TRISS STEIN: R.I.P.

Sad news: Mystery author Triss Stein passed away yesterday. R.I.P., Triss. You will be missed.

She was the author of the Erica Donato mysteries set in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Bones (2013) 

Brooklyn Graves (2014) 

Brooklyn Secrets (2015) 

Brooklyn Wars (2017) 

Brooklyn Legacies (2019)

She was also the author of the Kay Engels mystery Murder at the Class Reunion (1993)

Mystery Readers Journal was honored to have an author essay from Triss for the New York City Mysteries I issue of Mystery Readers Journal (32:1) Spring 2016. 

I'm reprinting the essay here:

Tres Brooklyn by Triss Stein

New York, New York. So nice they named it twice. I think I always felt that way. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my hometown, a small city in northernmost upstate New York, near the beautiful Thousand Islands and a real foreign border (exotic Canada). However, it was a place where nearby Syracuse represented quite as much excitement as most people wanted. I didn’t know anyone else who thought his or her future was in the big city. Or any big city. 
 
When I was a child, right after the dinosaurs, it was still perfectly all right for a little girl to say, “I want to be a wife and mother when I grow up.” Not me. I wanted to be Doris Day, a career girl with a cute apartment in New York. 
 
The surprise is that I did become a New Yorker, though it was almost by accident. I came from Boston for graduate school, owed New York state two years for a fellowship, and then I was going back to Boston. But I found a job. Fell in love. Had a family. Bought a house in Brooklyn that shouted old New York. I loved the old, I loved New York.
 
The moment I knew I was never leaving was when I was on the subway and two subway preachers were trying to out sing each other, shouting hymns across the aisle.
 
My first job was working as a children’s librarian in the Brooklyn Public Library system. I worked in nine different neighborhoods, and I was fascinated to see how different they were.  Our patrons did not say they were from “New York”, or even “Brooklyn,” but “Mill Basin.” Or “Van Dyke Houses.” Or “Cypress Hills.” Many of them only ventured into Manhattan once a year. In other words, it was a lot more like small towns than most of them knew.
 
The history fascinated me too. How can you not love a place that sent a parade of elephants to prove the safety of that soon-to-be-famous, brand new bridge? 
 
I didn’t know it then, but I was getting ready to write a mystery series about Brooklyn. Acting like a librarian, I was filing all those memories and oddball facts away for when I needed them. 
 
I have lived in Brooklyn now for most of my adult life. We started out in a neighborhood that was still touch and go. The playground was dangerous late at night and we had two children’s car seats stolen from our parked car. It is called Park Slope and it has evolved into the quintessential gentrified, quaint, very chic urban neighborhood. It is tres Brooklyn, as they now say even in Paris. Could there be lots of tension around these changes? That long downhill slide and the controversial revival? And does tension create plot? How about a body discovered in a house undergoing renovation? Houses here are always undergoing renovation. That became Brooklyn Bones.
 
The second series book, Brooklyn Graves, is about a beautiful, historic, art-filled cemetery and a lost Tiffany window, but also about a deteriorating neighborhood saved by a flood of Russian immigrants. Saved? Or was it ruined? It all depends on who you ask.
 
Brooklyn Secrets, released in December, 2015, is about Brownsville, a decidedly unrenovated neighborhood where young people now struggle with many of the same pressures as young people did generations ago when it was the breeding ground of the notorious branch of the mob called Murder Inc.
 
I know I will never run out of Brooklyn stories to tell. The next one will be about the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which ran 24/7 during World War 11, employed 70,000 people including women, built the battleship Missouri and then died a slow, painful death. After that? I have few ideas cooking.
 
I haven’t yet worked out how to write about the flock of bright green tropical parrots that live on the Brooklyn College campus, or the house where Winston Churchill’s mother was born – no one is sure exactly which house it was – but they may yet find their way into a story. 
 
And those elephants on the Brooklyn Bridge?  I don’t know where they came from – was the circus in town? – but maybe I should find out. 
 
 
 

Reed Farrel Coleman: A Thank You

Today I welcome back one of my favorite writers and one of the nicest guys I've ever meet, Reed Farrel Coleman.

Reed Farrel Coleman is the former executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America. He has published fourteen novels: two stand-alones and three series, including seven books in the Moe Prager series. Tower was co-authored with award-winning Irish writer Ken Bruen, and Gun Church was released as an exclusive audio download from Audible.com.

Reed is a three-time recipient of the Shamus Award for Best Detective Novel of the Year and is a two-time Edgar® Award nominee. He has also received the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards. Reed was co-editor of the poetry journals Poetry Bone and The Lineup and the editor of the short story anthology Hard Boiled Brooklyn. His short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in The Long Island Quarterly, Wall Street Noir, Brooklyn Noir 3, The Darker Mask, These Guns For Hire, Crimespree Magazine, and several other publications.

Reed Farrel Coleman: A Thank You

The other night at the Edgar banquet, I sat and listened to Dennis Lehane’s acceptance speech when he won the Edgar® Award for Best Novel. The unscripted speech was very moving in an unexpected way. There was Dennis, standing at the podium, dumbfounded, gathering himself, turning the statuette to face him, and introducing himself to Poe. Great moment. During his brief remarks, Dennis thanked his publisher, his agent, his family, and all the people you would expect him to thank. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but then he added one last thank you and that’s what got to me. Dennis thanked the city of Boston. Yes, he acknowledged the recent tragedy. Yet, that wasn’t the point, not exactly. He was thanking Boston for helping to shape the person, good and bad, he is, and, by extention, the writer he is. I understood his sentiment completely because it is precisely how I feel about Brooklyn.

The other day, when I was contacted by a childhood friend whom I hadn’t heard from in forty-years, it dawned on me that I have lived away from Brooklyn (though not that far away) longer than I lived in Brooklyn. The thing is, I have never been able to escape Brooklyn. I have never wanted to. Brooklyn gave me everything I ever needed and, I suppose, a lot of stuff I could have done without. Or maybe not. As a writer and as a middle aged man, It’s impossible to separate what you need from what you don’t. One part of Brooklyn in particular, Coney Island, is so integral to me as a person and as a writer that I sometimes feel like a bird who, as a hatchling, imprinted on the parachute jump instead of his parents.

In no book have I felt this connection to my hometown like I did while writing Onion Street. As Onion Street is a prequel set in 1967 and Moe is just another aimless college student, I had to get into Moe’s head and the setting in a profoundly different way than I had before. Moe is thirty or so in Walking the Perfect Square, the first novel in the series. He’d been on the job as a NYPD cop for ten years. Basically he’d been there, done that, no matter where there was or what that had been. So the eyes through which he saw New York and his old Brooklyn neighborhood were more than a bit world weary and jaundiced. But the eyes of the twenty year old Moe were still untainted. In getting into the young Moe’s head, seeing the world through his inexperienced eyes had the effect of bringing me back in time. It got me back in touch with how I had once felt about Brooklyn, not as a grown man but as a kid. How it was a world of dangerous wonder to me.

I hope the readers get that when they read Onion Street. And if I’m ever lucky enough to win an Edgar, I think I’ll get up behind that podium and steal part of Dennis Lehane’s acceptance speech. Because, frankly, I don’t know where I’d be as a writer or as a person without Brooklyn.