Dan Flanigan Books

"The only thing worth saying is ineffable."

Dan Flanigan

Who Is Dan?

Dan Flanigan is a novelist, poet, and playwright, as well as a practicing lawyer. His novel, Mink Eyes, is set in 1986 and explores the “greed is good” dynamic and the cultural tensions and gender complexities of that era. It is a modern hero’s quest in mystery-detective form. Dan has also developed a screenplay version of Mink Eyes. He has also published a book of verse and prose poetry, Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death. He will soon publish Dewdrops, a collection of his shorter fiction. He has also written the full-length plays—Secrets (based on the life of Eleanor Marx) and Moondog’s Progress(based on the life of Alan Freed). His inspirations include J.S. Bach, Shakespeare, Rumi, Bob Dylan, Secretariat (yes, the horse), Joseph Campbell, Turgenev, Yeats, Joyce, Robert Stone, and E.L. Doctorow.

Dan's Latest Books

Dewdrops

People on the Verge

Dewdrops--The life and death struggles of a charismatic but tormented drug rehab counselor and his patients.

Some Cold War Blues—A neighborhood snowball fight erupts into a thing as close to war as an 11-year-old American boy is likely to face.

On The Last Frontier—Old and broke in Juneau with winter coming on . . .

“The diverse array of stories in…DEWDROPS, are compelling and realistic. Flanigan’s characters are vulnerable, and their struggles with addiction and loss are recognizable.”- Thaïs Miller, Author of The Subconscious Mutiny and Other Stories (2009)

Mink Eyes

October 1986–the tarnished heart of the “Greed Is Good” Decade. Private detective Peter O’Keefe, physically scarred and emotionally battered Viet Nam vet, is hired by his childhood best friend, ace attorney Mike Harrigan, to investigate what appears on the surface to be merely a rinky-dink mink farm Ponzi scam. But, instead, O’Keefe finds himself snared in a vicious web—of money laundering, cocaine smuggling, and murder—woven by the mysterious mobster known as “Mr. Canada”. Also caught in Mr. Canada’s web is the exquisite Tag Parker, who might be the girl of O’Keefe’s dreams—or his nightmares. This is serious fiction wrapped in the cloak of a hard hitting, exciting detective novel—a story that has it all—terror, murder, addiction, sex, obsession, crime, and doom, yes—but also friendship, fatherhood, integrity, duty, self-sacrifice, and love. Dan Flanigan is a veteran practicing lawyer who gives us an insider’s real-world view of the formal and informal workings of our legal system and the schemes and scams germinating in the seamy underbelly of our business world.

Tenebrae

“Mink Eyes” introduces us to Dan Flanigan the novelist. “Tenebrae” shows us another side of Dan – the poet. The lead poem in this collection, “Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death,” is a lovely bracelet of verse and prose poems that link brilliantly together in a gripping narrative and wrenching emotional journey through the illness and death of his wife. Other poems in the book – including several snapshot portraits of Dan’s extended family under the title “The Irish in America” – reflect this same grappling with the fundamental issues of our lives – loss, change, growth, hope, despair and acceptance, reflecting throughout a compassionate embrace of the human condition. These are truly poems for the people – plain but exquisitely crafted, direct as a dagger, and expressed in a language that is both elegant and easy to understand at the same time. They reach from the heart to the heart.