Table of Contents
Praise
by Reed Farrel Coleman
Title Page
Foreword
Dedication
Acknowledgements
August 6th, 1998
January 28th, 1978
January 29th, 1978
January 30th, 1978
January 31st, 1978
February 1st, 1978 (early)
August 6th, 1998 (late afternoon)
February 2nd, 1978
February 3rd, 1978
February 4th, 1978
February 5th, 1978
February 6th, 1978
February 7th, 1978
August 6th, 1998 (evening)
February 7th, 1978 (late night)
February 8th, 1978
February 10th, 1978
February 13th, 1978
February 14th, 1978
February 15th, 1978
February 15th, 1978 (after Jack’s)
February 16th, 1978
February 17th, 1978
February 18th, 1978
August 6th, 1998 (late evening)
Epilogue
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
Praise for Reed Farrel Coleman and Walking the Perfect Square
“Reed Farrel Coleman is a terrific writer…. a hard-boiled poet… If life were fair, Coleman would be as celebrated as [George] Pelecanos and [Michael] Connelly.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“Reed Farrel Coleman is one of the more original voices to emerge from the crime fiction field in the last ten years. For the uninitiated, Walking the Perfect Square is the place to start.”
—George Pelecanos, best-selling author of The Way Home
“Among the undying conventions of detective fiction is the one that requires every retired cop to have a case that still haunts him. Reed Farrel Coleman blows the dust off that cliché in Walking the Perfect Square . . . with a mystery that would get under anyone’s skin.”
—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
“The author makes us care about his characters and what happens to them, conveying a real sense of human absurdity and tragedy . . . a first-rate mystery. Moe is a fine sleuth. Coleman is an excellent writer.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Whenever our customers are looking for a new series to read, they often leave with a copy of Walking the Perfect Square. It has easily been our best-selling backlist title. Thank you, Busted Flush, for bringing this classic ‘Moe’ back into print!”
—Gary Shulze, Once Upon a Crime (Minneapolis, MN)
“The biggest mysteries in our genre are why Reed Coleman isn’t already huge, and why Moe Prager isn’t already an icon. Both are to me. Read this book and you’ll find you agree.”
—Lee Child, best-selling author of Gone Tomorrow
“Originally published in 2001 . . . Walking the Perfect Square has been reissued by Busted Flush Press, good news for mystery lovers, since Reed Farrel Coleman is quite a writer, and this is only the first of five books about Moe Prager. The story and the characters will hook you, and Coleman’s lightly warped take on the world will make you laugh, dark as the tale is. As soon as I finished Walking the Perfect Square, I started the next in the series, Redemption Street. The only problem with the following three (The James Deans, Soul Patch, Empty Ever After) will be to decide whether to read them immediately or savor them over a period of time.”
—Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness
“Moe’s back—if you haven’t already discovered Reed Farrel Coleman’s wonderful, award-winning ex-cop-turned-PI, Moe Prager, here’s your chance. He’s for real, and so is Coleman’s handling of cases that stay with you long after the book’s end. Walking the Perfect Square, Redemption Street, and The James Deans belong in every mystery fan’s personal library, because the writing is fine, the realization is believable, and the character is true to himself. This is the man to measure the rest by, a writer with a passionate belief in giving his best, and an eye for what makes the PI novel work at a level few can match.”
—Charles Todd, best-selling author of A Duty to the Dead
“One of crime fiction’s finest voices, Edgar Award-finalist Reed Coleman combines the hard-fisted detective story with a modern novel’s pounding heart and produces pure gold. Moe Prager belongs with Travis McGee and Lew Archer in the private eye pantheon. Coleman’s series is a buried treasure—dig in and hit the jackpot!”
—Julia Spencer-Fleming, best-selling author of Once Was a Soldier
“Moe Prager is the thinking person’s P.I. And what he thinks about—love, loyalty, faith, betrayal—are complex and vital issues, and beautifully handled.”
—S. J. Rozan, Edgar Award-winning author of The Shanghai Moon
“What a pleasure to have the first two Moe Prager novels back in print. In a field crowded with blowhards and phony tough guys, Reed Farrel Coleman’s hero stands out for his plainspoken honesty, his straight-no-chaser humor and his essential humanity. Without a doubt, he has a right to occupy the barstool Matt Scudder left behind years ago. In fact, in his quiet unassuming way, Moe is one of the most engaging private eyes around.”
—Peter Blauner, Edgar Award-winning author of Casino Moon and Slow Motion Riot
“Reed Farrel Coleman makes claim to a unique corner of the private detective genre with Redemption Street. With great poignancy and passion he constructs a tale that fittingly underlines how we are all captives of the past.”
—Michael Connelly, best-selling author of 9 Dragons
“Moe Prager is a family man who can find the humanity in almost everyone he meets; he is a far from perfect hero, but an utterly appealing one. Let’s hope that his soft heart and lively mind continue to lure him out of his wine shop for many, many more cases.”
