Coleman's and Bruen's Tower

Reed Farrel Coleman is one of my favourite new private eye writers - he has a great sense of tragedy, place and noir. I've read less of Ken Bruen's work, but what I've read has been good, especially London Boulevard (that's coming out in Finnish in a few months; see to it that you read this book). So their joint effort, Tower (out in 2009 from Busted Flush Press) was bound to be good - and my God, it is very good! It's both tragically and hilariously violent, very elliptic in style and narration (and actually pretty hard to follow at times) and there's also a nice twist or two in the middle. It's clear both writers had a good time writing this. See Cullen Callagher's review at Pulp Serenade.

Granted, I had some trouble getting into the flow of the narrative and I thought the ending could've been stronger, but I don't mind, since the other stuff is so good. No wonder this has been popular and victorious: it won Macavity for best novel and was nominated thus: Anthony: best original paperback, Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel: Legends, Book of the Year: Foreward Reviews, Crimespree Magazine: Best Novel of 2009.

Two new private eye novels: Coleman and Winslow

I've been reading some new private eye novels, as I'm writing an article on them (my research ain't what it used to be and seems like I'll have to do only with some interviews, but such is life). There was a boom in private eye fiction from, say, 2005 on, at the same time new interest in hardboiled and noir came forth, but it seems like the economic depression and the publishing crisis almost made the boom diminish and many writers are now publishing with smaller outfits or doing self-publications.

Still there are new interesting books. Don Winslow and Reed Farrel Coleman aren't exactly new, but both bring fresh voices to the genre that's been deemed defunct several times after Raymond Chandler's death. This is the case especially with Coleman, whose Moe Prager books are very touching and moving, even though there's not much action and Moe Prager is a pretty ordinary guy. It's just that his life is full of mistakes, lies, secrets and agony. The private eye's tragedic life has become a bit of a cliché nowadays (look for example at Declan Hughes's Ed Loy books or Russel McLean's The Good Son), but Coleman makes the theme much more real than many of his contemporaries. The Moe Prager books form an epos, starting from the seventies, ending up in the present day, and the newest one, Empty Ever After, is just as good as any in the series. (It's maybe slightly better than the previous one, Soul Patch, which suffered a bit from Moe Prager's stream of consciousness; I thought those bits were unnecessary.)

Don Winslow's Boone Daniels is a different case altogether. He's not doomed or tragedic, he only wants to surf. To make some money, he works as a reluctant private eye from time to time. He first appeared in The Dawn Patrol, which I recently read and liked quite a bit, even though there was too much of Robert B. Parker in it. I don't really care for the macho posturing about the honour code and all that, even though Boone Daniels keeps his mouth shut about these things more than Spenser. I liked the bits about the cultural and geographical history of surfing in California. There could've been more action in the book, though.

Soul Patch [with links added]

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"?