"Difficult Lives" by James Sallis (Gryphon Books, 1993/2000)

With its mind in the gutter and feet firmly rooted even farther below that, deep down in the dark recesses of the human experience and the dusty corners of bookstores, James Sallis’ Difficult Lives: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Chester Himes (Gryphon Books, 1993/2000) stands right alongside Geoffrey O’Brien’s Hardboiled America as an essential text on crime fiction in the early days of the paperback original. While it does devote three chapters to those individual authors, Sallis’ introduction and first chapter, “Portable Worlds: The Original Paperback Novel,” succinctly and evocatively capture the pulp zeitgeist: “Tawdry–with just a hint of transcendence.”

The crux of the Sallis’ book is that the ephemeral nature of the paperback original – cheap, disposable, degenerate – both allowed for this trio to publish such experimental novels, at once intensely personal yet (sometimes unintentionally) reflective of the world around them, and subsequently for their work to be forgotten. “Once read,” Sallis writes, “like beer cans they were tossed away.” But being on the margin of the publishing industry allowed them certain liberties that major publishers would never have: Thompson’s experimental narratives and soociopathic protagonists; Goodis’ bleak worldview that veers away from plot and into irreconcilable broods; Himes’ hyper-kinetic, confrontational absurdities that reflected America’s racial prejudices and tensions. These weren’t safe, easy, or pleasant topics, yet they were crucial and relevant in ways that even the writers’ might not have suspected at the time. Roughly half a century later, their books say a hell of a lot more about what it meant to be alive at that point in time than any history book: to be scared, outraged, uncertain, submissive, and rebellious.

Thompson, Goodis, and Himes, each in their own way, chronicle peoples like themselves: fringe characters treading the line of social respectability and doing a bad job at it. Some try harder; some give up; others lash out. All are punished. These aren’t flattering portraits of America, but nor are they flattering characters, either. They were repackaging the worst parts of ourselves and selling it back to us for two bits: uncontrollable impulses, alcoholic depression, riotous race relations. I’d really love to know what some traveling salesman thought as he flipped through A Hell of a Woman, The Burglar, or The Real Cool Killers while sitting at a drugstore counter.

Clocking in at a brief 100 pages, it’s a quick and revealing read, and like the authors he writes about, Sallis can pack a big punch in a short sentence. (Though I do wish his chapter on Goodis were longer; he does a marvelous job detailing Goodis’ first few novels and early life, but cuts the story short around the time of Cassidy’s Girl without really touching on later works such as The Burglar and Somebody’s Done For, which I would argue are among his most fully realized and least compromising works.) References to such diverse authors as D.H. Lawrence (“Men murdered themselves into this democracy,”) and Anton Artaud (“Very little is needed to destroy a man, he needs only the conviction that his work is useless,”) elucidate some of the nuances to these writers work, but also make the case for their cultural and literary value. Sallis doesn’t seem to want to wrest them from the pulps to put on any high shelf; in fact, if anything, he sees the original context of their works as indispensable to understanding their importance. More than anything, I think that Sallis wants their work to be read and to stay in print. Difficult Lives was originally published in 1993, and sixteen years later, most of their work is still available and growing in popularity. Let’s hope it continues to do so.

Some favorite passages from Difficult Lives:

“What we have here, then, are failures to communicate. Three writers who like Icarus almost flew, but fell into a sea of original paperback novels. Three highly individual voices almost lost in the babble and hubbub of the marketplace. Three men who tried in their work to subvert again an already subversive genre and simultaneously to retrieve their lives, make some sense of them, through tricks of metaphor.”

On Thompson:
“One thinks of those cartoon beasts who, going about their destined business, pause to look down and only then discover that the ground beneath their feet – for how long? – no longer exists. But in Thompson’s work there is no restoration: in the following frame the coyote remains scorched and smoldering, stripped of hide and hair, foreshortened, legless, transformed.”

On Goodis:
“In fact, the craftsmanship he mastered in all those years of turning out fiction for the pulps was sometimes all that salvaged his books from a morass of aberrant psychology and obsession.”