—Laura Lippman, best-selling author of Life Sentences
“Reed Farrel Coleman is a hell of a writer. Poetic, stark, moving. And one of the most daring writers around, never afraid to go that extra mile. He freely admits his love of poetry, and it resonates in his novels like the best song you’ll ever hear. Plus, he has a thread of compassion that breaks your heart . . . to smithereens.”
—Ken Bruen, two-time Edgar Award-nominated author of London Boulevard
“Coleman is a born writer. His books are among the best the detective genre has to offer at the moment; no, wait. Now that I think about it they’re in the top rank of any kind of fiction currently published. Pick up this book, damn it.”
—Scott Phillips, award-winning author of The Ice Harvest and Cottonwood
“Reed Farrel Coleman goes right to the darkest corners of the human heart—to the obsessions, the tragedies, the buried secrets from the past. Through it all he maintains such a pure humanity in Moe Prager—the character is as alive to me as an old friend. I flat out loved the first Prager book, but somehow he’s made this one even better.”
—Steve Hamilton, Edgar Award-winning author of Heaven’s Keep
“Coleman may be one of the mystery genre’s best-kept secrets.”
—Sun-Sentinel
“Moe is a character to savor. And Coleman? He’s an author to watch. Make that watch and read. For this is only the beginning, folks, and I’m hitching my wagon to this ride.”
—Ruth Jordan, Crimespree Magazine
by Reed Farrel Coleman
Dylan Klein novels
Life Goes Sleeping (1991)
Little Easter (1993)
They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee (1997)
Moe Prager novels
Walking the Perfect Square (2001)
Redemption Street (2004)
The James Deans (2005)
Winner of the Anthony, Barry, and Shamus Awards. Nominated for the Edgar, Gumshoe, Macavity Awards.
Soul Patch (2007)
Winner of the Shamus Award. Nominated for the Edgar, Barry, Macavity Awards.
Empty Ever After (2008)
Winner of the Shamus Award.
Innocent Monster (2010)
Writing with Ken Bruen
Tower (2009)
Nominated for the Anthony and Spinetingler Awards.
Writing as Tony Spinosa
Hose Monkey (2006)
The Fourth Victim (2008)
Edited by Reed Farrel Coleman
Hardboiled Brooklyn (2006)
FOREWORD
By Megan Abbott
I come at Walking the Perfect Square backwards. Having discovered Moe Prager in The James Deans, Reed Farrel Coleman’s critically acclaimed third novel in the series, I continued on with Soul Patch and Empty Ever After. Now, I turn to the originary novel and it is like a haunting—one of those dreams where you walk into a strange house only to discover it is your childhood home, aching with nostalgia and loss. The experience is doubly poignant, as all the sorrow that hangs in every corner of Empty Ever After begins here. It recalled for me nothing more intensely than back to back readings of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and his first Philip Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep. You see the darkness beginning to spread at the end of The Big Sleep, as Marlowe, tainted by his case, famously bemoans, “Me, I was part of the nastiness now.” But you would never anticipate the gorgeous melancholy, the retreat from the world that marks The Long Goodbye. The beginnings and ends resemble each other, but don’t fully reveal the plummy depths to which the reader will go in following our heroes. As readers, we don’t emerge unscathed either.
The connection to Chandler is only natural. The Marlowe tradition is inevitably burned in all PI novelists’ brains. The anxiety of influence: do I embrace or reject the gimlet-soaked father? Coleman makes the smartest choice of all, and the most rewarding for readers. He gives us a detective deeply aware of his forebears, vigilant against clichés (but never afraid to play with them) and very much his own man. While many of Chandler’s “children” operate on the surface of the Marlowe tradition, Prager speaks to something deeper and more resonant in the detective’s character. For instance, it is commonplace that post-Marlowe PIs walk into any situation with wisecracks at the ready, but Marlowe’s deeper, wryer humor is at root a study of human nature, and a knowing tribute to its foibles and peculiarities. Consider Moe Prager describing a first dance with a woman: To call what we did by one name would have been a stretch. It was an amalgam of the Lindy, the tango and a half-assed polka. In spite of how we must’ve looked, we liked it. I liked holding her. She liked being held. I liked the way she touched me. My knee was blind to her charms. When we were done, we received a round of applause. New full glasses awaited our return. We toasted to Arthur Murray.
There’s a warmth to the humor (not to mention a Chandlerian rhythm to it), which stems out of awareness of the pair’s awkwardness in the moment, hesitant interest, a wariness but also a gentleness. It draws us to Prager and there are a hundred moments like this in as many pages. It is of course hard to imagine Marlowe having such an uncomplicatedly pleasurable moment with a woman. The Marlowe novels are bristling with the sexual anxiety that kicked into life classic noir. But Prager’s world is not that world. It’s a world of families, friendships, close ties, intimacies. Betrayals can and do occur, but Prager’s relationships—romantic, familial, collegial, fraternal—are as central to this novel as Marlowe’s solitariness is to his.
