I had gone to see R. B. Carter to tell him that his sister was neither a blackmailer nor a murderer and that she had in fact been dead these many years. Like Hammerling and Harder before him, he just seemed relieved. I could not bring myself to give him the ugly details. But R. B. Carter was no innocent, for, in a subversively fitting way, he had been involved in the matter for quite some time.
If it hadn’t been a particularly lazy Sunday, if Katy and Sarah hadn’t been up visiting the Maloneys, I might have missed it. It was an article in the Sunday New York Times detailing the efforts by Albany lobbyists to push a legalized-gambling bill through the state legislature.
CATSKILLS REGION GAMBLING BILL VOTED DOWN
was the headline. Major real-estate concerns, it seemed, had been buying up vast amounts of property for years in anticipation of the bill’s passage. The largest of those concerns was a company owned by R. B. Carter. The reporters also cited several less-than-savory tactics the companies had employed to depress the already depressed real-estate prices in the region. Guess who owned the old Fir Grove property? That’s right, R. B. Carter. Carter had leased the land to the likes of Anton Harder in an attempt to drive down the prices of the surrounding real estate. There was enough irony in that to make me puke.
Andrea’s journal wasn’t always an albatross. Funny things happened in her life. She had a dog named Sweetie that used to pee on her mother’s spider plant. She loved her big brother. She was jealous of the beautiful girls in school and thought Mr. Cantor, her social-studies teacher, was the handsomest man on the planet. She loved the Mets even though they were terrible. She thought George Harrison was the cute Beatle, but was hypnotized by John Lennon.
I thought back to the time Lennon was in my shop and we joked about Paul. That’s one of my favorite memories. My favorite passage in Andrea’s journal, though, is this:
May 26, 1965
Got my copies of the literary magazine. There was a great poem in it. It wasn’t great like Ginsberg great. It was just that the poet was so in love with the girl he was writing about. I want someone to love me like that someday. Iran into him on the boardwalk … on purpose. His name is Moses. I had him autograph his poem. That was weird, I guess. He’s pretty cute. Looked up his phone number. 332-8594. Maybe I’ll call him when I get back from the Fir Grove.
I still have the journal. It’s just hard to let some things go.
AFTERWORD
By Reed Farrel Coleman
In many ways, Redemption Street was a star-crossed project. As its author, the novel is, for me, an exercise in mixed feelings. While it no doubt represents some of the best of what the series has to offer, its lack of commercial and critical success has been my most bitter pill. I used to joke—maybe half-joke is the more appropriate phrase—that it was the first book in history to go direct from the printer to the remainder bin. For a long time, my friends and colleagues would whisper the words Redemption Street like my mom would whisper the word cancer and spit. But it is my nature to keep moving forward and my next Moe Prager Mystery, The James Deans, won the Shamus, Barry, and Anthony Awards. It was also nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, and Gumshoe Awards.
In the intervening years since the publication of Redemption Street, however, I’ve found that the book had many devoted fans, including numerous booksellers and fellow writers. While I have received more comments and fan mail for Walking the Perfect Square, The James Deans, Soul Patch and even some of my Dylan Klein novels, the comments and letters for Redemption Street are by far the most passionate. I’ve also found a real interest, almost a hunger, in fans of the later Moe books for a re-issue of Redemption Street.
I would like to say that when David Thompson and McKenna Jordan of Busted Flush Press and Murder by the Book in Houston first approached me with the idea of issuing a new, quality paperback edition of the novel that I immediately jumped at the idea, but I can’t. For while I was of course curious about their interest and the devotion of Redemption Street’s fans, I wasn’t anxious to revisit the events surrounding its initial release. That you’ve just read the new paperback edition the three of us discussed a few years back is both a testament to David and McKenna’s persistence and my reexamination of the novel.
Moe may be a big believer in fate, but I’m not. Yet it would be less than truthful of me not to confess that something, resembling my understanding of fate had a hand in the publication of the book you’re holding in your hand. In late 2006 and in early 2007, I was approached to write essays on the persistent nature of the private detective novel and on the growth of the ethnic detective in mystery fiction. While examining my own work and that of my colleagues in order to write these essays, I found that I was drawn not to the obvious choice, The James Deans, but to Redemption Street.
In rereading Redemption Street for the first time in four years, I rediscovered for myself what it was about the novel that made me so enjoy writing it and, perhaps, came to understand the chemistry that makes the novel so engaging to its devotees. First and most evidently, Redemption Street is, if I do say so myself, a kickass title. But the appeal of the novel is obviously much much deeper than the title page.
