Reed Farrel Coleman Archives

Dirty Work (Gulliver Dowd) by Reed Farrel Coleman

Gulliver Dowd, Reed Farrel Coleman, Review Comments Off

May 152013

I read this one in one sitting, and not just because it is a book in the Rapid Reads series, designed for fast and easy reading. I just loved the characters, the story and the writing style too much to put it down.
Main character Gulliver Dowd is a New York PI and a midget (ironic first name, right?). All good private eyes are outsiders, and Gulliver's size makes him just that. If you think he won't be able to take of himself because of the fact you're wrong, however. He shows himself to be just as tough as Spenser and tougher than Moe Prager!
Asked to track down the daughter of an old flame who seems to be his own daughter as well Gulliver clashes with a mobster that gives him the chance to strut his hardboiled stuff. It's all written in a nice crisp style which comes over a bit more pulpy than Reed's normal work.
I just loved Gulliver. Don't think his size is just a gimmick. It's integral in the way he does his work and I loved the fact his size was used to illustrate what a good manhunter he is, with his nose close to the ground.
Excellent stuff! We need more books like these. Fast-paced work, great for reluctant readers and just the stuff we need to get more PI fans! Looking forward to the second Dowd novel and hoping there will be many more!

Onion Street (Moe Prager) by Reed Farrel Coleman

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Apr 242013

Reed Coleman has been a praised master of PI fiction for years now and his Moe Prager series has been a fan-favorite. This novel gives us the chance to see just how Moe became the determined, principled and tough investigator we know.
It is 1967, Moe is a student in New York. His girlfriend is beaten into a coma, prompting the young man to investigate. It turns out his friend, Bobby, is also in danger and soon Moe as well.
Facing gangsters, anarchists and the challenges of becoming a man Moe has a tough time in store for himself that explains how he became a cop and a PI later.
The story is exciting enough by itself, it's simply a good mystery story, but what makes it so great is the little pieces of foreshadowing of Prager's future and in fact some of the inventions that we take for granted right now. An interesting character study as well as a piece of good historical hardboiled fiction this one's recommended. Highly.

Background Check on DIrty Work & Onion Street with Reed Farrel Coleman

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Mar 222013

The popular multiple Shamus Award winner Reed Farrel Coleman has two books coming out soon. Of course I had to ask him all about these...

Tell us what to expect from your two new books, DIRTY WORK and ONION STREET.
DIRTY WORK is a very interesting project. It’s the first of two novellas featuring a little person (dwarf) PI named Gulliver Dowd. Gulliver is a bitter man whose cop sister has been murdered. Her murder has never been solved and Gulliver becomes a PI in order to find her killer. This hunt for his sister’s killer is the subtext to the story. The main case features a woman from Gulliver’s past who reveals a secret that can turn Gulliver’s world upside down. ONION STREET is the next to last Moe Prager Mystery and is a prequel set in 1967. It tells the story of how Moe became a policeman in the first place. It begins with his girlfriend being viciously beaten and left to die in the snow on a Brooklyn Street. Moe needs to find out why and who did it. And Moe learns for the first time that very little in life is as it seems.

How long did it take you to write them?
As DIRTY WORK is a novella, it took me about four or five weeks. ONION STREET took me about four months to write. But in all fairness, when you get to the eighth book in a series, even if it is a prequel, the canvas is already partially painted.

Tell us about how you were inspired to write them.

DIRTY WORK was sort of a creation between my agent, Bob Tyrrell at Raven Books—Rapid Reads, and myself. They’re a Canadian publisher whose market is the emerging or late to literacy reader. Those readers like hard-boiled and noir to. So they approached my agent who approached me about doing some books for them and I agreed. They loved Gulliver as a character and so do I. I think readers will love him too.
ONION STREET filled in a big gap in Moe Prager’s history that the fans have been curious about. It essentially tells the story of how the Moe readers know became Moe. I think readers, myself included, love to see the roots of how a character they identify with developed into that character. I have dropped hints throughout the course of the series, but I thought the time for hinting was over and to explore the origins of Moe more deeply.

Will we see Gulliver Dowd return after DIRTY WORK?
For at least one more adventure. I’ve written a second Gulliver Dowd entitled VALENTINO PIER. I hope readers respond as I hope they will to Gulliver because I really do enjoy writing him.
ONION STREET is the penultimate Prager novel. Will you be coming out with a new PI series to follow that up or would that be Gulliver?
Gulliver is a fun character, but I’m not sure I consider him a successor to Moe. I think I’d like to do some other type of writing for a while. I am halfway through with a Sci Fi YA novel and have an idea to write a more standard literary novel. But I love the PI form and I will probably always have a toe in the private detective genre.

Did writing the books take a lot of research?

In all honesty, I have always hated research. Google has made life much easier for someone like me. I try not to weight myself down with research. For me the thrill of fiction writing is making stuff up.

What scenes did you enjoy writing the most?

