An Interview with Reed Farrel Coleman, Author of Blind to Midnight

 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.