Coleman Seizes Another Shamus

Directly on the heels of news about this year’s David Thompson Special Service Award recipient comes word (via The Gumshoe Site) that Long Island, New York, author Reed Farrel Coleman’s Where It Hurts (Putnam)—his book introducing former Suffolk County cop Gus Murphy—has won the 2017 Shamus Award for Best Private Eye Novel. This marks the fourth time Coleman has scored a Shamus; the first was in 2006, when his Moe Prager novel The James Deans received Best Private Eye Paperback Original honors.

Also in contention for the 2017 Best P.I. Novel prize—which is sponsored by the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA)—were The Graveyard of the Hesperides, by Lindsey Davis (Minotaur); Fields Where They Lay, by Timothy Hallinan (Soho Crime); With 6 You Get Wally, by Al Lamanda (Gale Cengage); and The Stardom Affair, by Robert S. Levinson (Five Star).

Ordinarily this announcement would have been made during a special Shamus Awards Dinner held in concert with Bouchercon. However, there will be no such celebration at this October’s Bouchercon in Toronto, Ontario (it was cancelled in July); Gumshoe Site editor Jiro Kimura reports that Coleman’s victory was instead broadcast “in the fall issue of the PWA newsletter.” That same bulletin declares the winners of three other 2017 Shamus accolades:

Best Original Private Eye Paperback: The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown, by Vaseem Khan (Red Hook)

Also nominated: The Detective and the Chinese High-Fin, by Michael Craven (HarperCollins); Hold Me, Babe, by O’Neil De Noux (Big Kiss); The Knife Slipped, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Hard Case Crime); and My Bad, by Manuel Ramos (Arte Publico Press).

Best First Private Eye Novel: IQ, by Joe Ide (Little, Brown)

Also nominated: Fever City, by Tim Baker (Europa Editions); Deep Six, by D.P. Lyle (Oceanview); The Second Girl, by David Swinson (Little, Brown); and Soho Sins, by Richard Vine (Hard Case Crime).

Best Private Eye Short Story: “A Battlefield Reunion,” by Brendan DuBois (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, June 2016)

Also nominated: “Keller’s Fedora,” by Lawrence Block (LB
Productions e-book); “Stairway from Heaven,” by Åke Edwardson
(from Stockholm Noir, edited by Nathan Larson and Carl-Michael Edenborg; Akashic); “A Dangerous Cat,” by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins (The Strand Magazine, February-May 2016); and “Archie on Loan,” by Dave Zeltserman (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September-October 2016).

Congratulations to all of the nominees.

READ MORE: “Kennealy Savors the Spotlight,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

Congratulations, Reed Farrel Coleman!

From the Web site Deadline Hollywood comes this news:

After a long manhunt that involved months of interviews with substantial authors, Michael Mann has found his co-writer for the prequel novel to Mann’s landmark [1995] crime film Heat. Writing with Mann will be Reed Farrel Coleman, the four-time Edgar Award-nominated author who is up for the award tonight for his 2016 novel Where It Hurts, part of mystery series that revolves around the retired Suffolk County cop Gus Murphy. Coleman will collaborate with Mann to tell an origin story involving the characters that populated the Al Pacino-Robert De Niro-led ensemble drama that Mann scripted, directed, and produced. The novel will be published next year under the Michael Mann imprint at William Morrow/HarperCollins.

(Hat tip to Linda L. Richards)

Bullet Points: Passover Edition

• Here’s a book I very much look forward to adding to my library: The Art of Robert E. McGinnis. Slated for release by publisher Titan in October, and put together by McGinnis and co-author Art Scott, it will trace the career of this Ohio-born artist “best known for his book cover and movie poster work”--someone whose illustrations I have frequently highlighted in my Killer Covers blog. I can’t tell, by reading the brief Amazon write-up, whether this is an expansion of a 2001 book McGinnis and Scott put together, or a wholly new volume; I hope it’s the latter. By the way, the cover art decorating this Titan book appeared originally on the 1960 novel Kill Now, Pay Later, by Robert Kyle.

