They’re all very well-written, readable crime dramas, if not quite as good as Mystic River. Of course, he had about ten years to improve between that one and the first. In fact, it’s easy to see how the former is a culmination of all the things he learned from his previous work, as if he had to figure out what his style was before writing a whole book in that mode.

Because the Kenzie and Gennaro adventures can be summed up, in a way, like film pitches. A Drink, Before The War, with its gang storyline and shady city politics, is like The Shield set in Boston (though it predates the series by a fair bit of time). Darkness, Take My Hand is a typical serial killer whodunit, and Sacred is a Robert Mitchum-type noir. And if Gone Baby Gone is anything, it’s a Hollywood kidnapping thriller, complete with gunfights and action sequences.

Of course, it’s the only one that’s actually been adapted into a Hollywood thriller, but in such a way that it’s not a typical thriller at all.

A lot of people get shot in the book series, which isn’t unusual for the genre. What makes it a little odd is the setting. Because Lehane does a brilliant job of capturing working class life in Boston (I have no idea how accurate it is, only that it feels sufficiently realistic), it’s a bit of a jolt to get into the action sequences that are also a big part of the books. There’s one character in particular, Bubba Rogowski, a psychotic arms dealer who wires up his apartment with antipersonel mines instead of a burglar alarm, who seems completely out of place, and I wondered how they’d handle him in the film. The answer is, he’s downgraded to a minor-league drug dealer.

A lot of things get that kind of low-key downgrading in the film, whether simplifying the chaotic plot of the novel, the scope of the final conspiracy, or the shootouts. But it’s all necessary, as the tack director Ben Affleck chooses to take is more the realistic portrayal of life in Dorchester, and that’s always been the most interesting part of Lehane’s books. What he keeps in are the impossible dilemmas that face all the characters.

A key scene in the book and the film is the execution of a child molester by Kenzie. Even though the scene is described far more brutally in the book than is shown in the film, the latter is still more horrific. If anything, it’s easier to understand Kenzie’s motivation in the film without his inner monologue. We don’t really need to know why he did what he did, because we’ve seen it for ourselves. Put in the same position as him, it’s easy to see how anyone would do the same thing, regardless of whether the person gunned down was unarmed or harmless. Kenzie’s guilt, however understandable his actions were, effect his judgement for the rest of the film, facing another impossible decision of leaving the missing girl with her kidnappers and a happy, promising future, or returning her to a neighbourhood that has destroyed so many other lives.

The film benefits from not being one of a series, like the books are. It’s the first time we see Patrick Kenzie, so we don’t know all the other tragic things that have happened to him. We don’t know his history with his father, or that he’s had to kill before (I’d assume that, continuity wise, film-Kenzie doesn’t have the baggage of the books), so we find it that much easier to identify with him, although we do get hints of his uncontrollable anger when he pistol-whips a guy in a bar towards the beginning. And even though Casey Affleck’s accent is damn near impenetrable.

It’s a grown-up film for grown-ups, so it’s not necessarily and easy watch. The whole cast are great, and the setting seems really authentic. The only character who gets a little short-changed is Angie Gennaro. In the book she’s explicitly dangerous, not only tough on her own terms but also the grandaughter of an old Boston mob boss. In the film, she just kind of cries a lot, and moans at Kenzie. The whole cast is so brilliant, it’s a fucking shame that they decided to cast the second most important character in the film by essentially looking for the next moderately famous attractive young actress to wander along. In a film so non-Hollywood, it’s typical that the Hollywood mentality still had to piss on the chips, even a little bit.