The Nuts and Bolts of Writing True Crime: An Interview with Black Bird’s Dennis Lehane

(Warning: Spoilers included)

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue was the genesis of detective fiction, which is also known as the ‘whodunit.’ His short story was published in 1841, with private detective Monsieur C. Auguste Lupin as the protagonist. Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction, which also includes legal thrillers, hard-boiled fiction, cozy mysteries, suspense thrillers, and police procedurals. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poiret, Charlie Chan, and Miss Marple are just a few fictional detectives that have thrilled audiences for years.

At the heart of these stories is mystery – it is the connection between the subgenres. In every situation, there’s something to solve.

Serial and podcasts of its ilk prompted a surge in the popularity of true crime stories. However, true crime is an evergreen genre. Unlike crime fiction, it’s based on facts and real people. Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), In Cold Blood (1967), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) are phenomenal films based on stellar true crime books. 

Dennis Lehane is no stranger to writing captivating thrillers. He’s the man behind Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island. However, he’s recently waded into non-fiction territory with Black Bird, a six-part TV series. Based on a memoir by James Keene and Hillel Levin, the series has an undercurrent of menace, generating from both the protagonist and antagonist. The writing is gritty and emotive, throwing us into the connected psyches of Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton) and Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser).

Dennis is a master at his craft, so he was up for the challenge of writing true crime.
The biggest difficulty in adapting Black Bird was that it was non-fiction and I’ve never done that before. There were ethical questions that I’ve never had to deal with before as I was adapting. Like, what are my responsibilities to the facts? What is my responsibility to people? That was the big question. I just had to inject my moral and ethical self as I wrote.

I knew I was going to have to take liberties with the investigative part of the show. There were two major investigations into Larry Hall. One is the one you see presented at the beginning. The apprehension of Larry Hall. Then there was a second set of investigations that took place while he was in prison to thwart his appeal. That second investigation didn’t involve Brian Miller (Greg Kinnear) and Lauren McCauley (Sepideh Moafi). But I had already established them, so I wasn’t going to create a whole new section of characters. When you already have good characters, you stick with them. That was the only major difference, as well as Jimmy and Larry were never in a riot together. Neither of those presents any ethical dilemma. The writing barometer I always use is the end of Braveheart. William Wallace and Edward Longshanks did not die at the same time. They didn’t even die in the same year. But it’s a good movie.

In reality, Jimmy Keene went on the same factual journey as you see in the show. He did not go on the same emotional journey at all. Jimmy’s not built that way. This isn’t an insult to Jimmy, but I think what made him capable of doing this is the same thing that would keep him from being an introspective person in that scenario. I needed to write a dramatic story and no hero is worth writing about unless they go through an internal journey.

As far as what the thematic question of the series is, I’d say it’s ‘Where am I on the line of toxic masculinity?’

Writing true crime can take an emotional toll on even the best writer. Dennis found one of the episodes difficult to write because it hits close to home.

The hardest scene to write was an entire episode. The fifth episode was excruciating to write. I have daughters. But I was determined to take Jessica Roach’s (Laney Stiebing) story back for her, not for Larry. Larry doesn’t own Jessica Roach’s life; he doesn’t own her story. He doesn’t own anything connected with her. All he did was kill her… we believe.

Setting is important to Dennis and is a secondary character in his writings. Setting can establish a tone; setting can be an extension of a character. 

Setting is everything to me. I can’t write anything until I’ve locked into the place. So, with Black Bird, the very first thing I write is the very first thing you see in the show. A girl on a bicycle. I locked on to this idea of the Heartland of America as Eden and a monster comes in and it blows up Eden. We shot it at a heightened glow so that all the scenes in the Midwest are richer in terms of pure cinema. I used Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven as our template.

Like many writers, Dennis’s childhood shaped his writing ethic and content. The Boston native is no stranger to violence, which he witnessed during his formative years.

I grew up around a lot of violence. I grew up in a violent place in a very particular violent moment in time, which was desegregation of public schools in Boston. I became fascinated with it and the roots of it and what is the price of tribalism. I write a lot about tribes. When I was quite young, I was walking back from church where I was an altar boy. I saw my neighbor, who raised Doberman Pinchers, beating up a younger man. When the younger man would protest, he would let the Doberman a little more off the leash. The reason the older man was upset was because the younger man had sold his home to an African American family. I think I was eight. I never forgot that.

Dennis has written novels, teleplays, and screenplays. While he finds novels the most difficult to write, there’s a particular part of screenplays that he finds is a hump you have to get over.

Novels are the most difficult to write. It’s not even a contest. To write a novel is to write a symphony. To write a screenplay is to write a blueprint.

David Mamet has a great line, “The problems of the second act are the problems of the first act.” The second act is always the most difficult because you made all sorts of mistakes that you weren’t aware of when you were conceptualizing the story. You don’t discover that until you get into the second act. The first act is the rush, the story’s moving downhill. Then you hit the valley in the second act. You have to figure a way out.

Dennis got his first agent when he was twenty-five years old and had his first novel A Drink Before the War (1994) accepted for publication when he was twenty-six. It wasn’t luck that got him this, but discipline and focus. Up to this day, he follows a writing routine that’s his recipe for completing a novel or whatever it is you’re writing.

I write when I need to. Now the trick is I write as early in the morning as I can, as soon as I get up, if possible. Then I write for a solid hour at least. If you can do that without distraction, without being pulled into the world, you can produce. Graham Greene wrote 300 words a day. He produced a book year in and year out for like twenty-five years straight. Meanwhile, he was a spy…! So, you can find the time to write.