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Okay, so his hair is thinning a bit on top, and there are touches of grey at the temples. But other than that, Dennis Lehane's life is good, and he knows it. His latest novel, The Given Day, five years in the writing and a whopping 700 pages long, broke into the Top 10 of the New York Times's bestseller list a week after its release.

Lehane's father doesn't quite get it. Of Irish extraction, Lehane Sr. worked for years in the shipping department at Sears, Roebuck and Co. in Boston, sired five children with his wife, a school cafeteria worker, and raised the entire brood in the working-class neighbourhood of Dorchester.

In all that hustle and bustle, Lehane Sr. somehow never developed a taste for fiction. Novels, movies, TV shows: All were anathema – “except maybe Gunsmoke,” his youngest son, now 43, said with a big smile during a recent visit to Toronto. “He never got that willing-suspension-of-disbelief thing.”

All of which means Dad Lehane hasn't got the full measure of Dennis Lehane's success. Hasn't read the seven novels Lehane published in the last 14 years, including the bestsellers Mystic River, Gone , Baby, Gone and Shutter Island. Hasn't gone to see the Oscar-nominated movies based on some of them (most notably Clint Eastwood's 2003 adaptation of Mystic River). Hasn't watched the episodes of The Wire his son wrote for HBO.

“In fact, my dad had no idea who Clint Eastwood is. None,” Lehane says, laughing. “And, you know, I love it. I love that there's a part of the culture where that sort of thing doesn't register.”

Another Hollywood Brahmin, Martin Scorsese, recently completed location shoots in Boston for his adaptation of Lehane's penultimate novel, Shutter Island, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo.

Now, you might think this “ridiculous” success, as Lehane describes it, might result in a swelled head, but you would be wrong. “The Irish will forgive you everything except you feeling conceited about success. They're okay with success, but the great crime in Irish culture is to put on airs. My family and my friends,” Lehane says, “have been very consistent in making sure my head doesn't blow up.”

At the same time, one mustn't don the cloak of faux humility. “Wasn't it Springsteen who said nothing's more pathetic than ‘a rich man in a poor man's shirt?' ” he says, riffing on the lyrics from Better Days. “If I was still going for drinks at Vaughan's Tavern in Dorchester, I think everybody would tell me to go home,” Lehane observes. “It'd be like that great line in Mississippi Burnin g: You're not from here no more.”

Boston nevertheless remains Lehane's spiritual home. He also maintains an apartment there, and the local newspapers like to report on his comings and goings, although he spends much of the year near St. Petersburg, Fla., where his second wife, an optometrist, works and where he has taught creative writing at Eckerd College.

Boston also continues to inform his fiction. The Given Day, for instance, is a richly textured historical novel centred on the famous 1919 Boston police strike, featuring a large cast of characters, imaginary (most notably the charismatic Danny Coughlin, one of the strike's organizers) and real (Babe Ruth, J. Edgar Hoover, Louis Fraina, Calvin Coolidge).

As Lehane buffs know, The Given Day is a decided departure for the writer, just as Mystic River was a rupture of sorts with its predecessors. Lehane's initial reputation was made with the detective novel, a series of sorts, in fact, featuring Beantown private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. Lehane wrote five Kenzie-Gennaro novels over five years. The film adaptation of the fourth of those, Gone, Baby, Gone, earned Amy Ryan a best-supporting actress Oscar nomination last year.

But then he burned out. Now he thinks he should have stopped in 1999 with Gone, Baby, Gone, “the peak,” he calls it. Instead, he wrote a fifth, Prayers for Rain, “for the fans.” That, he believes, was a mistake.

Amusingly, the fans still pester Lehane for a return to Kenzie and Gennaro, even though it has been almost 10 years and four books since Prayers for Rain. While Lehane isn't averse to a reprise, he finds that his best work comes from “a kind of tingling in the blood. That's what gets me writing a book.” He's “gone trolling” for a new Kenzie-Gennaro yarn “every now and then. But nothing has come. They just won't answer.”

Mystic River, published in early 2001, had some of the hard-boiled/thriller characteristics of Lehane's earlier work. Although critics everywhere recognized its portrayal of a Boston blue-collar neighbourhood “undone by the abduction and killing of one of its children,” the depiction of the ongoing trauma wrought by the abduction moved Lehane out of the genre ghetto into a more literary realm.

There certainly has been no shortage of literary-themed plaudits for The Giv en Day. Both its narrative reach and its ambition have prompted not a few comparisons to the works of Dos Passos, Dreiser, Doctorow and Sinclair. For Lehane, the most prominent model was Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's “great old-fashioned epic” of the old west, 800-plus pages and the winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize. “I knew if I was going to write a book this big, I'd have to make every page as enthralling as I could make it, like McMurtry did,” Lehane observes. As Lehane wrote, he would “check to see where McMurty was at, like, on page 270 in Lonesome Dove.” The practice almost invariably “left me feeling underconfident.”

“Instantly cinematic” is another descriptor laid on Lehane's fiction. Yet it's a claim he has trouble with – a somewhat surprising demurral given both the calibre of filmmakers his books have drawn and his own experiences with quality television. “I've always resisted the term ‘cinematic' when it comes to literature because cinema is literary,” he says. “We were seeing the world in cinematic terms long before cameras existed.”

Yes, writers today can't help but be informed, subtly or profoundly, by cinematic conventions. But “I can say categorically, without a hint of disingenuousness, that I never think of the movies when I write.” Once a book is finished and off to the publisher, Lehane and his wife and friends might engage in a bit of “who-could-play-so-and-so,” but it's all for fun and, more often than not, Lehane's casting “choices” have been wrong.

“When I first heard that Casey Affleck was going to be Patrick Kenzie in Gone, Baby, Gone, I went, ‘Huh?' But he was great.” Lehane claims to have no interest in adapting his own work for the big or small screen. “I've had such good luck with other people doing that, there's just no reason for me to delve into those waters.”

Does he think there's a sequel to The Given Day?

Yes and no. One of The Given Day's key characters is Luther Laurence, a talented black baseball player and small-time hoodlum who, after a bloody run-in with a crime boss in Tulsa, Okla., flees east to Boston where he befriends Danny Coughlin. At novel's end, Laurence returns to Tulsa and the wife and baby boy he left behind. The sequel potential arises from this return – Tulsa in 1921 was the site of what's been called “the costliest incident of racial violence in American history,” a white riot against the city's black population that left an estimated 300 dead.

Lehane admits he is tempted to take his talents there. But in what way? What happened in Tulsa in 1921 “is a rather sacred event in African-American history,” he notes. “And while it may be okay for a white guy to write such a story, maybe I'm not the white guy who should.”

Lehane confesses to being intrigued by the possibility of writing a novel set during the Roaring Twenties, one that might include the Tulsa saga – “but only as a part of it.” He sees the twenties as a sort of literary Everest. “It's one of the most exciting, dramatic and colourful decades in American history … Yet it's defeated a lot of writers, writers better than me. But who knows?”