• I was sorry to hear that Minnesota businessman-turned-novelist Harold Adams died on April 4 at 91 years of age. He was the author of 17 novels featuring Carl Wilcox, an itinerant sign painter and “happenstance private eye” who operated in the small South Dakota town of Corden during the Great Depression. That Shamus Award-winning series began with Murder (1981) and concluded with Lead, So I Can Follow (1999). Adams also penned two novels (1987’s When Rich Men Die and 2003’s The Fourth of July Wake) about a wise-ass contemporary TV news anchor, Kyle Champion, who winds up taking on P.I. work himself. “I consider Harold Adams to be one of the major voices of his generation of crime fiction writers,” Ed Gorman wrote in the Minnesota mystery anthology Writes of Spring (2012). “His unique voice, his strong sense of story and structure, and his rich, wry depictions of the Depression-era Midwest have stayed with me long after the works of flashier writers have faded. There’s music in his books, a melancholy prairie song that you carry with you for life … I consider him to be a master.” Learn more about Adams here.

• Good-bye, as well, to a couple of other famous figures: Peter Matthiessen, whose National Book Award-winning works The Snow Leopard (1978) and Shadow Country (2008) sit prominently on the bookcase just in front of my office desk; and Mickey Rooney, the child actor who grew up to wed the lovely Ava Gardner, appear in such films as Drive a Crooked Road (1953), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and The Black Stallion (1979), and headlined the 1982 TV series One of the Boys. Matthiessen was 86 when he passed away on April 5; Rooney succumbed a day later, at age 93.

• The 2014 Edgar Allan Poe Awards won’t be given out until May 1. (Here are the contenders.) But publisher Open Road Integrated Media is already endeavoring to build up excitement with this infographic, which looks back at the breakdown between male and female winners, the occupations of the protagonists in those books, the two U.S. presidents who’ve been given Edgars, and much more.

• Speaking of Open Road, one of its digital marketing associates, Emma Pulitzer, asked me to pass along word that the publisher is “looking for someone to join our mystery team in marketing. … The job is called ‘Digital Marketing Manager – Fiction,’ although it’s specifically for mysteries.” Learn more here.

• I’ve previously featured, on this page, the trailer for Frank Sinatra’s 1967 detective film, Tony Rome. But I have to confess, that I have never taken the time to read Marvin Albert’s novels featuring Rome, the Miami police detective turned gumshoe who lives on a boat called The Straight Pass. In fact, I was only reminded of the protagonist because William Patrick Maynard wrote about him last week in the blog Black Gate. As he explains: “The first book in the series, Miami Mayhem (1960), plays like an update of Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), with its exposure of the dirty secrets wealthy families can afford to hide most of the time. The second title, Lady in Cement (1961), sees Tony stumble into the middle of a sordid mob connection after discovering the corpse of a nude woman in a block of cement while snorkeling in the deep blue sea. The third and final book, My Kind of Game (1962), sees Tony on a mission of revenge when the surrogate father figure who mentored him in the private eye business is worked over while investigating big crime in a small town.” If anyone out there has read the Rome novels, let us all know what you thought of them in the Comments section below.

• In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chris Walsh revisits the largely forgotten TV movie The Execution of Private Slovik, which starred Martin Sheen, was written by Columbo creators William Link and Richard Levinson, was based on a tragic episode from World War II, and aired 40 years ago last month. Walsh’s piece is here.

• Belated congratulations to Reed Farrel Coleman, who has been tapped to compose four new novels in Robert B. Parker’s series about small-town Massachusetts police chief Jesse Stone. Commenting on this assignment in his blog, Coleman said, “Jesse Stone is a character with enormous appeal for me. I’d written an essay about Jesse entitled ‘Go East, Young Man: Robert B. Parker, Jesse Stone, and Spenser’ for the book In Pursuit of Spenser, edited by Otto Penzler. In doing the research for the essay, I found a rare and magical thing that only master writers like Mr. Parker could create: the perfectly flawed hero. Easy for writers to create heroes. Easy for writers to create characters with flaws. Not so easy to do both. But Robert B. Parker was an alchemist who turned simple concepts into enduring characters.” Coleman’s first Stone book, Robert B. Parker’s Blind Spot, is due for release in September by Putnam.

• Laura Lippman (After I’m Gone) picks her 10 favorite books about missing persons for Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Her most unexpected choice may be Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

• Dashiell Hammett--Sherlockian parodist?

• Darkness, Darkness, John Harvey’s 12th and last Detective Charlie Resnick novel, isn’t due out until September. In the meantime, though, UK readers can appreciate--this month!--an e-book short-story prequel to that release, Going Down Slow. Harvey offers background to the brief tale in his own blog.

