"Your children were your life and you did all you could for them." By age twenty, Lehane--a dedicated reader since childhood--was writing short fiction, although he never submitted them for publication "because my stories didn't meet my high standards," he explained to Jones. After graduating from college in 1988, Lehane entered the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Florida International University. From there it was just a few years until his first mystery novel,
A Drink before the War, was published. In fact, he bucked the stereotype of the typical starving artist: "My publishing career is such a fluke," he told Jones. "I got to it faster than I expected. I have no publishing horror stories."
Lehane garnered several admiring reviews for his debut novel. The author's voice, "original, haunting and straight from the heart, places him among that top rank of stylists who enrich the modern mystery novel," noted a Publishers Weekly critic in reviewing A Drink before the War. Numerous other critics concurred that Lehane's hard-edged style, ambiguous characters, and unresolved endings combine to create some of the best in modern mystery writing. The main characters in most of his novels are Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro--two young, cynical detectives based in Boston, where they grew up together.
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