Marlowe’s famous isolation, which grows as the series continues, extends in large part from his sense that he is an anachronism, a knight without meaning. The world around has changed, curdled, gone to rot. But while Marlowe is a man whose moral code is at odds with his times, Moe Prager’s emerges from his, is born from it, accounts for and takes its strength from an understanding of the complexities of his culture. His sensibility, and his strength as a detective, are informed by the complexities he ponders, parses and only after great, nearly Talmudic deliberation, will dare to pass judgment on. Prager, in 1998, can recall how shocking the Son of Sam murders once were, saying, “But serial killing was a nascent industry then and its purveyors didn’t seem to grow on trees the way they do now.” But the mood is not one of hermetic retreat from a twisted world. He remains engaged, feels he has no choice. He will not abandon a world that includes his family, his child and the score of striving, essentially good people he comes across, to the looming darkness.
For all these differences, however, Walking the Perfect Square’s abiding theme is also deeply Chandlerian: the slipperiness of identity. The missing-person case at the heart of the novel sends Prager on nothing short of an identity quest. Slowly, through the stories shared about him, through the evidence Prager uncovers, he “builds” Patrick Maloney, the young man whose face he stares at on the posters taped to mailboxes and lamp-posts around the city. But the question of how close he can ever get lingers. Much as Marlowe habitually, obsessively returns to the decadently adorned Geiger house in Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Prager circles back literally to Pooty’s, the bar that marks the last place Patrick was seen, and to the image of the missing-person poster itself, which reminds him of the famous Magritte painting. “The point is,” he tells us, “It wasn’t a pipe. It was the painting of a pipe. And the poster I was looking at wasn’t Patrick Maloney”
The closer he comes, the more the photo blurs, breaks apart before his eyes. Patrick is that elusive figure we see so much of in Chandler: Velma Grayle, Orfamay Quest, Terry Lennox, that shape-shifter we seek to know even as we secretly realize we will always come up empty. It is in this illusory pursuit for meaning that the core of the private eye narrative is laid bare. The blurry fear that encompasses Prager at the climax of Walking the Perfect Square, that moment when he looks in the rearview mirror and cannot fathom his own eyes, is the quintessential Chandler dilemma: What if there is no there there? In Chandler, that possibility broods over the novels. It’s all phoniness. It’s all illusion. Hollywood, Los Angeles, women, friendship, connections, meaning. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
In Walking the Perfect Square, however, the promise of authenticity remains, if only in the far corners. Its final, ruminatory pages carry us through the varied fates of the novel’s characters (one cannot imagine this in Marlowe’s isolated world), opening up vistas of personal histories that entwine with popular culture (Mystery Science Theater, VH-1) and give us a longer view of these characters who play bit or minor parts in the central drama of the novel. It is a generous gesture, and it speaks to Prager’s expansive nature but also to the larger view of history he has. Walking the Perfect Square is built on a structure of expansion and contraction, of flight and return. The novel circles back and forth between 1978 and 1998, with glimpses in between, demonstrating time and again that no life is solitary, that we all, for better or for worse, are linked and we’d best hold on to each other, and hold on tight.
But the more we move away from Philip Marlowe, the closer we come to him. Because, for all Moe Prager’s warmth, his efforts to understand and make meaning, to find the solid ground beneath his feet and be assured that one can fix things, make them better, this is a novel steeped in a deeply Chandlerian melancholy—a melancholy that never lifts as we move through all the Prager novels. A melancholy that haunts the reader as surely as the detective-hero. He may find authenticity, the solid root of things, the beating heart of the matter, and that is comforting. But he also realizes that if there’s anything worse than a world built on illusion and deceit it’s the understanding that while we may find real connection—the authentic self, intimacy—it will not last. It is fleeting. It breaks apart in our hands. That is when we realize that we have one up on Prager. He has no permanence, no anchor. But we do. We have him.
Megan Abbott
New York
, NY
February 2008
Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award-winning author of Die a Little, The Song Is You, and Queenpin. She also edited Busted Flush Press’s female noir anthology, A Hell of a Woman. Her Damn Near Dead (Busted Flush Press) short story, “Policy,” was the basis for her Edgar-winning novel, Queenpin. She has a Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University. Visit her online at www.meganabbott.com.
For my big brothers, Jules and David
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful for the love and support of my wife Rosanne and my kids Kaitlin and Dylan. I could not have written this book without the technical advice of Mitchell L. Schare, Ph.D. or my NYPD buddies: Billy Johnson, John Murphy, Jim Hegarty and Tom McDonald. I would also like to thank Ellen W. Schare for her editorial input.
To be is to be perceived
—Berkeley
I hold a picture up
everybody thinks it’s me
I get a thrill out of tampering
with the atmosphere
Hey baby, I’m out of favor
You can’t always be
the right flavor
Just seems that no matter
what you do
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