I have a soul patch, so there was a personal sympathy involved when I read Reed Farrel Coleman's award-winning novel Soul Patch. I finished it late last night. I liked it very much, as I hinted at in the previous post, but not as much as I liked Coleman's previous novel, The James Deans.
I said earlier that it seems that Coleman had a stricter editor at Plume. I'd've taken out almost all the stuff that was put in italics to show Coleman's private eye, Moe Prager, thinking to himself. I didn't find the bits necessary and they stopped the narrative flow. Some of the dialogue was a bit too cryptic for me and there were some passages that I thought were overwritten (and at times I thought that Moe Prager is a bore to be thinking all his thoughts about mankind and loneliness and angst and fear. C'mon, man, get a grip!).
But all in all, Soul Patch is a good example of the strong condition the American private eye novel is in. I'd like to bring Coleman to the Finnish audiences, but we'll see about that.
PS. Did you know that in Finnish "soul patch" is also called "pussy brush"?
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