pop

Title: Pop

Genre: Drug heist crime fiction set in Boston in the late-‘70s

Style: Holden Caulfield-esque stream of consciousness, like talking to a close friend

Format(s): Play script (theatre) and novel (70,000 words)

You can read a 50-page sample of the novel here.

Year(s) written: Play (finalized in 2005, produced in 2006) / novel (2010)

It’s a little bit like…:  Saturday Night Fever meets Blow meets (oddly) Catcher in the Rye

 Inspiration: This story is inspired by true events. In Boston in the late-‘70s, a major drug heist went completely belly up when two young drug dealers screwed it up at the last minute. The news clip from the time states that the cab driver was a critical link in destroying plans at the last minute, noting that one of the guys was a cheap tip.

Otherwise, the characterizations, details, dialogue and story are all fictionalized.

History: The play was produced in the spring of 2006 at 42nd Street’s Manhattan Ensemble Theatre and was a huge success.

I turned it into a book in 2010.

Synopsis:

It’s 1979, and charming drug dealer Patrick O’Shannahan (“Pop” to his friends) is down on his luck.  Arrested for dealing cocaine the morning of his high school graduation, Pop has an epiphany: he’ll never get out of the slums of South Boston if he doesn’t strike it rich.  Once his uncle busts him out of jail early, he decides he’ll do one more deal, and this one’s going to be big.  The biggest drug heist Boston has ever seen.

Because “the only way to win big is to play big”, Pop calls in every favor and puts everything on the line to make it happen.  He’s involved his anorexic 16-year-old sister, his nitwit best friend Jimmy Nuts, and the scariest drug lord in town.

Everything seems perfectly in place.  Nothing could possibly go wrong, right?  Better not, because if it does, Pop will go away for a really long time.

But as the date approaches, something isn’t right.  Even though he prides himself on having razor sharp instincts, Pop’s distracted by his girlfriend’s mysterious pregnancy.  And wouldn’t you know, the day of the heist is the same as his mother’s electric shock treatments, in a constantly failed effort to cure her “nervousness”.  

Who, then, is Pop’s downfall?

Pop was inspired by a true life, Boston-based drug heist gone wrong.  Having known the real-life “Pop” her whole life, author Liza Lentini creates a first-person, slice-of-life, comedic drama of betrayal, tainted love, 1970’s Boston, and the root of all evil: money.  It will warm your heart, win you over, and leave you begging for more of this self-professed superstar.  If Holden Caulfield was raised poor in South Boston in 1979, this is the story he would have told.