“If I see a film version of one of my books in which they clearly, clearly did not get it, then I’ll go, ‘Okay, well this sucks.’ But everything else? No idea. “The weirdest thing about this sort of stuff is that unless it is blatantly wrong, you just never know what to think,” says Lehane. “If I see a film version of one of my books in which they clearly, clearly did not get it, then I’ll go, ‘Okay, well this sucks.’ But everything else? No idea.” Like most of America, Lehane didn’t know what to make of Affleck’s sprawling and overstuffed story of a Boston stickup man–turned–Florida rum-running king, but for reasons entirely his own. The epic-in-scope, Prohibition-era-set, capital-G gangster movie-in which the Oscar-winning Affleck produces, directs, adapts and appears in nearly every scene- sank like a Craig Kimbrel curveball when it expanded wide this past weekend and has been ignored in year-end critics lists and award chases. Of course, Ben Affleck can take some credit by doing all the heavy lifting on Live by Night, the latest Lehane novel to make it to the big screen. Mercedes, a limited series adaptation of a Stephen King novel being produced by fellow Bay Stater David E. Meanwhile, Lehane, who spent time on the staffs of The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, has somehow found time to write scripts for Mr.

“I’m doing another pass on the screenplay as we speak,” he says, and you believe him. In 2015, the film rights for the book were the subject of a bidding war won by DreamWorks and shortly after he finished writing it, he fired off the screenplay.

He just finished Since We Fell, his 14th book, a thriller about an agoraphobic journalist who believes her husband is leading a secret life when it’s published later this year, it will be his second novel in as many years. Wherever the neighborhood, Lehane, 51, has been on a creative tear since coming west three years back. Adds Lehane, clearly on a roll, “I lived in a neighborhood of people with duck lips and purse dogs who were demanding to speak to the manager and I needed to get the fuck out of there.” Lehane packed up his wife, two daughters and his bulldog and tore down Lincoln to the demonstratively more suitable Playa del Rey, where, he reports, folks sport a more genial disposition and “look like they are from Boston, or could be.”

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