On Himes:
“[He] has held a mirror to this country, hoping the monster would see itself and feel shame, know what it was. But the monster breaks all mirrors that show true, and its madness finally drives the man from it. He stands far way, on a cliff perhaps, looking down as the monster breaks its baubles one by one, stuffs itself, fouls its nest, steps in its anger and hatred. Until one day the monster has nothing left, nothing, and desperately it turns its eyes to that cliff. But the man is gone.”

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[Read more of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott's blog.]

"East of Eden" by John Steinbeck (1952)

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is about losers. It would be a stretch to call it Noir, but it draws its characters from the same gutter of broken-down lives. Steinbeck’s protagonists resemble David Goodis’ in that they are dreamers who fail to live up to their goals, and whose ambitious drive gives them only enough strength to try and fail again. The only two characters in Steinbeck’s book to find any sort of success in their lives are those without any ideals or goals whatsoever: a Civil War veteran who fabricates his entire military history and robs the government of his money, and a war profiteer who rips off bean farmers and makes a bundle during WWI. The next closest success is the brothel madam Cathy, a femme fatale if there ever was one, who slept and seduced her way across the country and left a trail of corpses in her wake.

The rest of the characters belong to a downtrodden lot who never lived up to their hopes. They aspired to greatness, and fell short because of their own flaws. The story follows two families—the Hamiltons and the Trasks—through three generations. The Hamiltons hail from Ireland, while the Trasks come from Connecticut, but both families wind up in California at the turn of the 20th century. The patriarchs of both families buy land with hopes of making it rich, and both learn the hard way that prosperity is easy to dream of but difficult to realize.

When looked at this way, the motivating forces behind Steinbeck’s characters aren’t so different from those in a traditional Western novel. The character move westward in hopes of leaving their past behind, reinventing themselves, and finding prosperity and success through the land. These same desires can also be found in Steinbeck’s earlier novel, The Grapes of Wrath. But if we are to consider East of Eden as a Western, then we have to pay close attention to its time period. While Samuel Hamilton settles in California sometime after the transcontinental railroad is completed (perhaps mid-1880s?), most of the novel takes place after 1900, when the Wild West was already settled. This time period is crucial: both Adam Trask and Samuel Trask (the respective patriarchs) have missed their historical mark. Samuel was too late to buy fertile land, and he had to settle for an arid plot without access to water, and which never amounted to much. Adam, on the other hand, was rich enough to buy the best land, but personal tragedy left him depressed and deflated all his dreams. Neither Samuel nor Adam lived to be the majestic Western settler they wanted so badly to become. The West was settled before they arrived, only they didn’t know it.

While I do see distinctive parallels between East of Eden and both Western and Noir genres, Steinbeck’s novel doesn’t belong in either category. It is an epic work, spanning multiple generations and a huge cast of characters. The book is not only impressive for its breadth, but for its thoroughness. Steinbeck can introduce a character in a chapter and encapsulate their entire life in a mere few pages. From chapter to chapter, he moves amongst different characters, some of whom appear only for a few pages never to appear again. But with each successive character, the story deepens and the plot thickens. The narrative develops because of the complexity of the characters and their interactions. Impressive is hardly a sufficient word to describe the intricate, delicate, and sublime narrative structure that Steinbeck has created.

In a way, East of Eden is the opposite—or, perhaps, complement—of The Grapes of Wrath. Where Grapes is focused on a single family during a short, specific time period, East of Eden is expansive and ephemeral. But though its tapestry may be large, East of Eden never feels thin or rushed. Steinbeck is patient, and he lets his characters wreck their own lives when they’re ready for it. Part of that patience is his sympathy, and part of it is his wish that, this time, maybe things will work out all right. As all of the characters realize, hope will have to lie with the next generation who, whether they like it or not, might just wind up repeating the mistakes of their elders.

"Save the Last Dance for Me" by Ed Gorman (Carroll and Graf, 2002)

Black River Falls is the stage for a religious war in Ed Gorman’s fourth Sam McCain mystery, Save the Last Dance For Me. John Muldaur runs a radical church on the edge of town that is stirring up controversy because of their extreme views and use of rattlesnakes during ceremonies. Muldaur thinks someone is trying to kill him, so he hires lawyer and sometimes-PI Sam McCain to find out who. When McCain and reporter Kylie Burke take a trip to see the rattlesnake services in person, they get more than they bargained for when Muldaur collapses dead in the middle of his sermon. Finding the killer, however, proves difficult when McCain realizes that someone in town was secretly financing Muldaur’s church, and they’d do anything to prevent the truth from coming out. With Judge Whitney’s good friend Senator Richard Nixon paying a visit in just a few days, it is up to McCain to clean up this mess as soon as possible.

