Once Moe With Feeling

Reed Farrel Coleman is a busy, busy man these days. Last month he released the standalone title GUN CHURCH as an audio book; this month sees the latest Moe Prager, HURT MACHINE, land on a bookshelf near you, courtesy of Tyrus Books. Will it be the last in the Moe series? Quoth Reed:

“HURT MACHINE is the 7th novel in the Moe Prager Mystery series. When the series began with the original novel, WALKING THE PERFECT SQUARE, Moe was in his thirties. He had just been forced to retire from the NYPD due to an inglorious injury and knee surgery. He was alone, childless, in search of a future without his beloved job. In Hurt Machine, Moe is in his sixties. He and his brother own a large chain of wine shops. He’s been twice married, has one daughter on the verge of marriage, and has only worked one case as a PI in the last several years. Let’s face it, it’s tough to write a credible PI series when your protagonist takes long naps and worries about his Lipitor dosage. Yes, Moe Prager is coming around that last turn.
  “In HURT MACHINE, his daughter is two weeks away from her wedding when Moe receives very grave news about his health. Things get even more complicated when his ex-wife and former PI partner, Carmella Melendez, shows up after a nine year absence, asking for a desperate favour. A favour Moe is not inclined to grant. It seems Carmella’s estranged sister has been murdered outside a popular Brooklyn pizzeria, but no one, not even the NYPD, seems very motivated to find the killer. Why? That’s the question, isn’t it?
  “Fans of the series needn’t worry, though. The series isn’t coming to an end with HURT MACHINE. I plan on two more novels in the series. ONION STREET, the Moe book I’ve recently begun, is a prequel and will feature Moe just before he joins the NYPD. He’s an 18 year-old student at Brooklyn College and one of his closest friends gets in way over his head. As for the last book in the series … we’ll just see. It’s been a hell of a ride and I don’t know that it will be that easy to let go of my old pal, Moe.” - Reed Farrel Coleman

  Yes, yes - but is it any good? Well, Publishers Weekly likes it, for starters …

Origins: Reed Farrel Coleman

Being the latest in what will probably be yet another short-lived series, in which yours truly reclines on a hammock by the pool with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets a proper writer talk about the origins of his or her characters and stories. This week: Reed Farrel Coleman, author of INNOCENT MONSTER. To wit:

“Every author is sick to death of the questions about where ideas come from. We’re sick of the question because, as writers, the answer is so bloody obvious. Our ideas come from everywhere: from newspapers, from television, from life, from an incident that happened thirty years ago, from some seed planted in our twisted little brains. Where our protagonists come from is less obvious and much more interesting. In the two novels (HOSE MONKEY, THE FOURTH VICTIM) I wrote under the pen name Tony Spinosa, my protagonist, Joe Serpe, was a product of circumstance: mine and the world’s. For several years, I’d been making cash driving a truck and delivering home heating oil (a form of diesel fuel once popular in the northeast USA). I came to truck driving late in life, so, unlike driving a car, the process was fascinating to me. I also enjoyed the very physical nature of the work, so different than my writing. Hence Joe Serpe would drive a heating oil delivery truck. For once I was writing about something I knew about first hand. The other half of Joe’s equation was his struggle to come to grips with personal tragedy in the aftermath of 9/11.
  “Moe Prager, the protagonist of my most popular novels, is a different matter altogether. Moe is the product of another failed protagonist from an aborted series and from the plot of a novel that shaped him as much as anything else. In the 90s while I was writing my first three novels (LIFE GOES SLEEPING, LITTLE EASTER, THEY DON’T PLAY STICKBALL IN MILWAUKEE) featuring insurance investigator cum novelist Dylan Klein, I tried to write a second series featuring a Jewish, Brooklyn-born, hotshot NYPD homicide detective named Moe Einstein. Problem was my grasp exceeded my craft and though the novels had their strong points, they weren’t publishable. I didn’t have the chops to pull them off and Moe Einstein—Jesus, can you imagine all the lame puns I generated with that name—was too clever by half. I hadn’t yet developed my own voice to a point where I could escape the clichés and overdone conceits of the genre. Still, Moe Einstein stuck with me. I liked the fact that he struggled with his religious identity and that he was wed to his Brooklyn neighborhood. I liked that he was unconventional and loyal to his family.
  “Well, by the time I came to write my fourth novel, I was faced with a dilemma. I could either try to continue writing the Dylan Klein series or forge ahead into new ground. I tried to write DK4, but it just wasn’t working because of something I’d done plot-wise in Stickball that would have caused me to make a major shift in book 4. Looking back at it, I think I unconsciously sabotaged the series because I had taken it as far as I could. Basically, I had used the first three books—plus the two unpublished Moe Einstein books—to teach myself how to write. If you read my DK novels, you can see the growth for yourselves. Frustrated, I searched for a new direction. Boom! In New York Magazine, a story about a missing college student. I remembered reading many stories like it over the course of my life: a college student, usually male, comes into Manhattan for a night of partying and disappears off the face of the earth. What happened to them, I wondered? What were their stories? Who could the detective be to answer those questions? Moe Einstein raised his hand and volunteered and I picked him…sort of.
  “Moe kept his first name, but lost the Einstein. And now Moe was short for Moses because he would lead people to the Promised Land, but never quite reach it himself. I emphasized his allegorical nature by naming his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam. Moe Prager was born. This Moe would not be a hotshot detective, but an everyman cop, a guy in uniform who gets hurt on the job but in a completely inglorious manner. He had to be someone any reader could relate to. In uniform, Moe had done one great deed, but was never really rewarded for it. That’s something I know I can relate to. Plus Moe would be intimately close to the reader. He would do more than tell you what he was doing. He would tell you what he was thinking and, most importantly, what he was feeling. So Moe was an outgrowth of an earlier character and the plot of the book I was writing. Yet, Moe is such a fine character, I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t have found my way to him no matter what.” - Reed Farrel Coleman

