"I WANTED TO GET ACROSS HOW IMPORTANT- AND UNFORTUNATELY HOW RARE- FOR A MAN TO LIVE BY THE LIGHTS OF HIS OWN INTEGRITY": THE RED SCARE MURDERS' CON LEHANE

In The Red Scare Murders, Con Lehane introduces us to Mike Mulligan, a blacklisted animator turned fledgling private detective in the fifties. He gets hired by a union boss in a last ditch effort to get one of his members, a black communist, off death row for killing his boss. Con uses the case to give a vivid portrait of living in that era. Don was kind enough to talk in depth about the book and the period it covers.

SCOTT MONTGOMERY: What drew you to the Red Scare?

CON LEHANE; Answering this is like writing my biography. But I’ll keep it short. I’ve spent most of my adult life in the labor movement, having come to it after developing a kind of social justice philosophy in college during the Sixties. As Bertolt Brecht wrote, “I came among men in a time of uprising and I revolted with them.”

Because of my political activities, I came in contact with—and became friends with—the children of Communists, some of them Communists themselves, others not. As I learned about what had been done to their parents, most of whom were union activists in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties—and were still activists in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s—I was shocked and angered by the blacklisting and witch hunts, the viciousness and cruelty of the government and the hypocrisy of institutions—newspapers, colleges and universities, liberal organizations, lawyers groups, and labor unions—who didn’t stand up against the attacks on freedom of speech and civil liberties.

I grew up buying into the orthodoxy that Communists were evil, and then my lived experience told me different. The main point in this and how it relates to The Red Scare Murders is that I realized that the Red Scare was a fabrication, a national hysteria fomented by lies to benefit the oligarchs who were afraid of losing the tremendous power they had (and have) over the government The CPUSA had no plans to overthrow the government by force or violence. Nor were they in any way capable of trying, much less accomplishing it. The attack was to weaken the progressive movement and specifically the labor movement.

S.M.: What did you want to get across about the period?

C.L.: I wanted to get across what I said above that the Red Scare was a lie. I also wanted to bring to life what the Communists did—in my experience, at any rate. They were involved in the struggle against segregation and for human rights before such activities were widely popular; they organized labor unions and tenants rights groups; fought for free speech. They were also secretive and paranoid; they made mistakes. It was fine for Mick Mulligan, my private eye, and others in the story to disagree with the Communists, to disagree on a lot of things. But not fine to pillory them for things they didn’t do, like plan an armed struggle to overthrow the government.

Most important I wanted to write a story about working class folks going about their lives against the backdrop of the Red Scare, seeing how all that unfolded through the eyes Mick Mulligan—not a Communist himself but a victim of the witch hunt hysteria nonetheless—who is trying to save a man’s life and find a murderer.

Also, though the theme has been used before, I wanted to get across how important—and unfortunately how rare—for a man to live by the lights of his own integrity.

S.M.: What made you choose a private eye for the first time as your protagonist?

C.L.: To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. I came into the crime fiction genre through reading Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Then, years ago, I was turned off by private eye writers like Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald and their descendants for two—probably politically correct—reasons. I didn’t like how Mike Hammer or Travis McGee looked upon and treated women. And I didn’t agree that it was heroic and noble to solve problems with violence, that the struggle between good and evil was the good guy’s violence overcoming the bad guy’s violence.

I’m not willing to argue that point, and I can make room for exceptions. But this was why I began my crime fiction writing with a (‘morally rumpled’ in the words of Tom Nolan) bartender, Brian McNulty, who I hoped to be an antidote of sorts to the two-fisted wielders of the sword of justice. 

I didn’t change my mind on either of those points, so I can’t really tell you why I chose a P.I. for this book and I hope others in a series. I immediately took to Mulligan though. I like his voice and the first-person narrator’s ability to immediately give his perspective on things.This was what—in Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, as different as they were from one another—drew me to the crime novel in the first place, the voice and the character’s way of seeing what was happening in the world around them.

S.M.: How different was it than writing for your amateur sleuths?

C.L.: I spent a lot of time on The Red Scare Murders, spread out over three or four years and four or five major drafts, writing other books in the meanwhile. So that was a bit different. What happened with each of the series—Brian McNulty, the bartender, Raymond Ambler, the librarian/curator, and Mick Mulligan, the4 private eye—is the voice and tone changed. The way each character saw the world, the language he used (McNulty and Mulligan are first person, Ambler is third person, but free indirect discourse, so the third person narrator sort of becomes Ambler, and the reader gets his voice and sensibility almost like first person) was different. It just happens that when I’m writing Ambler, the character sees the world differently and conveys what he sees in different language than when I’m writing Mulligan. 

With Mulligan, the time the story took place was different (1950) so that meant a different sensibility and different language—the syntax and diction  are different, the shared knowledge of society is different. I tried to make him authentic by getting into the character and seeing and understanding what happens around him through his consciousness. It’s not like I think about or plan a different diction or way of seeing. My imagination does the work.

S.M.: Your fifties New York feels very lived in. How did you approach the research and then apply it?

C.L.: For one thing, I did a lot of research in the popular culture of the time. I watched movies that took place in 1950 in New York City—The Naked City was one. I also read newspapers—mostly the tabloids—and magazines. I got a lot of help with that from the 42nd Street Library research librarians. I also read mystery novels from the period, three or four Rex Stout, Nero Wolf books, and a bunch of others. Another major source were memoirs of writers who’d been blacklisted, also a couple of reminiscences of anti-Communist, FBI informers, and a couple of memoirs of Communists. “Cold War Fugitive by Gil green  was one of those. Plus I’d read a lot of labor and left wing history over the years, and I could transfer my experience in the labor movement (and as a cab driver) into a different era.

S.M.: What should we know about the Red Scare in life and politics today?

C.L.: I’m not a political analyst. I wish I could tell you what we should do about our current political mess. The right wing—that is to say anti-democratic, authoritarian, once-upon-a time fringe elements have become mainstream again.

Back during the Red Scare, a common slander was to call someone a “Communist dupe” when in reality just about everyone was an anti-Communist dupe. But I don’t think folks are so easily duped today, though certainly a lot of working class Trump supporters who think he’s planning to address their concerns have been duped.

There’s far less resistance to Trump’s authoritarianism than there should be. Yet, during the Red Scare virtually everyone climbed onto the anti-Communist bandwagon. I think this is less true today. Trump’s efforts to diminish free speech and to violate due process have met resistance, though not from many institutions that should stand up—like Congress, the Supreme Court, corporate information sources, some universities, law firms, and other institutions that should know better.

But there is resistance. Folks in LA and Chicago—though it isn’t reported much in the mainstream media—have put up tremendous resistance against ICE. Some unions have become more militant in these hostile times. Though there’s less political support for the labor movement than there should be, there are positive signs. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have energized progressives across the nation in so-called red and blue states. Zohran Mamdani took on the political and financial establishment in New York City and won. 

Change will come from below and as it always has will require struggle. In one way, I think if The Red Scare Murders does anything useful, it pays tribute to the unheralded folks who have fought for human rights and labor rights and progressive change over the years.