Farewell
With the knowledge that my Moe Prager series was coming
to an end with this month’s release of The
Hollow Girl, the ninth installment in the series, people have asked me if I
will miss Moe. The answer is simple: I don’t know. We haven’t been apart long
enough. What I can say is that I don’t miss him yet. Moe and I have spent
fifteen years together, about half as much time as my wife and I have been
married. That’s a mighty long time to have someone else living in your head.
It’s both frightening and wonderful to think about, but I have probably
expended more thought, energy, and effort on the fictional Moe Prager than I
have on any living human beings other than my wife and two kids. Moe and I have
had a wonderful partnership, but not all partnerships last forever. Sometimes,
when you try to push partnerships past their logical shelf life, they turn
toxic. I wasn’t going to do that with Moe.
Moe has been
wonderful to me. He has given me a vehicle through which to express my views on
religion, politics, morality, sports, corruption, hypocrisy, music, love and
friendship, truth and lies, romance and sex. Moe has allowed me to paint vivid,
if somewhat distorted, pictures of the world I grew up in, of my little corner
of Brooklyn, NY. I haven’t physically lived in Brooklyn since 1983, but Moe has
allowed me to linger in the Brooklyn I loved and hated, the Brooklyn I left
behind but that has never left me behind. It is surely a Brooklyn of the mind.
My mind. Moe’s mind. It’s very odd for me now that my daughter Kaitlin lives in
Brooklyn. But it’s not my Brooklyn. There was nothing hip or cutting edge about
my Brooklyn. To paraphrase something I
wrote in one of the Moe books, my Brooklyn was always the poor relation, the
girl in last year’s dress. I never thought I would live to see the day that
Parisians would say something was tres
Brooklyn as an expression of coolness.
I’ve also been asked what gave me the idea to end the
series now. That answer is simple. I never envisioned this as an open-ended
series. That’s why I aged Moe throughout. I built the end of the series into
its initial conception. Though each book was written organically—I never had a
series arc in mind when I wrote Walking
the Perfect Square—I knew that I would eventually run out of things to say
through Moe. And let’s be real, 65 may be the new 55, but Moe had been through a
lot. I could no longer accept a 65 year old man who had just survived a near
fatal bout with stomach cancer as a tough guy, hard-boiled PI. And if I couldn’t
accept it, how could I expect my readers to accept it. No, when I was writing Hurt Machine, the seventh installment in the series, I was already planning to wrap things up.
It’s my hope that as I move on with my career that
readers who have never heard of Moe or readers who have heard of the series,
but for some reason have never picked up one of the books, find the time to
read the series. I hope people realize that although I won’t be writing anymore
Moe books, I will never really leave Moe behind. How could I? Whatever success
I have achieved has been largely due to our partnership. Thanks to all of you
for your loyal support. I can’t possibly express how much it’s meant to me … I
mean, us.
