Back in print, Reed Farrel Coleman’s first Moe Prager private eye novel! Walking the Perfect Square By two-time Edgar® Award nominee Reed Farrel Coleman New foreword by 2008 Edgar® Award winner Megan Abbott. New afterword by Reed Farrel Coleman. Busted Flush Press / paperback / $13 / 978-0-9792709-5-6 “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 Turnaround Reed Farrel Coleman has earned the following for his third & fourth Moe Prager novels: The James Deans TO BE REPRINTED IN EARLY 2009 FROM BUSTED FLUSH PRESS, WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY MICHAEL CONNELLY. Winner of the Anthony, Barry, and Shamus Awards. Nominated for the Edgar, Gumshoe, Macavity Awards. Soul Patch AVAILABLE NOW FROM BLEAK HOUSE BOOKS. Nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. But don’t miss Reed’s acclaimed first & second Moe novels, the books that started it all... Praise for Walking the Perfect Square “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 bring this classic ‘Moe’ back into print!” —Gary Shulze, Once Upon a Crime (Minneapolis, MN) “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 “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 Slipping into Darkness and Slow Motion Riot Praise for Reed Farrel Coleman & Redemption Street “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, New York Times best-selling author of The Brass Verdict “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, New York Times best-selling author of Another Thing to Fall “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 Sanctuary and Once Were Cops “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 “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 In This Rain “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 Night Work “Coleman may be one of the mystery genre’s best-kept secrets.” —Sun-Sentinel 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) Soul Patch (2007) Empty Ever After (2008) Writing with Ken Bruen Tower (2009) Writing as Tony Spinosa Hose Monkey (2006) The Fourth Victim (2008) Edited by Reed Farrel Coleman Hardboiled Brooklyn (2006) Short Stories “Kaddish”, Plots with Guns: A Noir Anthology (2005) “Portrait of the Killer as a Young Man”, Dublin Noir (2006) “Killing O’Malley”, (writing as Tony Spinosa) Hardboiled Brooklyn (2006) “Requiem for Moe”, Damn Near Dead (2006) “Bat-head Speed”, These Guns For Hire (2006) “Due Diligence”, Wall Street Noir (2007) “Pearls”, Expletive Deleted (2007) “Accidentally, Like a Martyr”, The Darker Mask (2008) “No Roses For Bubbeh”, Brooklyn Noir 3 (2008) WALKING THE PERFECT SQUARE by Reed Farrel Coleman Busted Flush Press Houston 2008 Walking the Perfect Square Originally published in 2001 by The Permanent Press. This edition, Busted Flush Press, 2008 This edition copyright © Reed Farrel Coleman, 2008 Foreword copyright © Megan Abbott, 2008 Afterword copyright © Reed Farrel Coleman, 2008 Author photo copyright © Renaissance Studios Cover design: Jimmy Jack Bottlestop Bar sign photo: PunchStock “Nobody Hurts You” written by Graham Parker. Copyright © 1979 Ellisclan Ltd(PRS). Administered by Bug Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission. This a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978-0-9792709-5-6 First Busted Flush Press paperback printing, June 2008 P.O. Box 540594 Houston, TX 77254-0594 www.bustedflushpress.com 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.