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Going well beyond most contemporary crime thrillers, bestselling author Dennis Lehane’s first five Kenzie and Gennaro novels published in the 1990s constitute probing noir parables of the sins-of-the-fathers motif including child abuse. The biblical concept of generational iniquity and its consequences is tied closely to what one character in Darkness, Take My Hand (1996) terms a “postmodern malaise” linked to a contemporaneous devaluation of human life. Although Lehane’s narrator in the series, private investigator Patrick Kenzie, is no moralist, he recognizes through the trauma of his own abuse at the hands of a tyrannical father contributing reasons for this pervasive corruption of values. By forthrightly addressing issues of moral ambiguity as they involve vexed questions of what is legal versus what is right, this popular novelist’s forensic texts transcend the usual limitations of his chosen genre.

This paper examines the role of suspense in Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island and Mystic River, focusing on the themes of unreliable truths and buried traumas. Both novels create a sense of uncertainty by employing unreliable narration and fragmented memories, which keep readers questioning the nature of reality. In Shutter Island, the blurring of madness and reality challenges the reader’s perception of truth. In Mystic River, hidden traumas from the past continuously shape the present, creating an underlying tension that unfolds gradually. The construction of suspense is achieved not just through plot developments, but by exploring the emotional and psychological complexities that arise from unresolved past experiences. The paper argues that Lehane’s use of suspense goes beyond traditional thriller tropes, serving as a tool to delve into deeper themes of trauma, identity, and moral ambiguity. The study demonstrates that suspense in Lehane’s work is a means to explore the instability of truth and the long-lasting impact of the past, creating a more profound narrative experience that challenges the boundaries of reality and perception.

Music in narrative film has historically been understood as performing a mood-setting or underscoring function. In this study, I challenge this restrictive notion and take an intermedial approach to film, positing that music is an important contributor to narrative communication. My investigation makes this argument through an investigation of narrative voice in film adaptations of literary texts, exploring in particular the translation of voice and structure across medial boundaries. More specifically, this dissertation investigates the relationship of music’s meaning- and narrative-shaping function to narrative voice in East German film adaptations. The social and political realities of the socialist East German state—a context in which expressive language was externally censored—creates a unique framework within which to explore questions of narration and voice. This dissertation argues that the great aural complexity and experimentation in DEFA cinema exploits music’s subtle extra-linguistic qualities to introduce semantic complexity and to address controversial topics. Each chapter in the study considers a different aspect of subjective literary narration and focuses on music’s role in translating the narrative voice across medial boundaries.The introduction contextualizes the questions that drive this dissertation against the backdrop of previous scholarship on film music, literary adaptations, and the Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft, or DEFA, the East German state-run film production company. It also establishes the multidisciplinary approach of this study, highlighting its relevance to scholarship in fields as diverse as film studies, musicology, narratology, East German Studies, and gender studies. The following three chapters present case studies on pairs of adaptations. Chapter One examines Konrad Wolf’s Goya (1971) and Heiner Carow’s Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973), focusing on the use of music and sound to create character subjectivity in the filmic medium by placing particular emphasis on the use of mediated music (Miceli) to create an inner subjective world belonging to a specific character or characters. Chapter Two explores unique deployments of music and sound to enact and represent the silencing subjective gendered voices in Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1964) and Frank Beyer’s Der Verdacht (1991). Each film manages the relationship of a subjective female voice to a collective voice largely coded as male. Chapter Three focuses on the use of multi-voiced musical melodies in Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner (1974) and Lothar Warnecke’s Unser kurzes Leben (1981) to translate complex, multi-voiced narration from novel to film. An epilogue examines some of the afterlives of the films and texts in this study to suggest some implications of this study beyond DEFA and Literaturverfilmungen.