Sins of the Fathers: Dennis Lehane’s Noir Parables

Going well beyond most contemporary crime thrillers, bestselling author Dennis Lehane’s first five Kenzie and Gennaro novels published in the 1990s constitute probing noir parables of the sins-of-the-fathers motif including child abuse. The biblical concept of generational iniquity and its consequences is tied closely to what one character in Darkness, Take My Hand (1996) terms a “postmodern malaise” linked to a contemporaneous devaluation of human life. Although Lehane’s narrator in the series, private investigator Patrick Kenzie, is no moralist, he recognizes through the trauma of his own abuse at the hands of a tyrannical father contributing reasons for this pervasive corruption of values. By forthrightly addressing issues of moral ambiguity as they involve vexed questions of what is legal versus what is right, this popular novelist’s forensic texts transcend the usual limitations of his chosen genre.