In early 2004 I had a call from Kate herself, saying, “you’ve got to meet this guy.” The guy was Richard Marinick. He’d written a scathing, gritty novel about two brothers in a South Boston Irish gang. And yeah, he’d learned to write in prison doing a ten-year stretch for armored car robbery. He was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and working with him on his debut novel was like spending a month of nights at Triple O’s lounge with some of the Southie “hard guys.” As debut novels go, Boyos was a big success, starting with the cover shoot for the Boston Globe magazine with Rick and Dennis Lehane. I have to think the only reason it didn’t get snapped up by Hollywood is that ’04 was the same year The Departed came out, and a film like that kind of sucks all the air out of the room.