Dennis Lehane

yeah, I think that's a lot of Simon language.

And that was just done then, you know, like Richard Price, who would become a writer later, a white novelist and Dennis Lehane and George Pelicanos, who I think is already working on it in season one.

He's already in the writer's room.

I'm pretty sure because he I know he writes the second to last episode himself.

And gun to my head, I have no recollection of writing any of those phrases.

I feel a lot like Dennis Lehane at the moment.

He wrote, back when he only had nine novels...

In two of his novels, they begin with a kid getting into the backseat of a car of two adults he doesn't know.

look like him.

Well, he isn't Lehane.

I got the name mixed up because Matthew Kasowitz, well, no, he's not in Lehane necessarily.

He is, but he's the director

of Lehane.

So I knew the name and I was associating with Lehane.

But I had the wrong person.

So when I saw him, I'm like, that's not the guy I'm thinking of.

And then people said to me, "Well, why do we care about these characters?" But that's the way you're supposed to start a thriller, right? You either start out with a body or some danger or some kind of fight or something, 'cause that's the way thrillers start.

And then I thought of Dennis Lehane's Mystic River.

You read that? It's a, you know, it's a wonderful book, but it doesn't start off with the crime that takes place during all the, all the, most of the book.

It starts off with, you know, 12-year-old boys, one of...

Sure, the reader will be glad for a couple pages of happiness after the climax, but not much more than a couple pages.

For example, in Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, the hero Teddy Daniels finds the answer to the main story question on page 366.

The novel ends three pages later.

In Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, the destruct mechanism is disabled on page 319.

To the point of not knowing, I mean, you mentioned some people write books, they create a character, they don't really know where they're going.

I remember interviewing Dennis Lehane, the thriller writer, Quite a long time ago now, but he told me he had written 200 pages of a book, and then he realized he didn't know where it was going and walked away from it.

Yeah, I

think I would do that.

They're still writing.

And then maybe also look at some old Dennis Lehane, not old, just some Dennis Lehane in general for the political corruption issue.

And the kidnapping and just the suspense vibes.

I mean, he's not writing historical fiction in the same way.

But I love Dennis Lehane.

And I feel like he writes that sort of city corruption, political suspense in a great way.

I'll also say Nellie Bly was an answer on Jeopardy recently the other night.

Huxley, Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville have not.

But Crace is coming, and Lehane and Elroy have.

Wow.

Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth, sadly passed, Mishner, Stephen King.

Like, I'm still thinking about them years later when I can't sleep.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane is set at an asylum on a remote island.

The Hunger by Alma Katsu revolves around the Donner Party.

All of her books are terrifying.