Save the Last Dance For Me is important in the McCain series for a couple of reasons. First, because it introduces one of my favorite characters: Kenny Thibodeau, the local paperback sleaze writer. Kenny dresses like a beatnik to look the part of a writer, and he does hackwork to pay the bills, but Sam recognizes that he’s got not only got real literary talent but also a great eye for humanity, both of which pop up now and then in his lesbian-themed novels.

Another reason it is important is Sam’s relationship with Kylie. After finding himself caught between Pamela Forrest (he would-be lover) and Mary Travers (his should-be lover), he’s decided to move on and try to start a new relationship. The problem this time, however, is that Kylie is married. Her husband is a wannabe writer compared to Kenny, someone who goes to grad school and talks fancy and walks the walk but can’t produce anything worth while. He also treats Kylie like dirt. And there is Sam, who once again is trapped in a relationship that is doomed from the start. But we feel for him, especially because he does really care for Kylie. The tragedy is that he understands all too well what it means to hold on to a fantasy, and to give up everything to try and make a relationship work even when you know it is futile. Gorman’s books are filled with damned sad truths that we’ve all suffered in our own lives. Touches like these make the books come to life.

It might not seem obvious to call Gorman a stylist, but when you look at some of his paragraphs and sentences, there’s remarkable a subtlety, clarity, and precision to his prose. It’s style without bombast or distraction. These are some of my favorite lines from the book. The first passage, in particular, hits home—Sam and I are about the same age, so it is easy for me to identify with a lot of his thoughts and problems.

“And then at the grocery store last Saturday, everybody crowded in there buying potato chips and beer and Canada Dry mixes for highballs. I saw a lot of the kids I’d graduated with from high school. And they all had wives and kids in tow. And looked happy. And grown up. And I thought of what a mess my life was and how in a lot of ways I was still a kid and sometimes that was all right but other times it made me ashamed of myself. Maybe I’d never be Robert Ryan but at least I could be an adult like my dad. He had to quit school when he was in tenth grade to help support his family. I guess that grows you up pretty fast.”

“Sometimes, it feels sorta good to be sad. You know what I mean? But most of the time it just feels like shit to be sad. Could you turn up that song? I love it.”

“Judging by the entertainment shows on the tube, everything was just okey-dokey here in the land of Lincoln. But we knew better, didn’t we?”

“But you know something, it was quite likely that both portraits were true. We’re heroes or villains depending on who’s talking.”

The McCain series keeps getting better and better. Up next: Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.

"Forty Lashes Less One" by Elmore Leonard (Bantam, 1972)

Elmore Leonard broke the mold when he wrote Forty Lashes Less One. He not only put the “wild” back into the “Wild West,” he made it crazier than ever before. Originally published in 1972, today the book still exudes a rare and precious chaotic energy and uninhibited creativity. When you get right down to it, the book is totally twisted—the humor is surreal, the violence palpable, and the characters are amoral at best. The story doesn’t proceed in any conventional direction, and it’s difficult to predict exactly where Leonard is taking you—and perhaps that’s because even the characters seem to be at a complete loss for control. Leonard leaves the typical Western paradigms in the dust, and instead creates something fresh, daring, and truly innovative.

As Forty Lashes Less One begins, Yuma penitentiary is getting a new superintendent, the ironically named Mr. Everett Manly. A minister by trade, he has no prior prison experience. Arriving at the same time is former soldier named Harold Jackson, Right away, the predominantly white inmates single him out because he’s black, but Harold remains defiant and holds his head high. Frank Shelby, the local kingpin among the inmates, decides to put Harold in his place and engineers a fight between him and another outcast, a Chiricahua Apache named Raymond San Carlos.

