Dennis Lehane’s latest crime novel starts out on impressive hard-boiled turf: he tracks Joe Coughlin, a small-time bandit, as he robs a card game controlled by Boston crime boss Albert White in 1926. This is a scenario we’ve come across a lot in recent crime drama, whether it’s Boardwalk Empire or The Wire or an old Sopranos episode. Yet Lehane paints the scene like a true pulp writer from the ‘30s or ‘40s:
A woman had been serving drinks to the table. She put the tray aside, lifted her cigarette out of an ashtray and took a drag, looked about to yawn with three guns pointed at her. Like she might ask to see something more impressive for an encore.
The woman is Emma Gould, the moll of gangster White — naturally — and Joe falls hard for her — also naturally. So far, it sounds like the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, without the laughs. But Lehane didn’t become a best-selling crime novelist without figuring out some sly hooks in his trade. I’m not sure if he traded in his word processor for a vintage Underwood, or went to a seer and channeled the ghost of Raymond Chandler for inspiration, but he writes damn good noir when he sets his mind to it. Unfortunately, Live By Night settles into a more pedestrian prose about midway through that masks a less dark outlook than true noir fiction.
Irishman Joe is your typical morally conflicted criminal. Described by some characters as a “pretty boy,” he lives to steal, although he comes from a wealthy Boston family (his father’s a city police captain, also crooked; Live By Night is actually part of a Lehane trilogy depicting crime in the early 20th century). Joe’s old neighborhood pal is Italian thug Dion, a guy you’d expect to be played by the guy who played Big Pussy in The Sopranos. (For Joe, might as well insert a mental image of Leo DiCaprio: Hollywood already has him signed on for the role.)
Joe doesn’t really respect White, but he plays fair with him. Until Emma Gould enters his life and turns it all inside out. Live By Night is on sure footing during these early scenes: Lehane has a knack for describing the particular suits, fabrics, shoes and décor of the era. Almost as good as Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho, in fact. And he captures the turmoil of Joe’s heart, how he’s willing to throw everything away for a few blank-eyed stares and one-liners from his gangster moll cutie.
Joe double-crosses Albert with Emma, gets nearly beaten to death, and eventually ends up in jail; there he educates himself and becomes an effective mob businessman, learning the ropes from aging mob boss Maso Pescatore. He then takes over Maso’s rum-running business in Florida (this is during the Prohibition era). He’s good at it, and impresses the local minorities from Havana and Latin America. He’s fair to them and most poor folk, and becomes almost like the Barack Obama of gangsters.
But then the narrative takes a few left turns that make it less believable as a morality tale à la Robin Hood. Most of Joe’s inner turmoil seems to be about deciding whether he’s a criminal or a mobster. (There’s a difference?) Because of this moral waffling, Live By Night is never quite capable of embracing its own dark heart, and the ease with which Lehane’s prose slips into the period is almost undone by the too-easy morality he grafts onto the ending.
It’s worth remembering that noir comes out of a very dark post-war impulse in fiction: a rejection of society’s values, a doomed embrace of a personal moral code. Joe Coughlin doesn’t quite fit the mold. Lehane may at times write like Faulkner or Hemingway at their dead-eyed best, but he doesn’t really go deep into the moral problems of crime. Even the book’s title — Live By Night — is a riff on the Nicholas Ray noir They Live By Night, except that 1949 film is a much darker depiction of American crime and its consequences. 
“Good deeds follow bad money” is about as deep as Lehane’s willing to go with his moral analysis. Along the way, he makes period references to crime and racism that seem like oblique commentaries on today’s headlines, as topical as last week’s presidential race, greedy bankers or immigration debates. But the conclusion is pretty much this: crime may have its consequences, but it does, indeed, pay; and if you redistribute the wealth properly, who’s to judge?
Like Joe Coughlin at times, Lehane seems to pull his punches. But Live By Night will satisfy fans of his kitchen sink realism, and its portrayal of small-town criminals with big ambitions has “Hollywood” written all over it.