''Everybody loves a winner, especially in Hollywood,'' says film historian Leonard Maltin. ''So when you start building a track record, people in the industry respond to that. They may not have even read the books. They're trying to attract a top-level cast, and they know that the first one had a meaty dramatic role that led to an Oscar for Sean Penn.''
Still, Maltin allows, ''It's a pretty amazing trifecta of filmmakers to be attracted to one writer's work. I don't know how much precedent there is for it, if any. Especially so close together.''
Well before he penned ''Mystic River'' in 2001, Lehane had a loyal following with his series of five detective novels featuring homegrown Boston private eye Patrick Kenzie and his girlfriend, Angie Gennaro. They began with ''A Drink Before the War'' in 1994, but truly took off with the fourth, 1998's ''Gone, Baby, Gone,'' a dark tale about an abducted child. (For the film, Ben Affleck took the commas out of the title and cast his brother, Casey Affleck, in the lead.)
''They've been huge sellers in our store,'' says Otto Penzler, owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. ''From his first book, he's been one of the top writers in America in the crime novel genre, no question.''
Lehane should be judged by ''the same standards you'd bring to any literature,'' Penzler says. ''He creates serious, real characters who have heart and are memorable, and his dialogue is absolutely believable.''
Indeed, all Lehane's novels (he just finished the eighth, a historical work called ''The Given Day'') have been set in Boston, his hometown. The sense of place that infuses his work, film critic Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post wrote recently, is a chief pleasure of Lehane's books, which are ''like a tour of back-alley, blue-collar Beantown; spend time with them in any form, and you start swallowing your r's, then spitting them out as h's.''
Lehane was born 41 years ago in the working-class neighborhood of Dorchester, the youngest of five children of Irish immigrants. His father worked in the shipping department of Sears, Roebuck, his mother in a public school cafeteria.
After dropping out of college a couple times, he found his calling, and sold ''A Drink Before the War'' while still in graduate school at Florida International University. Then he moved back north. His $8,000 advance was just enough ''for a good meal, a crappy used car and my taxes,'' he says — certainly not enough to quit his job as a parking valet at the Ritz-Carlton, albeit one with a master's degree.
In 1997 Lehane had moved up to house chauffeur, and finally quit. ''Gone, Baby, Gone'' came out the next year — a ''career-changer,'' Lehane says. Of course, he chuckles, it didn't hurt that President Clinton was shown exiting Air Force One with the book tucked under his arm.
''After that book, I was suddenly living on good money,'' Lehane says. But it was ''Mystic River'' in 2001 — another supremely dark work about child abuse, murder, and people doing the wrong thing — that propelled him to the best-seller lists.
What made Lehane so interested in the darkest aspects of humanity? He cites his work just after college counseling damaged children. ''I saw levels of abuse that truly shocked me,'' he says. ''It gave me a kind of moral fury.''
When Eastwood took an interest in ''Mystic River,'' he asked Lehane if he'd be interested in adapting his own screenplay. No way, the author replied. It had taken him long enough to get the thing down to 401 pages. ''Besides, it feels like operating on my own child,'' he says. He's never adapted his own work for the big screen, though he's written for HBO's ''The Wire.''
Not all Lehane's books have received the glowing reviews that greeted ''Mystic River'' or ''Gone, Baby, Gone.'' One that got mixed reviews was 2003's ''Shutter Island,'' about the hunt for a murderess who's escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane (Lehane calls that plot his most original; The New York Times called the book a ''misguided effort.'') But Scorsese chose that book, with a script by Laeta Kalogridis, for his next project, on which Lehane will be executive producer. ''People didn't quite get what I was doing with 'Shutter Island,''' Lehane says now.
Success has given the author a number of things — the ability to take five years between novels, for example. And security. ''When you come from a background like mine, the worst feeling in the world is constantly worrying about money,'' he says. ''The great thing about success is when that worry goes away.''
It's also given him the freedom to spend time teaching, which he does with a warning to his students from the start. If you've come to learn the secret of writing the next best-seller or the next blockbuster film, he says, ''You've walked into the wrong door. Knock yourself out! But you're not part of my club.''
''I tell them, it's very simple,'' Lehane says of his students. ''If you learn how to write well, to write with depth, cream will rise to the top. You'll get published.
''But,'' he says, ''there is no secret.''