Reed Farrel Coleman is a four-time Edgar Award nominee in
three different categories: Best Novel, Best Paperback Original, and Best Short
Story. He is a four-time recipient of the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel of the
Year. As if his mantel wasn’t full enough, he has also won the Audie, Macavity,
Barry, and Anthony Awards. Best known for his Moe Prager and Gus Murphy private
investigator novels, Reed also continued Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone novels for
the Parker estate after Parker’s death in 2010.
Reed’s current endeavor is the Nick Ryan series, of which book
two, Blind to Midnight, drops on August 13. Reed was good enough to take
time from a busy pre-launch schedule to answer some questions for the blog.
One Bite at a Time: Welcome back to the blog, Reed.
I’m happy to see Nick Ryan is back in Blind To Midnight. When you were
here last year to talk about Sleepless City, you mentioned it was more
of “a Jack Reacher-ish novel” than your previous books, and it served well as
an explosive opening to the new series. Blind to Midnight does not lack
for action, but it’s a little more personal to Nick. What was your intent
there?
Reed Farrel Coleman: Second books or episodes or
seasons are problematic. They are especially troublesome if the first go around
is operatic or “Big” with lots of action and hyper-intensive emotion. Sleepless
City was an origin story that was necessarily full of big themes, lots of
action, complex emotion … I have always thought it a mistake to try to outdo
oneself by going bigger, more operatic, more intense. If you do that in book
two or season two, where do you go in book three or season three? I have always
maintained that instead of trying to go ballistic, one should go quieter.
Instead of broader, go more personal. As you say, Blind to Midnight certainly
doesn’t lack for action, but the root of the action is more personal than
global, it hits closer to home. This isn’t a small book by any means. It has
all the elements Sleepless City contained, but the focus is closer to
Nick’s heart. Do you remember the TV show Picket Fences? Season one was
great. Full of quirky character and unusual situations, but it was so weird and
quirky that by the second season there were plots involving aliens. I loved
season one and hated season two. That taught me a lesson.
OBAAT: Blind to Midnight has Nick Ryan working
a unique cold case. In the book, as in real life, apart from the three thousand
who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, there was only one
homicide in New York City, an eastern European immigrant. Where did you learn
this, and what about it generated the germ of the story for you?
RFC: On 9/11 a Polish immigrant named Henryk Siwiak
was murdered in Brooklyn. He got lost on his way to work. His was the only
homicide in New York City that day not directly connected to the terrorist
attacks. The case remains unsolved. Every year, stories appear in the papers
and on TV about the case. The theory goes that since Siwiak spoke English with
a heavy accent, was dressed in camouflage like clothing, and was bearded that
he might have been the mistaken target of someone’s anger over the earlier terrorist
attacks, but that’s speculation. I’ve always been fascinated by this case and
as real events often are, Siwiak’s murder became the jumping off point for Blind
to Midnight. The interesting part as a crime fiction writer was crafting a
plot the grew organically from the murder. And I suppose somewhere I hope that
the book reignites interest in the actual case and that the murder of this man
finally gets solved.
OBAAT: You have a gift for writing stories that are
influenced by world-changing events without being about them. Sleepless City
was written during the pandemic and the aftermath of the George Floyd killing
and, though it does not deal with them directly, there’s an influence there. Blind
to Midnight relates to 9/11 without being about it. One year at Bouchercon
– I forget which – you were discussing the Moe Prager novel Onion Street,
which takes place in the 60s. What stuck with me was a comment you made about
how people forget, no matter how tumultuous the time, ninety-five percent of
everyone still gets up and goes to work in the morning. How does this
sensibility affect your stories that take place tangentially to history
altering events?
RFC: Thank you, Dana. It’s always great when
something one says has an impact on a colleague. Okay, please excuse my tooting
my own horn here, but it relates. A few years back, a renowned TV actor and
director was interested in my novel Where It Hurts. He was so interested
that he met me for breakfast and had me drive him around to specific locations
I mentioned in the novel. Finally, I got the nerve to ask him what it was about
the book that captured his interest. He said that he had never read a crime
novel in which there was as realistic a balance between the protagonist’s real
life and his job, between his deep emotions and the emotions he displays doing
his work. In the end we couldn’t agree upon a deal, but I felt he understood
exactly what I go for in my work. That people are never simply what they do.
What they do is part of them, not all of them. I build characters from the
inside out, not the other way around. I’m an author, but I’m also a dad, a
brother, a husband, a grandfather, a friend … I am not just one thing, and I
don’t feel just one way. My characters live full lives no matter how secondary
they seem to the plot. People are complex, so my characters are complex.
OBAAT: Your main characters are never static from
book to book. How does Nick Ryan evolve in Blind to Midnight? What is he
learning?
RFC: One of the conceits of our genre that has always
chaffed is the static protagonist. The one that never ages or grows or changes.
So, I have always made it a point, even when I was writing the Jesse Stone
novels for the Robert B. Parker estate, to have my protagonists evolve. In book
one, Nick is new to his job as the city’s fixer, its shadow warrior. In book
one he’s learning on the job. He discovers a child he didn’t know about. He
discovers the woman he left behind has never left him behind. In Blind to
Midnight, Nick now understands the true nature of his job, is more suspect
of his own lofty goal of looking out for the little guy. He understands there
are hidden motivations on the part of the powerful people for whom he works. As
with any person, the knowledge that one is a parent changes you. And now that
he knows there’s a woman who loves him and a child of his in the world, it
hampers his judgement. Oh, legion are the ways Nick changes from book one to
two.
OBAAT: Nick has close to carte blanche in how
he handles his cases. If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,
what is the effect on Nick? Does he fight against this tendency, does he
embrace it, or is he more pragmatic and takes things as they come?
RFC: Bingo! In your previous question, you almost
answer this question for me. Nick understands that some of what he is doing is
a way for powerful people to gain leverage and more power. Nick is no fool and
understands that he needs to gain power and leverage of his own to protect
himself and the people he loves. But will this have a corrosive effect on Nick?
Stay tuned.
OBAAT: You spoke last year about how your college
poetry professor, David Lehman, had you “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.” I had a professor in grad school do much the same with
us. He said that, having dedicated our lives to becoming musicians, we could
never listen to music for entertainment alone; we always had to look deeper. Do
you find that thinking of yourself as a writer changed how you read?
RFC: How could I not and I have paid a price for it.
Some of my joy of reading has disappeared. It’s an occupational hazard, I
suppose. I know the shorthand. I can see how an author is plying their trade. I
know the tricks and I know their tricks. I’ve been at this so long that I have
not only seen the man behind the curtain, I’ve become the man behind the
curtain.
OBAAT: Last year you mentioned Gus Murphy 3, as well
as a couple of standalones, were complete and looking for homes. Any luck on
any of those fronts?
RFC: One aspect of the pandemic that turned out to be
beneficial was added writing time. During the pandemic, I wrote not only Blind
to Midnight, but three other novels as well. One of those novels is Gus
Murphy #3, All Buried Things. I don’t know when, but it will someday see
the light of day even if I have to publish it myself.
OBAAT: Will Nick Ryan be back for a third book?
Either way, what else is on your plate going forward?
RFC: Right now, there’s no contract for Nick #3, but
that could change any day. I hope it does. Currently, I’m writing a novel based
on a traumatic experience from my teenage years. When I was fifteen, I watched
a man die of a gunshot wound. He died not more than ten feet away from me. It’s
a fictionalized version of a writer like me who, decades later, goes back to
research that murder.
