is best known as the New York Times best-selling author of such books as “Gone, Baby, Gone,” “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island,” all of which have been adapted into major motion pictures. But Lehane got his start writing a series of suspense novels featuring private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. Lehane released “Moonlight Mile,” the sixth — and what he has said will be the final — novel featuring the duo on Nov. 2.

We spoke to Lehane in advance of his appearance at the Dogwood Fine Arts Festival in Dowagiac

about transitioning in and out of the series, talking with Ben Affleck, writing and what makes a good movie.

MLive: You've said that you dropped out of two colleges before you settled on writing and went back to college to pursue it. What did you plan on studying before writing?

Dennis Lehane:

They were safety majors. I tried to be a journalist. I did journalism and realized I didn’t really like facts all that much. So then I decided, well, I like reading so why don’t I become a reading professor. And then I realized after a year of majoring in English that while I liked reading books I didn’t particularly like talking about them. And so then the writing was kind of on the wall. So what do you want to be when you grow up? It had always been be a writer. But it was such a leap given where I came from, and I knew of nobody who became a writer in my world, that it took me a couple of years and a couple of failures to figure out that’s what I really wanted.

ML: You wrote the first draft of your first novel ("A Drink Before the War") during college, you've said "as a fluke." Did you ever see yourself as a mystery writer during your studies or was that novel a true fluke?

DL:

It was a true fluke. I by that point had been through college and was I think like a lot of people — and this is how you figure out your aesthetic anyway — I’d become pretty much an elitist snob when it came to writing and reading. And then that summer that I wrote “A Drink Before the War” I’d always read detective novels, I’d kept reading them, and I just thought “Oh why not have a little fun and see what happens, give it a shot.” Because I didn’t have the story-of-my-life novel in me because I didn’t think my life was terribly interesting. It was sort of like “white boy goes to college,” and I thought there was enough of those books out. So I sat down to write the book and it just poured out of me. And I thought, “Well that’s interesting.” And even though when I said I’d sort of become an elitist snob, I’d kept a very clear sense that some of the best writing, certainly in the 1980s, was being done in the crime fiction genre. So I could be a snob, but not necessarily a genre snob, if you will.

ML: So did that book kind of save you from a life of being that "elitist snob" when it came to literature in a way, or is that still a part of you to some extent?

DL:

I will say I’m proudly a snob when it comes to a certain level of writing, certainly as a reader. I mean there’s just a lot of popular fiction out there that is very badly written, and then there’s a lot of sort of pseudo or faux literary fiction out there that I think certainly doesn’t come from the heart and is sort of so esoteric as to reach an audience of three. So you have those two poles. And I think the problem is that it’s almost like the Democratic-Republican issue right now: The extremes of each party want you to think that they’re representative. And so the extremes in the literature party certainly in the 1980s wanted you to think that they were representative. And I think a lot of people right at that time all over the country having conversations were beginning to say, “Wait a second, there’s a lot more room under this umbrella.”

ML: From that point you wrote a number of books using the same characters, then "Mystic River" and "Shutter Island," then "The Given Day," which in the past you've described as that kind of "book of your life" thing you mentioned before. Is that why you tackled "The Given Day" when you did? Why did you decide to take on a book of that scope at that particular time?

DL:

The books I like to write tend to be the books I like to read. I just love epics, I’ve always loved epics. I love those big, fat, family saga books. And so the very first thing that sort of led me down the path towards “The Given Day” was “Boy I’d like to do an epic.” And then the second thing — and they almost dovetailed at the same time — was just a lifelong itch about the Boston police strike. It’s a lifelong interest. And I thought, well nobody’s really written the big book on the Boston police strike. There’ve been a couple of books out there but they’ve just kind of touched on it. So that was where that happened. I think at the end of the day — and this for good and ill has defined my career — I can only write the book I’m sort of passionately in love with. And that leads me to have a career path that could seem from the outside to be a bit arbitrary.

ML: "The Given Day" has been billed as your first historical novel. Is that a fair assessment? Is that something that you're going to do again?

DL:

“Shutter Island” was my first foray, I thought, into historical fiction, because it’s set before I was born. I think that just defines something as historical. But I would say that “The Given Day” is much more classically historical fiction. … “Shutter Island” is a gothic that’s set in the past. So I’d already been dabbling in a little bit of sort of American history, which I’ve always loved, and then I did “The Given Day,” and now my next book is a Patrick and Angie, but then the book after that is set in the 1920s. And I think for whatever reason that’s where I just fall head-over-heels in love with writing again, is when I’m writing about the past. For whatever reason the present, it’s just not jazzing me up.

ML: The new Patrick and Angie book comes out in November. Why return back to the series at this time? Is it easier doing something like the series versus something like the book in the 1920s?

DL:

Oh, no, sh*t man, going back to the series was so hard (laughing). Oh, wow, was it ever. No, the series, I want to finally put a period on this sentence. I want to put a final, final period on this sentence, and I can’t let these characters fully walk away until I deal with this one case that has always haunted them, which is the case that was in “Gone, Baby, Gone.” And so the book picks up 12 years later, when that girl goes missing again as a 16-year-old. So that was just one of those things: They came knocking on the door, I answered the door. They came knocking after 11 years, so I was like, “Wow, how are you guys? Lot of lines on your faces.” So it was a way to also look at them in real time, and really to close the series down. This is a book of utter finale. There’s no way that you could finish it and go, “Oh wow, they’ll hop on to another adventure next week.”

ML: So this will finally be the end of journalists asking when the next Patrick and Angie book is coming out?

DL:

It will certainly end people in the audience asking (laughing). There are two questions I get asked the most: I would say one is, “When are Patrick and Angie coming back?” and the other is ‘“Explain the ending of ‘Shutter Island.’” So those are the ones I get the most.

ML: You said it was hard to go back to the series. Was it harder in terms of effort, or writing versus research, or what?

DL:

It was just everything. It was going back to that world, it was being a different human being, being 11 years moved on myself. It was working in a subgenre that I think ultimately I felt like I’d done most of what I wanted to do in it already, which is the private-eye novel. It was working in first-person after not having that constraint for over 10 years. I remember when I was writing “Mystic River” it was like a floodgate opened because I got to write in third-person again, which had normally been my sort of voice of choice. So going back into first-limited was quite difficult. And I’ve heard people sort of piss on series — particularly long series — books, and I just feel like saying, “You have no idea how hard it is.” I so take my hat off to guys like the late Robert Parker or James Lee Burke who can put out 15 books of high quality with Dave Robicheaux, because I sure as hell couldn’t. At the end of the day it’s so unbelievably hard to keep that stuff fresh.

ML: Yet you've done work on the television series "The Wire," which is similar in that you're basically using the same characters episodically…

DL:

Yeah, but in a way a season of “The Wire” is a novel, that’s one novel. It’s not like one episode is a novel; one episode is a chapter. And so doing five years of “The Wire” and being only one little writer among 12, that wasn’t nearly as difficult to keep that fresh.

View the second half of our interview with author Dennis Lehane here.