Let me answer that in reverse. The scenes I hate most, the ones I know most of my friends hate most, are bridge or transition scenes. Getting the reader from here to there can be awfully burdensome. I love writing scenes where the physical setting is a reflection or a foreshadowing of the action that will take place later in the novel. For instance, read any of my scenes that take place in Coney Island and you will know I loved writing those. I also can do dialogue in my sleep.

Who is your favorite among the characters in the books?

If I had to choose one character, I would choose Israel Roth. He’s the moral compass by which Moe steers his life. But Mr. Roth is terribly flawed and scarred. I just love him.

Is there anything else you'd like to say about the books?

Buy them! I’ve got a son in college and a daughter in graduate school.

"Hell, Hurt, Blood and Rapture" at Los Angeles Review of Books

Alan Glynn, David Laurence Wilson, Greg Shepard, Harry Whittington, Jake Hinkson, John Rector, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Pulp Press, Reed Farrel Coleman, Stark House Press, Tyrus Books Comments Off

Jan 232012

My most recent post at the Los Angeles Review of Books is called, "Hell, Hurt, Blood and Rapture." Check it out for reviews of Jake Hinkson's Hell on Church Street (New Pulp Press), Reed Farrel Coleman's latest Moe Prager book, Hurt Machine (Tyrus Books), John Rector's Already Gone (Thomas & Mercer), Alan Glynn's Bloodland (Picador), and a Harry Whittington anthology from Stark House Press that includes Rapture Alley, Winter Girl, and Strictly For the Boys.

Read the full article here.

Excerpts below:

Hell on Church Street is one of the rare novels that actually deserves the over-used comparison to Jim Thompson, not just because Webb follows in the footsteps of such crazed protagonists as Lou Ford (The Killer Inside Me) and Nick Corey (Pop. 1280), but because Hinkson takes a risk and deviates from Thompson’s iconic moulds.

Rector writes hardboiled noir with a rare poetic élan, tight, almost violently compressed action, and reticent melancholy... He’s already proven himself among the freshest and most stylistically austere voices working in the thriller field. In fact, labeling his books “thrillers” feels too limiting. There’s a tonal ambience and doleful vibe that permeates his work, which comes as a surprise, considering how action-packed and tense his narratives tend to be. Acutely visual, Already Gone pulses with cinematic urgency and visceral punch.

Reed Farrel Coleman’s Moe Prager saga, about a Brooklyn ex-cop turned reluctant wine merchant and occasional PI, is that rare series that improves with each new entry. Coleman is now up to the seventh book, Hurt Machine, and it’s not only the best one yet but also the darkest... Coleman’s novels, like Ed Gorman’s, impress not with distractingly complex plots (though they’re both certainly capable of spinning real page-turners) but with their profound clarity and expert simplicity. Coleman’s characters don’t need grand schemes or million dollar payoffs as motivations: as Moe too frequently discovers, there’s enough potential for lifetimes of pain in our everyday lives.

Alan Glynn’s Bloodland, a loosely related follow-up to 2009’s Winterland, is a stunningly intricate and timely piece of globalization noir... In its depiction of immoral business practices and the increasingly blurred lines between criminals and politicians, Bloodland is like an amped-up 21st-century version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. From the exploitation of human labor through umpteen middlemen to who-knows-where, Bloodland captures the fragmentary and alienating mechanism of international affairs with prismatic clarity.

The real prize of the anthology, however, is Strictly For the Boys, originally published in 1959, and the only one of the three to bear Whittington’s own name. The story is about a battered wife attempting to flee an abusive husband who refuses to let her, her mother, and her new boyfriend alone. Downright disturbing in its realism and sobering depiction of domestic violence, Strictly For the Boys displays a social consciousness that was prescient for its time, and which continues to be relevant today... Editor and scholar David Laurence Wilson deserves special commendation for his tireless efforts to restore Whittington’s reputation (and, in the case of Winter Girl, to restore the text itself). Wilson and Stark House publisher Greg Shepard give their books scholarly attention on par with the Library of America. Meticulously researched and lovingly edited, Stark House presents these forgotten paperback novels not as pulp curios, but as real literature, and set the bar high for other reprint series.

Hurt Machine (Moe Prager) by Reed Farrel Coleman

Moe Prager, Reed Farrel Coleman, Review Comments Off

Dec 282011

With this novel Reed shows us again why he’s the crime writer’s writer.
Moe Prager has been diagnosed with stomach cancer, but that doesn’t hold him back from investigating the stabbing of his ex-wife’s sister.
There’s a lot of people out in NY that hated her, because she neglected her duties as a paramedic and let a man die in a restaurant. Uncovering her secrets Moe infiltrates into the macho world of the New York fire department. And it must be said, Moe might be getting old, he might be getting sicker and sicker but he can still be a pretty tough guy.
What makes this such a great PI novel is the fact it never strays from what makes the genre great but also adds more. The mystery is very satisfying but we also can read the story as social commentary, as a more literary view of a man fighting age and disease. Excellent work.