After spending time in the hole—“the snake den,” as they call it—Raymond and Harold become friends. Things begin to get strange when Mr. Manly decides to reform the two prisoners in an unconventional way: he wants them to become “warriors” like their ancestors. Raymond and Harold realize Mr. Manly is a little cuckoo, but who are they to argue for getting out of work duty? So, they run in the fields all day, and practice throwing spears. Then comes word that Yuma Penitentiary is shutting down. Everyone knows that Frank Shelby is going to try and make his escape. Meanwhile, Raymond and Harold start to plan their own escape, and how to exact revenge on Shelby and his goons.

That, in a nutshell, is Forty Lashes Less One. But it is a highly condensed nutshell that loses the ferocity of the characters, the spontaneity of the plot, and the unexpected humor and violence of the narrative. Everything unfolds so whimsically that the story feels alternately like a hardboiled prison narrative, a magical realist fantasy, and farcical nightmare. At points, Leonard seems to even be channeling the sardonic, anticlerical humor of Luis Buñuel, particularly in Mr. Manly’s attempts at educating Harold and Jackson about the Bible. Manly’s story about how all men are brothers turns into an unintended defense for incest. And Manly even admits to himself that one of the biggest motivations for him reforming these prisoners is so that, in the eyes of God, he might be redeemed for lusting after the female prisoners. Mr. Manly may be a minister, but his soul is as impure and corrupt as the murderers in his prison.

One of the reasons Forty Lashes Less One feels so unique is that, in many ways, it runs completely antithetical to the traditional Western. The West is supposed to offer endless horizons, heavenly vistas, and opportunities for renewal and purification. Forty Lashes Less One is the exact opposite: almost the entire book takes place within the penitentiary walls, and a significant portion even takes place in solitary confinement. All the characters are filthy, sweaty, and covered in blood or feces or sand. Even the brief glimpses of the landscape don’t inspire hope in the prisoners: “There was nothing out there but sky and rocks and desert growth that looked as if it would never die, but offered a man no hope of life.” The prisoners are confronted with a harsh landscape with little food or water, and few places to hide. An early escape attempt proves almost immediately futile. So much for Manifest Destiny—these characters couldn’t control their lives, let alone the world that surrounds them, no matter how hard they tried.

Another of Elmore Leonard’s masterful touches to Forty Lashes Less One is his choice of protagonists: Harold Jackson and Raymond San Carlos. The traditional Western is populated by cowboys, ranchers, lawyers, homesteaders, and other character-types who are typically white. Here, it is eye-opening and refreshing to see the West through the eyes of non-traditional characters. Not only is it a welcome reminder to how diverse the population of the West was, but also how divergent their experiences were. Brian Garfield’s Tripwire, published two years later, similarly focuses on a black protagonist, and uses his story as a lens for reconsidering what we typically consider the Western experience. Prejudice and racism were still present in the aftermath of the Civil War, and these narratives are useful critiques not only of American society in the past, but also the present. Ed Gorman’s masterful third book in his Guild saga, Blood Game, also examines racial conflicts in the West. More recently, Edward A. Grainger (David Cranmer) has been exploring similar themes in his Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles Western stories.

One of the great legacies of the Western genre is its social commentary. The building of homes, communities, industries, and legal systems are recurring themes in Western novels. While some books choose to idealize the past, others use the stories as an opportunity to deconstruct both historical and modern life, to take apart the pieces and examine them critically before piecing them back together. In Leonard’s book, Yuma Penitentiary becomes a microcosm for society as a whole. He critiques power structures, racial and gender attitudes, legal corruption, and even religion. When looked at in this light, Harold and Raymond’s rebellion becomes heroic not because they embody any righteous moral attitudes, but because of their defiant spirit. They’re non-conformists to the core. They recognize the bullshit and the corruption around them, and they don’t want to correct it so much as get the hell away from it all. There’s more than a bit of Huck Finn in them. In the end, however, they realize that a little revenge goes a long way, and they decide to revel in the pleasure of giving Frank Shelby and Mr. Manly their long-overdue comeuppance. Their final gesture in the novel is an inspiring moment of cultural dissent, a true declaration of independence. Harold and Raymond were freethinkers, counter-cultural idols whose resistance wasn’t at all out of place amidst the political upheaval of 1970s, Vietnam-era America. Elmore Leonard may have set Forty Lashes Less One in the first decade of the 20th century, but in a way he was still writing about contemporary times. Nearly four decades later, Harold and Raymond still have a lot to reveal about the topsy-turvy, politically screwed up world we live in. The Old West may be long gone, but it is still ever-present in the world in which we live.

