Talking Politics |

The blue collar and the blue blood
Ray Flynn and Robin Moore seem worlds apart, but they’ve formed a fruitful writing partnership. Their success has as much to do with a changing political climate as it does with the stories they have to tell.

BY SETH GITELL

FORMER BOSTON MAYOR Raymond Flynn makes his home in a dense corner of South Boston off Marine Road, within sight of Dorchester Bay. Author Robin Moore inhabits a graceful redwood-and-glass home overlooking Concord’s Sudbury River. The lives the men have lived are as different as their dwelling places. The Irish-Catholic Flynn, elected as the city’s mayor for three terms beginning in 1983, defined an era of Boston politics. The Unitarian Moore — born Robert Lowell Moore Jr. — is the best-selling author of muscular books such as 1969’s The French Connection, the story of an international drug ring; 1965’s The Green Berets, about the Vietnam War; and 1994’s The Moscow Connection, about illegal Russian arms smuggling.

Yet the two men are now partners in a burgeoning writing venture. They co-wrote The Accidental Pope (St. Martin’s Press), a novel about the Vatican that was published last year to positive reviews and reached number five on last week’s local bestsellers list. And they’re finishing up a second collaboration, John Paul II: the Pope and the Man, a memoir of Flynn’s time at the Vatican that’s due out from St. Martin’s Press in February. Vatican gossip suggests that members of the College of Cardinals are scurrying to read the first book.

It says a lot that Flynn, whose last political contest saw him defeated by Michael Capuano in the 1998 race for the Eighth Congressional District, has spoken more frequently in recent days to the patrician Moore than to John Sweeney, the president of the AFL-CIO: those two old friends haven’t spoken since the former mayor endorsed George W. Bush in October. The pairing between Flynn and Moore began as a business relationship. But their working arrangement — which saw Flynn traveling to leafy Concord almost every day for two years — seems to symbolize the distance from the Democratic Party that the former Boston mayor has moved since his days as the city’s chief executive. Or perhaps it shows how far the Democratic Party has moved away from Flynn, who is now president of the Washington-based Catholic Alliance, a political-action group that broke two years ago from the Christian Coalition. At root, both Flynn, the lunch-bucket populist, and Moore, the swashbuckling Republican novelist, exemplify a mix of outspokenness and Old World honor that was rare during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

WHAT DO these two fellows have in common?” asks Flynn. “One an Irish-Catholic Democrat from South Boston — the other, you’re talking about a Unitarian blue blood from a Republican conservative family, who rubs elbows with the blue bloods. What’s the attraction? What does Ray Flynn from the rough-and-tumble world of street politics in Boston have in common with Robin and the Chablis crowd in Concord?”

What, indeed?

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