Reed Farrel Coleman belongs to a particularly appealing strain of crime writers that I enjoy, the ones who would perhaps rather be poets. I’d include Ken Bruen, Qiu Xiaolong and maybe James Sallis on that list too, (and it also seems to go the other way—Richard Hugo wrote a mystery novel—Death and the Good Life, and let’s not leave out Charles Bukowski, whose Pulp was one of the first “mysteries” I ever read). Coleman chooses his words and themes as precisely as a poet would and earns his books their haunted quality line by line, (from his own afterword to The James Deans, “As I don’t outline, I am useless at trying to predict how a book will turn out. I write one word at a time; each new word amplifying the last, justifying the next.”).

Continuing in the hardboiled American tradition of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Coleman's Brooklyn detective Moe Prager does what he does with a sense of duty that can not be bestowed by any external institution or code, but comes from within. It makes him more effective and more vulnerable as well. There’s a personal toll to these episodes in Moe’s life—with ongoing consequences that work themselves out as the series continues and his latest, Innocent Monster is no exception.

Coleman, who also writes under the pseudonym Tony Spinosa, is a cult figure at this point. His readership is largely made up of writers and some of his early work languished in out of print purgatory, but the late David Thompson’s Busted Flush Press has brought back the first Prager titles. BFP also published last year’s Ken Bruen/RFC original collaboration, Tower, which has been optioned for a film—maybe when there’s a big hit movie, Reed will get the wide readership he deserves. But, you dear, discriminating readers have no excuse. The entire series is available to fill the hole in your post-Chandlerian mystery exercises in existential anxiety exploration and humanities.

Coleman’s been doing some great blog posts and interviews in support of Innocent Monster and you can check some of those out here and here and here. On a side note, if you’re registering for Bouchercon 2011, do it early and get the chance to have a character in Reed’s next book named after you.

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.