An Interview With Reed Farrel Coleman, Author of Sleepless City

Reed Farrel Coleman has won more awards than Tom Brady. (See below.)  Called a hard-boiled poet by NPR's Maureen Corrigan and the "noir poet laureate" in the Huffington Post, Reed is the New York Times bestselling author of thirty-two novels including six in the Jesse Stone series for the late Robert B. Parker. He is a four-time recipient of the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel of the Year and a four-time Edgar Award nominee in three different categories. Reed has also received the Audie, Scribe, Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards. His latest novel, Sleepless City, will be published July 11 by Blackstone Publishing. He lives with his wife on Long Island, and it’s a real treat to have him on the blog.

 

One Bite at a Time: Reed, we’ve known each other quite a while, but this is the first time I’ve had

you on the blog. Welcome, and thanks for stopping by. Your new book, Sleepless City, drops July 11 from Blackstone. Tell us a little about it.

Reed Farrel Coleman: Thanks for having me, Dana. Ooh, “tell us a little bit about it.” Danger, Will Robinson!!!! That’s a trap for an author. Over the years I’ve found it best not to directly fall into that trap. I hope my answers to your other questions give the people reading this a better sense of the novel than I could with some pithy or longwinded response.

 

OBAAT: You’re best known for your Moe Prager books, though I like the Gus Murphys at least as much. How is Nick Ryan different from either Moe or Gus?

RFC: Nick is different from them in ways both latent and manifest. Neither Moe nor Gus ever made detective. Both spent their careers in uniform. So, when it came time, either out of choice or circumstance, to try their hands at PI work, they were ill-prepared for the task. Competent as they were at their jobs in uniform, they stumbled around as detectives, making all manner of missteps and mistakes. Nick on the other hand, is still on the job. Unlike Moe and Gus, he’s a detective and a damned good one. He’s superb at UC (undercover) work. The best on the NYPD. Furthermore, Nick, having spent two tours in Afghanistan, has a different sense of right, wrong, and justice from Gus and Moe. Nick is not afraid to act alone and to take matters into his own hands. Whereas Moe and Gus were stumbling about, Nick is a natural leader of men. He’s younger than Gus and Moe and he’s unattached. Well, at least he thinks he is. But when it comes to heart and protecting the lost and less fortunate, he’s not unlike them at all.   

 

OBAAT: Sleepless City is a departure for you. While it still has the same moral dilemmas that made your other books so compelling, Prager and Murphy often had to find ways to work with, or around, the system; Ryan has the juice to bend the system to his will when necessary. What sent you in that direction?

RFC: It grew out of a discussion with my agent, Shane Salerno. Shane, a famous screenwriter in his own right, and I were kicking around the idea of a different kind of protagonist. One who could both work within the system and outside the system. One who had the full power of the system behind him when he needed it, but who could still be a lone wolf when the situation called for it. You alluded to Moe Prager and Gus Murphy in your question. I loved writing those guys, but as I stated in my previous answer, they were both stumblers, sometimes barely able to tread water, guys almost always in over their heads. In Nick, I finally got the chance to write someone who wasn’t afraid to swim with the sharks, a character whom the sharks themselves might fear. It was a revelation to me to write a competent character, but one who still has the interest of the little guy at heart. That’s why the book works, I think. Nick may draw outside the lines, but he never forgets who’s important.

 

OBAAT: You’ve been called the “noir poet laureate” with good cause. While Sleepless City does not lack hard-boiled poetry, I sensed more of an edge to the writing than typical in your work. Was that deliberate for this book/series? Or is your style evolving in this direction?

RFC: I hope I never stop evolving as a writer and I hope I never stop being inspired and influenced by other writers. It’s impossible for me to state the importance or how much I have learned by reading other authors’ work. As to Sleepless City, I did make a conscious decision to be a bit more plot driven and action oriented. One of my early readers called Nick Ryan the love child of WB Yeats and John Wick. I think that sums it up perfectly. One of the challenges of taking this on was to see if I could write a Jack Reacher-ish novel and still maintain that lyrical quality of my style. Lee Child once said to me that if I left three words out of all my sentences, I’d be a bigger seller. He said it with a smile. I understood what he meant, but I write how I write.

         More importantly, I wrote a portion of this novel during the pandemic and in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. Anyone reading Sleepless City will immediately recognize the influence outside events had on my work. I usually try to shut out the world when I’m working on a novel because the only world I want to think about is the one in my head, the one I’m creating. Only here that was impossible. During that period it seemed the entire world was all sharp edges and moral dilemmas. How could I ignore it?       

 

OBAAT: I mentioned earlier that you were best known for the Moe Prager books, as the list of awards and nominations earned by that series attests. In fact, you may well be better known to the general public for carrying on Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone series. As self-assured as your writing always reads, what was it like to have to write in someone else’s universe?

RFC: I love answering this question. To do what I did with Jesse Stone or what Ace Atkins did with Spenser, you have to do two things: find a way into someone else’s character, and, more importantly, find a way to make that character your own. My way into Jesse Stone was through struggle and disappointment. Jesse struggles with alcohol. We all struggle, some of us with weight, some with drugs, some with our emotions, our relationships. But struggle is a common and unifying human quality. So, it was easy for me to relate to Jesse’s struggles, though I’m not an alcoholic. Jesse was also one phone call away from being the starting shortstop for the Dodgers. But he hurt his shoulder in a meaningless exhibition game. Talk about disappointment! Again, like struggling, who hasn’t dealt with big disappointments in life? Who doesn’t carry around those “What if …” questions with them? It took me three books until I really felt as if Jesse were my character. Although I’d gotten inside him, it took a few books to feel as comfortable with him as a character as say, Moe or Gus.  

 

OBAAT: You’ve said your greatest influencer was your college poetry professor, David Lehman, in part for helping you to learn how to self-edit. Please talk a little about that. (Full disclosure: My first agent, the late Pam Strickler, did the same for me. I use her lessons every day, so it’s a topic, and skill, near and dear to me.)

RFC: Writing and reading poetry are perhaps the best teachers for future prose writers. Poetry teaches you several important lessons: economy, rhythm, power of language. Poets sweat each word that goes on the page. I have often wondered how many drafts it took William Carlos Williams to write “The Red Wheelbarrow”, a sixteen-word poem or how many drafts it took Ezra Pound to write “In a Station of the Metro”, a six-word title for a two line, fourteen-word poem. On the other hand, “Prufrock” was once almost twice as long as the version we all know. The most important thing David taught us was to think of ourselves as writers. He had us take an oath that from that day forward, regardless of what we did to earn a living, we would always think of ourselves as writers. When many years later I went to a book signing of David’s, he said he had totally forgotten the whole oath thing. 

 

OBAAT: What’s next for you?

RFC: I’ve already written Nick Ryan #2, Blind to Midnight. And the pandemic has given me ample time to complete Gus Murphy #3, All Buried Things and two other standalone novels. Where Gus and the other stuff gets published is yet to be determined.