"Texas Wind" by James Reasoner (Manor Books, 1980)

James Reasoner may open Texas Wind (Manor Books, 1980) with the Private Eye’s iconic visit to a potential client, the initial gestation to many a detective narrative (shades of Marlowe in The Big Sleep), but this is 1980, and just as the world is a different place than it was in Chandler’s time, the private detective is also a different person. Midway through Cody’s investigation into the disappearance of college student Mandy Traft, he is given a telling warning that immediately separates his character from the classic milieu of Marlowe, Spade, Hammer, Scott, or any of their veteran pulp colleagues. “I’d hate to have to file a report listing you as the victim. This isn’t the wild days anymore. Take it easy, okay?” Reprehensible, vulnerable, fallible, imperfect – perhaps the best word to describe Cody is the simplest of all: human.

As Ross Macdonald notes in his On Crime Writing, “Throughout its history, from Poe to Chandler and beyond, the detective has represented his creator and carried his values into action in society.” This is one of the unique appeals of the genre: the detective figure is pliable enough to be at once distinct and yet firmly part of a larger tradition. It is a difficult feat to balance a sense of history and remain independent, but Reasoner does it marvelously.

Like the great detectives, Cody is an anachronism. His perceptive cynicism marks him a realist in a fantasy world, and his values give him a sense of grounding while those around him flounder in meaninglessness. He immediately recognizes the phoniness in Mandy’s stepmother (who claims to be “friends” with her) and her friend Lisa (who pretends there is no sexual tension between them and Jeff, the third member of their musical group). He also empathizes with their need to cling to these facades when Mandy’s disappearance brought one glaring, unpleasant truth to the surface: no one was as intimate or close as they once thought. This was the closest thing they had to family and friends, and with Mandy gone, the charade can’t support itself, nor can it give meaning to their lives.

As for Cody, he may be a hero for trying, but even he realizes he’s a fool for thinking he could enact change in a world that is irreversibly changing. He makes mistakes, and he pays for them – and so do others. His few attempts at gung-ho heroism go terribly wrong. And when he ignores gut instinct to inform the police about the kidnapping and ransom request, you begin to wonder whether the attributes of detectives of yesteryear (bullheaded independence, reckless egoism, total disregard for law and order) are as admirable as we once thought. As readers we want to believe in Cody’s decisions, and believe that everything will turn out for the best in the end. We want the myth of the Private Detective and his personal agency to win out against an increasingly oppressive world. By the end of the book, however, even Cody isn’t convinced of this anymore. The weight of reality is just too hard to ignore.

In the midst of all of this despair is a life-affirming sense of humor. (A favorite observation is: “When we were back in the car, I noticed that Janice wasn’t sitting as close to me as she had before. The price you pay for carrying a human finger in your pocket, I guess.”) There’s real warmth to his characters’ interactions, and just as much fire when they’re fighting. For his first book, James Reasoner created a Private Eye novel as classic as it is modern, and fans of the genre are sure to enjoy the deft storytelling and rich characters it has to offer.

Here are just a few more of my favorite lines:

“I woke up to sunshine coming in the window and the smell of bacon cooking. I understood what people meant when they talked about waking up and thinking they were in heaven.”

“Her guilt on top of mine was like thick dust in the air, making it hard to breathe.”

“Maybe the problems of youth didn’t seem quite so important as you got older, but that didn’t mean they were less than earth-shaking for the people going through them. Everybody’s problems are important at the time.”

"The Red Right Hand" by Joel Townsley Rogers (Simon and Schuster, 1945)

A hallucinatory account of one devilish night on the back roads of New England with a murderous maniac on the loose, Joel Townsley Rogers’ The Red Right Hand (Simon and Schuster, 1945) is the rare psychological thriller that actually disturbs the reader’s equilibrium. All sense of balance and logic is sent on a tailspin that moves further and further off course, never righting itself. Even in its wonderfully and preposterously slapstick finale, The Red Right Hand abides by no rules and leaves you flabbergasted as to how such a fiendish novel could ever be assembled by a sane mind.

