Dog-eat-dog world

It’s a quaint conceit of Dennis Lehane novels, most of them set in the Boston area, that so many of his characters still attend local Catholic churches and keep the faith, never mind the number of scandals and cover-ups emanating from The Vatican.

Quaint, that is, except to the blue-collar characters who are Lehane’s chosen people — the bartenders and ex-cons and cops and priests of his familiar home turf.

Bob Saginowski is one of the chosen, a bighearted but lonely bartender (played by James Gandolfini, his last big role, in the just-released movie) who doesn’t quite keep the faith, but believes enough in his own sins to worry about his eternal soul. One night after his shift he finds a whimpering dog abandoned in a neighborhood garbage can and decides to take the badly beaten pup home with him, after leaving him with an animal-friendly local named Nadia Dunn who knows about rescuing dogs.

Thus begins a slim novel by Lehane that began as a short story (“Animal Rescue”) and expands here to include Lehane’s thoughts on faith, love and Chechens.

Yes, Chechens appear often as the requisite mob guys — the latest on the block — who own the bar and keep Bob’s cousin Marv (who used to own the bar) on a short leash. Marv’s bar is a favorite spot for doing “drops” — a drop-off site for thick envelopes of money collected from gambling, drug dealing and other illegal activities.

Cousin Marv is kind of a blowhard dumbo, the sort of guy who can’t pronounce “Chechens” right (he calls them “Chechneyans” until Bob corrects him: “It’s ‘Chechens.’ You don’t call people from Ireland Irelandians, do you?”) and who spends his time reminiscing over his glory days running a crew with Bob, before the bar got taken over by tougher mobsters.

Bob is bighearted but not exactly brimming with self-confidence, and not used to having much happiness in his life. (Cue: big dark secret in his life.) So adopting a dog is like the clouds parting and the sun starting to shine through. Not to mention he’s found a friend in Nadia, though he doesn’t know quite enough about her, like for instance how she got the big scary scar on her neck (he’s polite enough to tell her she can talk about it when and if she’s ready). Unfortunately, part of her history includes a dangerous psychopath by the name of Eric Deeds, and he’s starting to circle around Bob and his new adopted family like a mongoose in the henhouse.

A large part of the fun of The Drop is this tussle over ownership — both of the dog, called Rocco, and Nadia. Deeds is the dog beater (anyone could see that one coming), but when he starts leaning heavy on Bob to get the dog back, it escalates into one of those classic neighborhood showdowns — you know, “Tit for tat, butter for fat, you kill my dog, I’ll skin your cat.” That sort of thing. 

The Drop shows Lehane’s seemingly effortless skill with the language of real-life characters. True, sometimes they’re a bit more philosophical than real folk are, given to epigrammatic pronouncements on God and death and such (sample: “The closer you come to Caesar, the greater the fear.”) But Lehane has his ear to the ground much the way someone like Elmore Leonard always did: his dialogue shapes these characters, who could be one-dimensional Boston stereotypes, into people we never question the existence of for a moment.

Not to mention he’s a truly fine crime writer, skilled in the procedural (there’s always a cop lurking around after about two or three chapters, and they’re always worth getting to know) as much as he is in writing a bang-up action scene. (A South Carolina shootout involving Deeds and a trio of local drug dealers in a swampy shack is dark, tight and riveting.)

The only pity is that the novel is too short. Detective Torres doesn’t even get his procedural underway — trying to find out who robbed Cousin Marv’s bar while also seeking the perp in a cold case disappearance 10 years earlier — because he’s too busy banging a fellow Latina cop, despite the wedding band on his finger (he goes to confession regularly to “get right” with God). Before Torres can even dig into either case, the book’s done. Things get resolved, as they say, outside the law.

Nadia is another interesting character that we hardly get to know in Lehane’s short novel. Her dark past is hinted at, but mostly we are asked to accept her as simply the light that Bob’s life needs to finally learn to function like a human being. She is, writ large, The Possibility of Love.

The dog, Rocco, gets quite a bit of shading. We hear all about his vet visits and pooping schedule, and it’s the relationship of Bob to animal that makes The Drop a slightly offbeat entry in the Boston crime literary genre.

As for Bob, he’s a goodhearted thug, a tough teddy bear, and it’s easy to believe he was written by Lehane with Gandolfini in mind.

As with the good writers, the little details are what make Lehane’s books entertaining and compulsively readable (though I didn’t much care for his last one, the Prohibition-era novel Live By Night). Plus he’s a master at injecting an ironic twist ending.

Still, no matter how skilled, an expanded short story does tend to feel a bit bitin. Lehane could have stayed with these characters and their worlds a few hundred pages more without stretching anyone’s patience. It’s almost as though Lehane wanted to tell a simple, skeletal tale for a change, minus the major world-thumping angst. What you get instead is a meet-cute situation involving a dog and an unlikely couple. Plus a whole lot of Chechens.

You can read The Drop in about three hours, and expect the upcoming movie to hit all its pulse points like a pinball machine. But to truly enjoy the journey, dig into Lehane’s prose. He may do this stuff in his sleep, but he’s a master at it.