• Editor Steven Powell, who wrote on this page two years ago about Theodora Keogh’s forgotten 1962 novel, The Other Girl, notes in The Venetian Vase that “Pharos Editions, a Seattle-based press, has just reissued Keogh’s novels The Tattooed Heart (1953) and My Name Is Rose (1956) in a single volume featuring an introduction by Lidia Yuknavitch. Apparently, this is the first time these novels have been reissued since the 1970s, although Olympia Press did reissue Keogh’s other novels between 2002 and 2007.” Go to the Pharos Editions Web site for more information.

• Speaking of forgotten things … Longstreet!

• Double O Section has the trailer for A Most Wanted Man, a forthcoming film adapted from John le Carré’s 2008 novel of the same name, and featuring “one of the final lead performances from the brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman.” Watch it here.

• And the Pierce Brosnan espionage film November Man (based on the late Bill Granger’s 1987 novel, There Are No Spies) has finally, at long last, been given a U.S. release date of August 27.

“I Don’t Do Any Planning in My Writing”

Here’s an interview I wish I’d had for The Rap Sheet: Jen Forbus’ two-installment conversation (Part I, Part II) with Reed Farrel Coleman, author of the new Moe Prager novel, Innocent Monster (Tyrus).

Coleman Back on Top

If there are second chances in life, few are more deserving of one than Reed Farrel Coleman. He garnered well-deserved attention in 2002 with the first book in his Moe Prager series, Walking the Perfect Square. From there, it seemed he was on track to become the next breakout star of the private-eye genre. But like Ross Macdonald, to whose work Coleman’s bears an occasional resemblance, success wasn’t happening overnight. Unlike Macdonald, Coleman didn’t have an Alfred A. Knopf patiently waiting for him to blossom, after first putting together a sizable backlist. Coleman continued to gather raves for his subsequent Prager novels, Redemption Street (2004) and the Anthony, Barry, and Shamus-award winning The James Deans (2005), the latter of which was picked up by Viking after Perfect Square’s splash. However, Viking passed on another Prager, prompting outraged fans (myself one of them) to cry, “Save Moe!”

Moe Prager was ultimately saved. But for a time there, it looked as if his Brooklyn-born creator would have to start all over again from scratch. In 2006, Coleman slipped on the enigmatic identity of Tony Spinosa, the alleged bastard son of a wiseguy and a rabbi’s daughter, to write Hose Monkey, his first book with upstart independent press Bleak House Books. It appeared Coleman was rebooting his career with a new name.

But the Bleak House folks liked the follow-up to The James Deans. And they liked Reed Farrel Coleman as Reed Farrel Coleman. So in 2007, Moe returned in his 1990s-based Soul Patch. That novel had a George Pelecanos vibe to it, rooted as much in the early ’70s as it was in the “present” of the 1990s. The Mystery Writers of America thought highly of it, too, nominating Coleman for an Edgar Award.

Not content with seeing Moe’s life story simply continue while the early Moe books all went out of print, Busted Flush Press went back and obtained rights to reprint Coleman’s first three Prager novels. So with the publication of this year’s Empty Ever After, Moe is not only saved, but his 52-year-old “father” is thriving. And so is his alter-ego, Tony Spinosa.

Of Empty Ever After, Bleak House says:

There are no second acts for the dead ... or are there?

For over twenty years, retired NYPD officer and P.I. Moe Prager, has been haunted by the secret that would eventually destroy his family. Now, two years after the fallout from the truth, more than secrets are haunting the Prager family. Moe Prager follows a trail of grave robbers from cemetery to cemetery, from ashes to ashes and back again in order to finally solve the enigma of his dead brother-in-law Patrick. He plunges deeper into the dark recesses of his past than ever before, revisiting all of his old cases, in order to uncover the twisted alchemy of vengeance and resurrection. Will Moe, at last, put his past to rest? Will he find the man who belongs in that vacant grave, or will it remain empty, empty ever after?

Coleman recently took a few minutes out of his writing schedule to answer my questions about Moe Prager, Tony Spinosa, and poetry, among other things.

Jim Winter: Your first Bleak House effort, Hose Monkey, was published under the name Tony Spinosa. Was that a one-shot deal? Or do you see yourself doing different types of books under that name, like Stephen King and Richard Bachman?

Reed Farrel Coleman: Actually, I’ve written a short story under that [pseudonym], “Killing O’Malley,” [which appears] in the short-story anthology I edited, Hard-boiled Brooklyn. And I have a second novel coming out as a follow-up to Hose Monkey. This October, The Fourth Victim will be hitting the shelves. I plan to pull Tony Spinosa out from time to time when it suits the situation.