INNOCENT MONSTER is the sixth Moe Prager novel. Reed Farrel Coleman has won the Shamus Award for Best Novel of the Year three times as well as the Barry and Anthony, and has twice been nominated for the Edgar.

A GONZO NOIR: Reed All About It, Etc.

I’ve mentioned the Holden Caulfield impulse before on these pages, the Holden Caulfield impulse being the one where Holden says that sometimes when you finish a book you’d like to be able to call up the author and tell him what a great book it was. Thanks to the interweb, I’ve been able to act on that impulse a couple of times over the last few years. One of those times was shortly after I read Reed Farrel Coleman’s (right) THE JAMES DEANS, which I read in one sitting out on a balcony on a rainy day in Croatia while my beloved went shopping: just me, coffee, cigarettes and Moe Prager. A damn fine day it was too, rain or no rain. Anyway, I dropped Reed Farrel Coleman a line to tell him how brilliant I thought the book was, and one thing led to another, and he ended up writing me a very generous blurb for THE BIG O. Which was nice.
  What was nicer was, at last year’s Bouchercon in Baltimore, I was at the bar with John McFetridge when I spotted Reed Coleman. “Hold on,” says I, “there’s Reed Coleman. I need to buy that man a drink.” Except Reed Farrel Coleman went, “No, man – I’m buying you a drink.”
  As Holden Caulfield might say, albeit without the sarcasm, the man’s a goddamn prince.
  All of which is a long-winded preamble to saying that Reed Farrel Coleman has been kind enough to blurb A GONZO NOIR. To wit:

“Stop waiting for Godot – he’s here. Declan Burke takes the existential dilemma of characters writing themselves and turns it on its ear and then some. He gives it body and soul … an Irish soul. If you want to think while you’re being entertained, read this book.” – Reed Farrel Coleman, two-time Shamus Award-winning author of EMPTY EVER AFTER

  Like I say, the man’s a gent …
  In one of those lovely twists of fate the universe offers up once in a while, the aforementioned John ‘Fetch’ McFetridge (right) chipped in with his two cents early the following morning. As with Adrian McKinty, the man’s a mate, a good bloke and a terrific writer, and not necessarily in that order. Anyway, quoth John:

“In this era of formulaic, pre-fab, test-marketed, focus-grouped, pre-packaged, no-risk sequels, remakes and the same-old same-old all over again, A GONZO NOIR is shockingly original and completely entertaining. Post-modern crime fiction at its very best.” – John McFetridge, author of EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE

  Two things I’m liking about the reactions to A GONZO NOIR. Well, three, given that I’m chuffed people seem to like it, obviously. But one thing I do like is how quickly the reactions are coming back, given that the manuscripts only went out about 10 days ago; and another thing is that the people who’ve been so generous already, namely Ken Bruen and Adrian McKinty, and now Reed Farrel Coleman and John McFetridge, are writers who don’t stand to benefit anything by doing so. I’ve raised the spectre of log-rolling already, but I’m only flattering myself when I do that – these guys have nothing to gain by lending me a hand, because a bottom-feeder like me is no position to return the log-roll favour. I can write about them on Crime Always Pays, of course, but that amounts to about three molecules of publicity oxygen …
  Anyway, you can analyse these things too closely. The bottom line is that terrific writers seem to like the book, and that they’re prepared to say so. All hopes of publication and / or earning nappy vouchers aside, that kind of reaction is priceless …