Like a perpetual downward spiral, the narrator of The Red Right Hand – one Dr. Henry N. Riddle, Jr. – repeatedly goes over the same gruesome events, as though in search of not only an answer, but proof of his own sanity. Here is how the story begins:

"There is one thing that is most important, in all the dark mystery of tonight, and that is how that ugly little auburn-haired red-eyed man, with his torn ear and his sharp dog-pointed teeth, with his twisted corkscrew legs and his truncated height, and all the other extraordinary details about him, could have got away and vanished so completely from the face of the countryside after killing Inis St. Erme."

If the facts are to be believed, the killer was a hitchhiker picked up by St. Erme and his fiancé, Elinor Darrie. When the hitchhiker attacked the two lovers, St. Erme fought back – and lost. Meanwhile, Ms. Darrie escaped. The hitchhiker stole the car and kidnapped St. Erme. The car was later found along with St. Erme’s corpse…which was missing its right hand. Several other bodies lay dead in the car’s path. But one thing has Dr. Henry N. Riddle, Jr. puzzled – why didn’t he see the car that night? He was on the same road all night, yet he neither saw nor heard any sign of the maniac.

So, the spiral continues, with Riddle returning to the central events over and over again, but always from a slightly different perspective. But the closer to the truth Riddle comes, the farther away he seems. Impossibility is the only possibility, surreality the only reality - unless Riddle himself is the answer to this illogical equation. Could he be the killer?

Joel Townsley Roger’s lucid prose captures Riddle’s own compulsive, psychological instability. Some passages read like Henry Miller-style stream of consciousness, with paragraphs consisting of solely one sentence that go on for more than a page. Other passages consist of short, terse sentences. These fluctuations in style prevent the reader from ever pinning down Riddle – we are never sure whether we are reading the ramblings of a madman or the objective observations of a purely rational mind.

Structurally, The Red Right Hand defies every accepted convention. The narrative is not an “arc” but, instead, a conical wrap-around, like a carousel of horror that switches horses trying to find the perfect viewpoint, but never finding it. The few flashbacks are brief and serve only to contextualize the central murder. Much like Riddle, the author refuses to allow the reader’s mind to wander from this surreal, fiendish plot for even a second.

Often if can be difficult to find information about the personal lives of pulp writers. Thankfully, Rogers’ son, Tom, has compiled an extensive biography and bibliography and published it online. Detailing his background at Harvard, experience during World War I, and his entry into the pulps as an editor, this biography is a blessing to readers and fans of The Red Right Hand. As if that weren’t enough, Ramble House Books has made available many of Rogers’ rarest novels! Thank you, Fender Tucker, for keeping Rogers’ work in readers' hands.

Lovers of language can do no better than to read The Red Right Hand. Rogers’ playful and virtuoso prose is delectably intoxicating.

“One only thinks of something as inhuman which should be human. And perhaps is, in part.”

“It is the thing which I must do now, to the exclusion of all else. There is a killer loose. There is a malignancy to be located and excided. It is a problem in diagnosis, nothing more.”

“Through the open window at my right hand the mingled odor of yellow roses and damp night grass and rich black garden earth comes in. Moths are fluttering against the copper window screen, with soft repeated bumping of their white dusty bodies, their crimson eyes reflecting in the light.”

“Unistaire lay ten feet from me, already partly buried, with his feet upward on the sliding slope, his head down. With a great red gash across where his throat had been, as wide as the mouth of a tiger laughing.”

“The figure of something – animal or human – swung into my headlights on the driveway in front of the porch steps, crouching on all fours among the debris. It wore a leopard skin and a pale purple gown, and had a feather duster fastened to its stern like a rooster’s tail. It leaped up with a rabbit scream and away from in front of my lights as I came around at it, and went rushing up the steps like something in a surrealist’s dream…”

“What you need is to believe with all your soul in phantasms which cannot possibly exist.”