JW: Soul Patch was a great slice of Brooklyn and goes into the past almost as much as it brings Moe to the eve of the 1990s. Have you ever thought of visiting Moe’s days as a cop for an entire novel?

RFC: That’s a great question. Unfortunately, the whole point of Moe’s career in uniform was that it wasn’t very exciting. The one memorable thing he did on the job was to rescue Marina Conseco from that water tank. That issue is so thoroughly explored in the last two Moe books [Soul Patch and Empty Ever After] that I don’t think I could turn his rescue of Marina into a new book. I’m also not a big fan of revisionism, so I don’t want to go back and create a life for Moe that isn’t true to the books I’ve already written.

JW: In Empty Ever After, you’ve pretty much knocked Moe down as far as he can go, then you knock him down further. Is this the endgame for Moe Prager?

RFC: That depends on whether I get a new contract for more Moe books. Are there more Moe books in me to be written? Absolutely. I simply needed to turn the corner with the series, because the original arc ... had run its course. In order to change course in such a well-established series, I had to resolve most of the open questions and to rid the series of most of the old cast of characters. In the new Moe books, there will still be a connection to his past, but the thrust of the newer books will have a new emotional touchstone.

JW: You once edited a poetry magazine that actually turned a profit. Do you still do poetry?

RFC: I just wrote a poem for the second edition of Gerald So’s The Lineup. But mostly I spend my writing energy on prose.

JW: Tell me about Bleak House. You have three novels with them now. How have they been to work with?

RFC: Well, by this October, it will be four novels, one short-story anthology as editor, and two as a contributor. It’s been a very interesting ride. I think we’ve grown together, and with growth comes growing pains. There have been some rough moments, but there always are. In spite of the rough patches, I can never say a bad word about Ben [LeRoy] and Alison [Janssen]’s commitment to their authors and the work. And one of the great parts of doing work with an up-and-coming publisher is the level of involvement the author is permitted. Bleak House never acts as if they know everything about publishing and marketing; they use my experience, all their authors’ experiences, as a resource. They also let me have input on everything from cover design to release date. It’s a relationship that’s been very good for both parties.

JW: What else are you up to these days?

RFC: I’m working on the “big” novel. I would tell you about it, but then ...

JW: What’s next for you?

RFC: Hair growth! In reality, there’s a lot going on. David Thompson at Busted Flush is reissuing all the early Moe books with new forewords by Megan Abbott, Peter Spiegelman, and Michael Connelly. The James Deans will be reissued later this year or early next. Also coming out next year is Tower, the novel written by Ken Bruen and me. I’m very excited about Tower, because it is a very different kind of novel and a departure for me.

READ MORE: “Reed Coleman Writes of Crime and Brooklyn,” by Michael Wilson (The New York Times); “Reed Farrel Coleman Revealed” (Behind the Black Mask); Reed Farrel Coleman Interviewed by Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen Press.

A Brooklyn State of Mind

Reed Farrel Coleman, whose most recent novel is Soul Patch, is interviewed by the estimable Megan Abbott (The Song Is You) at the Mystery Readers International site. My second-favorite quote from their satisfyingly long exchange:

MA: Why did you choose to have [your protagonist] Moe [Prager] married? Why do you think it’s still the exception to have a married PI?

RFC: I’m not certain it was as calculated when I began to write the series as I remember it, but I did know that I wanted to turn [Philip] Marlowe and [Matt] Scudder on their ears. As I’ve said, as you’ve heard me say, the gun-toting, divorced or single Christian, alcoholic, white guy, loner PI character has been done as well as it could be done. Yet, there is just something so appealing to me about that kind of character. I challenged myself to write a character like Marlowe and Scudder, but one who was happily--for the most part--married, one who had [a] good source of income beyond his PI work, but was still an everyman. The challenge, as I found out writing Walking the Perfect Square, was not in creating such a character, but making him compelling. That’s always the challenge, though, isn’t it? Married PIs are the exception because a spouse limits the possibilities. But I’ve found that limiting the possibilities makes you work harder and helps avoid falling into cliché.

But my favorite quote is this one:

MA: If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend all the time you now spend writing?

RFC: Being fucking miserable and earning a respectable wage.

You can read the whole interview here.