Listen to author Dennis Lehane's working-class Boston soundtrack

Dennis Lehane is known for writing best-selling thrillers such as Shutter Island, Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, all of which have been made into films.

Many of his novels are set in the Boston area and for Lehane, a native of the Dorchester area of the city, music played a pivotal role in inspiring him creatively.

His latest book is the recently published Since we Fell. He talked to q about the music that provided the soundtrack for his Dorchester upbringing, which featured many Irish and Polish descendants, countless pubs and an ingrained working class philosophy.

"The influence of Dorchester is all-encompassing," says Lehane. "It's in my first five novels. It was a very clannish world, it was a very proud world, it was a very violent world and it had an absolute strain of integrity that I'd never seen before or since, that I carried out into the world with me."

Pulp, 'Common People' 

The Pogues, 'Dirty Old Town'

Bruce Springsteen, 'Backstreets'

Joe Walsh, 'In the City'

— Produced by Ben Edwards