What I noticed as I read was that the Moe I presented in Redemption Street was willing to bare different aspects of himself than the Moe of Walking the Perfect Square. In Walking … the reader is introduced to Moe the person. In Redemption Street, the reader is introduced to Moe’s soul, particularly his Jewish soul. For Moe, that internal tug of war between his mixed and contradictory feelings about his own “Jewish-ness” is an essential struggle that continues to playout during the course of the series. And what, if not a protagonist’s struggles, is it that gets a reader to invest his or her real feelings in the life of a fictional character?
That I then externalized that tug of war by placing Auschwitz survivor Israel Roth on one end of the rope and leader of the Yellow Stars, Judas Wannsee, on the other, was not anticipated. Amazingly, neither of these characters was part of a master plan. Neither Mr. Roth nor Wannsee came into my head until I actually wrote the Catskill sections of the book. Mr. Roth, maybe second only to Moe, is the most beloved character in the Prager novels. He is such a powerful presence in my own life that even I think of him as a living breathing human being. I also represented Moe’s struggles by having Moe bounce between characters who represented the Freudian constructs of Moe’s self: Sudden Sam Gutterman (id), Israel Roth (ego), and Judas Wannsee (super ego). I think some, people enjoy the novel because I took on serious topics like cultural assimilation, Jewish self-hatred, and anti-Semitism.
But at its core, Remeption Street is the work that lays out the pattern of Moe’s obsession with the past and his dread of its implications for the future. Walking the Perfect Square lays out the arc of the series, not its emotional underpinnings. Moe Prager is a sometimes reluctant, sometimes eager slave to the past and nowhere is that clearer than in this novel. Because for Moe, the past is never really past, and it’s always personal. Always. Until I wrote Empty Ever After, the fifth installment in the series and in some sense a companion piece to Redemption Street, none of Moe’s cases was as personal as the long delayed investigation into the death of his high school crush, Andrea Cotter.
Oddly enough, after going through all this soul searching and analysis, I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t in fact matter why people have a soft spot for Redemption Street. I am just gratified that they do. For my own self, I’ve come to the realization that writing Redemption Street was crucial to the series, that without it, The James Deans, Soul Patch, and Empty Ever After would not have been what they are. For in Redemption Street, Moe Prager reveals the depth of his soul and establishes many of the central characters and themes integral to the series. So while other titles in the series have received critical acclaim, garnered nominations and awards, had greater commercial success, none is more essentially a Moe novel than Redemption Street.
Reed Farrel Coleman
October 2007
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Reed Farrel Coleman was Brooklyn born and raised. He is the former Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America. His sixth novel, The James Deans, won the Shamus, Barry and Anthony Awards for Best Paperback Original. The book was further nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, and Gumshoe Awards. He was the editor of the short story anthology Hardboiled Brooklyn and his short stories and essays appear in Wall Street Noir, Damn Near Dead and several other publications. Reed lives with his family on New York’s Long Island. Visit him online at www.reedcoleman.com.
Tyrus Books publishes crime and dark literary fiction, offering books from exciting new voices and established, well-loved authors. Centering on deeply provocative and universal human experiences, Tyrus Books is a leader in its genre and the centerpiece of the F+W Crime community.
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Text copyright © 2004 by Reed Farrel Coleman
Foreword copyright © 2008 by Peter Spiegelman
Afterword copyright © 2008 by Reed Farrel Coleman
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
This edition published in 2012 by
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eISBN 10: 1-4405-4101-9
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4101-8
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their product are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.
Table of Contents
Cover
Praise
Title Page
Foreword: By Peter Spiegelman
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One: November 23rd, 1980
Chapter Two: November 25th
Chapter Three: November 25th (Evening)
Chapter Four: Thanksgiving
Chapter Five: November 27th
Chapter Six: November 28th
Chapter Seven: November 29th
Chapter Eight: November 30th
Chapter Nine: December 1st
Chapter Ten: December 3rd
Chapter Eleven: December 4th
Chapter Twelve: December 5th
Chapter Thirteen: December?
Chapter Fourteen: December 7th
Chapter Fifteen: December 8th
Epilogue: Ashes
Afterword: By Reed Farrel Coleman
About the Author
Also Available
Copyright
Redemption Street Page 24
