheriff, but he doesnft kill anyone who stands in his way he just comes to mutually understood agreements with all of them. So what happens when Maso comes to Tampa with his son Digger in tow? Does Maso plan to give Joe more territory to control? After all, profits in the rum business are up substantially. Or does Maso have something else in mind for Joe?I did not like this book. I was expecting better from the author of such books as Mystic River, Shutter Island and Gone, Baby Gone, but I have several complaints about this book. Everything seems to come too easy for Joe Coughlin, hefs in a car accident, gets beaten to a pulp by cops, gets stabbed in prison, and yet comes out of prison and stages a raid against the US Navy, with a small gang of raiders and pulls it off. Every time Joe got into a tough situation, I had a feeling he would get out of it, because he got out of every situation up to that point. Also, there is some historical content in this book, like the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two suspected anarchists who were executed, or Honey Fitz, John Fitzgerald, mayor of Boston, and former congressman, or John Ringling, head of the famous circus, but he mentions these names in passing and does not really weave these names into the story. Lehene tries to weave Lucky Luciano into the story too, but by the time Luciano and his sidekick Mayer Lansky co,me into the picture, itfs much too late in the book for Luciano and Lansky to get more than a cursory mention. Sometimes Lehane lapses into cliche, I almost fell off my chair when Lehane mentioned cement shoes. This is a pre-eminant writer of crime drama? Ifve heard the phrase cement shoes in every bad gangster film Ifve seen.That is not to say that there are not iinteresting elememnts in this book. Emma Gould is an intreresting character, but she is presumed dead and forgotten for most of the book. The Klansman could have been an interesting character if given more space to develop, but hefs in and out of the book, Loretta Figgis, an Amy Semple McPherson type evangelist, is perhaps the most interesting character in the book, and could have been an intesting lead character, but again is treated as an afterthought by Lehane. These interesting elements are never fully synthesized into a cohesive novel, so I found vast elements of this book unintersting, and nothing changed that impression.Live By Night. Living by the reputation of its author.For more book and movie reviews, please go to my blog,
[email protected] is difficult to say anything about the plot without presenting spoilers, so I will not, but this is a top notch gangster yarn; pace, action, violence, nasty racism, evil, very good writing and some great characters, with the author getting right inside their heads.There are a couple of morals: greed begets evil and good can come from bad.It also very clearly illustrates everything that is wrong with prohibition - if people want it, they will get it, and, if you make it illegal, you just create and enrich the illegal providers.One quote from the book, admittedly taken out of context, really sums it up: "We live by night and dance fast so the grass can’t grow under our feet. That’s our creed.”Interesting to read that Batista was initially seen as the rescuer of the Cuban people from the Machado regime - something went wrong there, eh?Towards the end, I had a feeling about how it would finish and really hoped that it wouldn't....but, sadly, it did.Being a big fan of Dennis Lehane's I was really looking forward to reading this book, especially as it was billed as a sort of sequel to The Given Day, which I really enjoyed. However I must admit, although I did enjoy it, I felt it was a bit predictable and it read more like one of those formalistic, big blockbuster novels and although the settings were different, I felt I'd read a similar stories before.The novel follows the criminal career path of Joe Coughlin, one of the brothers from The Given Day, from the mid 20's, through the Depression, to the mid 30's. Joe, originally from Boston, earns a place in the Pescatore family and is moved to Tampa to oversee the bootlegging and speakeasy businesses during the prohibition era. Without giving too much of the story away Joe has an arch enemy who always returns to haunt him and there are also a couple of women to complicate his life. There are also cameo appearances from his father and brothers.The other thing that slightly annoyed me was that Lehane has tried to make Joe, a gangster, or outlaw as he describes himself, with a conscience. Obviously he thinks this will make him a more sympathetic character and more acceptable to his readers. Myself, I would have preferred it if Joe was a bit more ruthless but then again that would have significantly shortened the story !I first became aware of this book when I saw a trailer for the new Ben Affleck film and wanted to know more about it. All of the conversations I came across talked about how good the book is and I'm a fan of Dennis Lehane's work so decided I had to read it. I really enjoyed it, from start to finish, and found it quite gripping. There were definitely a few moments where I felt like Lehane was slipping too much into a sort of caricature of the mob world rather than keeping it gritty and real so that would be one of my only criticisms. I'm undecided about whether I'll read the last in the trilogy - part of me is quite happy to just imagine a future for this story and these characters of my own making :)'The Given Day' was something of a masterpiece about a Boston Irish family in the 1920's. Live by Night focuses on the life of Joe Coughlin one of the characters from the previous novel and is in no way inferior. While I would recommend you read 'The Given Day' first it is by no means essential to your enjoyment of 'Live by Night'.It is at times quite violent but I understand the years of prohibition could be and if you read the blurb on the dust jacket you know what to expect. It has a great ring of authenticity, great plot and great characters. It is, quite simply, superb.Incidentally, I looked at the reviews of the people giving this book only one star and they don't seem to like much of anything they read which is a shame.Dull and Boring are the adjectives I would use! Clearly written with an eye to someone buying the film rights and turning it into an unlikely thriller. I found it totally unconvincing and have already forgotten most of it! A shame he didn't build upon the change of direction he made with The Given Day which shows he can write a good story.
