Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, Dennis Lehane's "The Given Day" tells the story of two families — one black, one white — swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses. Featuring a number of the most famous and influential figures of the era, including Babe Ruth, Jack Reed, Calvin Coolidge, Eugene O’Neill and W.E.B. Dubois, the novel is a remarkable work of historical fiction. An excerpt.

Chapter one
On a wet summer night, Danny Coughlin, a Boston police of­ficer, fought a four-round bout against another cop, Johnny Green, at Mechanics Hall just outside Copley Square. Coughlin-Green was the final fight on a fifteen-bout, all-police card that included flyweights, welterweights, cruiserweights, and heavy­weights. Danny Coughlin, at six two, 220, was a heavyweight. A sus­pect left hook and foot speed that was a few steps shy of blazing kept him from fighting professionally, but his  butcher-knife left jab combined with the  airmail-your-jaw-to-Georgia explosion of his right cross dwarfed the abilities of just about any other semipro on the East Coast.

The all-day pugilism display was titled Boxing & Badges: Haymak­ers for Hope. Proceeds were split  fifty-fifty between the St. Thomas Asylum for Crippled Orphans and the policemen’s own fraternal orga­nization, the Boston Social Club, which used the donations to bolster a health fund for injured coppers and to defray costs for uniforms and equipment, costs the department refused to pay. While flyers advertis­ing the event  were pasted to poles and hung from storefronts in good neighborhoods and thereby elicited donations from people who never intended to actually attend the event, the flyers also saturated the worst of the Boston slums, where one was most likely to find the core of the criminal element — the plug-uglies, the bullyboys, the knuckle-dusters, and, of course, the Gusties, the city’s most powerful and f---  out-of-their-minds street gang, who headquartered in South Boston but spread their tentacles throughout the city at large.

The logic was simple:

The only thing criminals loved almost as much as beating the sh-- out of coppers was watching coppers beat the sh-- out of each other.

Coppers beat the sh-- out of each other at Mechanics Hall during Boxing & Badges: Haymakers for Hope.

Ergo: criminals would gather at Mechanics Hall to watch them do so.

Danny Coughlin’s godfather, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna, had decided to exploit this theory to the fullest for benefit of the BPD in general and the Special Squads Division he lorded over in particular. The men in Eddie McKenna’s squad had spent the day mingling with the crowd, closing outstanding warrant after outstanding warrant with a surprisingly bloodless efficiency. They waited for a target to leave the main hall, usually to relieve himself, before they hit him over the head with a pocket billy and hauled him off to one of the paddy wagons that waited in the alley. By the time Danny stepped into the ring, most of the mugs with outstanding warrants had been scooped up or had slipped out the back, but a  few — hopeless and dumb to the  last — still milled about in the smoke-laden room on a floor sticky with spilt beer.

Danny’s corner man was Steve Coyle. Steve was also his patrol part­ner at the Oh-One Station House in the North End. They walked a beat from one end of Hanover Street to the other, from Constitution Wharf to the Crawford House Hotel, and as long as they’d been doing it, Danny had boxed and Steve had been his corner and his cut man.

Danny, a survivor of the 1916 bombing of the Salutation Street Sta­tion House, had been held in high regard since his rookie year on the job. He was broad-shouldered, dark-haired and dark-eyed; more than once, women had been noted openly regarding him, and not just im­migrant women or those who smoked in public. Steve, on the other hand, was squat and rotund like a church bell, with a great pink bulb of a face and a bow to his walk. Early in the year he’d joined a barber­shop quartet in order to attract the fancy of the fairer sex, a decision that had served him in good stead this past spring, though prospects appeared to be dwindling as autumn neared.

Steve, it was said, talked so much he gave aspirin powder a head­ache. He’d lost his parents at a young age and joined the department without any connections or juice. After nine years on the job, he was still a flatfoot. Danny, on the other hand, was BPD royalty, the son of Captain Thomas Coughlin of Precinct 12 in South Boston and the godson of Special Squads Lieutenant Eddie McKenna. Danny had been on the job less than five years, but every cop in the city knew he wasn’t long for uniform.

“F---in’ taking this guy so long?” Steve scanned the back of the hall, hard to ignore in his attire of choice. He claimed he’d read some­where that Scots were the most feared of all corner men in the fight game. And so, on fight nights, Steve came to the ring in a kilt. An au­thentic, red tartan kilt, red and black argyle socks, charcoal tweed jacket and matching five-button waistcoat, silver wedding tie, authentic gillie brogues on his feet, and a loose-crowned Balmoral on his head. The real surprise wasn’t how at home he looked in the getup, it was that he wasn’t even Scottish.