"Walking the Perfect Square" by Reed Farrel Coleman (Busted Flush Press, 2008)

More so than any other private detective I’ve ever read about, Moe Prager seems like a real human being. He’s no crusading knight, action hero, or existentialist antihero. Nor is he just an “ordinary” guy set in “extraordinary” circumstances. The story of Walking the Perfect Square comes right out of our daily newspapers, and its characters are people we pass on the street everyday, sit next to on the bus, or live under our same roof. It would have been easy for Reed Farrel Coleman to concede to genre, to make compromises with his story just because certain things are “accepted” in mystery fiction. Instead, he tries to ensure that the gravity of real life is felt in every gesture, in every plot twist, and in every line of dialogue. He’s skilled enough a storyteller than he can tie up loose ends without necessarily resolving the tensions felt by the characters. For, if anything, the circumstances of Walking the Perfect Square continue to haunt not only the characters, but also the readers, long after the book is over.

When a dying man he has never met calls him to his bedside to hear a secret, Moe Prager is sent thirty years into the past to relive his first ever case as a private investigator. It is 1978, and he has just been laid-off from the NYDP during an economic slump. Still recovering from an un-heroic slip on a piece of paper that left his knee badly injured, Prager takes a job as a private investigator in a missing persons case involving a young college student that disappeared after a night at the bar. The more Prager searches, however, the more he is convinced that not only does the kid not want to be found, but that his family might not want him found either.

Originally published in 2001, Walking the Perfect Square was reprinted by Busted Flush Press in 2008 in a great new edition with a foreword by Megan Abbott (Edgar-winning author of Queenpin and other excellent books) and an afterword by Coleman in which he discusses the creation and evolution of Prager’s character. Abbott’s introduction, in particular, is an invaluable companion to the book, helping to place Coleman within the context of the private eye genre, and pointing out where he diverges from tradition and forges his own path. “Betrayals can and do occur, but Prager’s relationships—romantic, familial, collegial, fraternal—are as central to this novel as [Phillip] Marlowe’s are to his,” Abbott writes. This sense of Prager being firmly a part of, and product of, his community is something missing from Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and many of the foundational writers. Those detectives are loners, marginal characters that can’t exist within the world as it exists. They have to be a force for change, whether it is actualized or not. Prager, on the other hand, is subject to the forces at hand. Like the rest of us, he’s trying to get by. He’s not happy with what he sees, but he knows he’s not a superhero. He does what he can, and lives with the consequences.

Perhaps Moe Prager is best summed up in this one line: “No, Mr. Beaman. I’m not smart. I just have a conscience.”

And lest you get the impression that Coleman lacks a sense of humor – well, he doesn’t. In fact, he’s pretty damn funny. As you’ll see, some of my favorite lines in the book are full of Coleman’s warm, perceptive wit. If you’d like to sample more of Walking the Perfect Square, head over to Busted Flush Press where you can purchase the book, or download this PDF that includes a lengthy excerpt of the novel, as well as both Megan Abbott and Coleman’s new essays.

And now—on with the quotes!

“The answer I give as to how I hurt the knee is inversely proportionate to the amount of alcohol I’ve consumed. Sober, I tell them I was hit by a flaming arrow shot by some schizophrenic junkie from a housing project roof in Queens. Two drinks, I tell them I injured the knee catching a baby thrown from a burning building by its frantic mother. Shitfaced, I tell the truth: I slipped on a piece of carbon paper in the squad room.”

“He wasn’t impressed by my powers of deduction. He wasn’t the type to be impressed by much. Maybe, I thought, if I pulled a silver dollar from behind his ear…”

“Pooty’s was the kind of place where people were encouraged to gouge their initials into the tables with keys. Old poets went there to die.”

“When I walked in even the flies yawned. So much for High Noon.”

“His ears were so littered with studs, safety pins and dangling razor blades that if he were to stand between two strong magnets his face would peel off.”

“Eating ribs on a second date takes nerve. It’s difficult to look suave gnawing on dead pig bones and licking red goo off your fingers. And scraping sinew out from between your teeth always drives ‘em wild.”

“I suppose it’s a scientific impossibility, but sometimes it just seems that, like a rug or silk tie, the atmosphere can be permanently stained.”