The audience, red-faced and drunk, had grown increasingly agitated the last hour or so, more and more actual fights breaking out between the scheduled ones. Danny leaned against the ropes and yawned. Mechanics Hall stank of sweat and booze. Smoke, thick and wet, curled around his arms. By all rights he should have been back in his dressing room, but he didn’t really have a dressing room, just a bench in the maintenance hallway, where they’d sent Woods from the Oh-Nine looking for him five minutes ago, told him it was time to head to the ring.

So he stood there in an empty ring waiting for Johnny Green, the buzz of the crowd growing louder, buzzier. Eight rows back, one guy hit another guy with a folding chair. The hitter was so drunk he fell on top of his victim. A cop waded in, clearing a path with his domed hel­met in one hand and his pocket billy in the other.

“Why don’t you see what’s taking Green?” Danny asked Steve.

“Why don’t you climb under my kilt and pucker up?” Steve chin-gestured at the crowd. “Them’s some restless sots. Like as not to tear my kilt or scuff my brogues.”

“Heavens,” Danny said. “And you without your shine box.” He bounced his back off the ropes a few times. Stretched his neck, swiv­eled his hands on the wrists. “Here comes the fruit.”

Steve said, “What?” and then stepped back when a brown head of lettuce arced over the ropes and splattered in the center of the ring.

“My mistake,” Danny said. “Vegetable.”

“No matter.” Steve pointed. “The pretender appears. Just in time.”

Danny looked down the center aisle and saw Johnny Green framed by a slanted white rectangle of doorway. The crowd sensed him and turned. He came down the aisle with his trainer, a guy Danny recog­nized as a desk sergeant at the One-Five, but whose name escaped him. About fifteen rows back, one of Eddie McKenna’s Special Squads guys, a goon named Hamilton, grabbed a guy off his feet by his nostrils and dragged him up the aisle, the Special Squads cowboys apparently figuring all pretense could be chucked now that the final fight was about to begin.

Carl Mills, the BPD press spokesman, was calling to Steve from the other side of the ropes. Steve went to one knee to talk to him. Danny watched Johnny Green come, not liking something that floated in the guy’s eyes, something unhooked. Johnny Green saw the crowd, he saw the ring, he saw Danny — but he didn’t. Instead, he looked at every­thing and looked past everything at the same time. It was a look Danny had seen before, mostly on the faces of three-bottles-to-the-wind drunks or rape victims.

Steve came up behind him and put a hand on his elbow. “Mills just told me this is his third fight in twenty-four hours.”

“What? Whose?”

“Whose? F---ing Green’s. He had one last night over at the Crown in Somerville, fought another this morning down at the rail yards in Brighton, and now here he is.”

“How many rounds?”

“Mills heard he went thirteen last night for sure. And lost by KO.”

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“Rent,” Steve said. “Two kids, a pregger wife.”

“F---ing rent?”

The crowd was on its feet — the walls shuddering, the rafters shim­mying. If the roof suddenly shot straight up into the sky, Danny doubted he’d feel surprise. Johnny Green entered the ring without a robe. He stood in his corner and banged his gloves together, his eyes staring up at something in his skull.

“He doesn’t even know where he is,” Danny said.

“Yeah, he does,” Steve said, “and he’s coming to the center.”

“Steve, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t ‘Christ’s sake’ me. Get in there.”

In the center of the ring, the referee, Detective Bilky Neal, a former boxer himself, placed a hand on each of their shoulders. “I want a clean fight. Barring that, I want it to look clean. Any questions?”

Danny said, “This guy can’t see.”

Green’s eyes were on his shoes. “See enough to knock your head off.”

“I take my gloves off, could you count my fingers?”

Green raised his head and spit on Danny’s chest.

Danny stepped back. “What the f---?” He wiped the spittle off on his glove, wiped his glove on his shorts.

Shouts from the crowd. Beer bottles shattered against the base of the ring.

Green met his eyes, Green’s sliding like something on a ship. “You want Green met his eyes, Green’s sliding like something on a ship. “You want to quit, you quit. In public, though, so I still get the purse. Just grab the megaphone and quit.”

“I’m not quitting.”

“Then fight.”

Bilky Neal gave them a smile that was nervous and furious at the same time. “They’s getting restless out there, gents.”

Danny pointed with a glove. “Look at him, Neal. Look at him.”

“He looks fine to me.”

“This is bullsh--. I — ”

Green’s jab caught Danny’s chin. Bilky Neal backed up, top speed, and waved his arm. The bell rang. The crowd roared. Green shot an­other jab into Danny’s throat.

The crowd went crazy.

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