Dylan Klein Books in Order

Dylan Klein belongs to Reed Farrel Coleman's earliest crime novels, and you can feel the energy of a writer figuring out what kind of trouble he most wants to chase. Dylan is an offbeat Brooklyn investigator, sometimes an insurance man, sometimes a would-be writer, always a little out of step with the people around him. He is smart, anxious, funny in a dry way, and forever getting yanked into situations that are much dirtier than he expected.

The books have more manic motion than the later Moe Prager novels.

Life Goes Sleeping sends Dylan back to his old neighborhood for his mother's funeral and then into betrayal and murder. Little Easter throws him into a deadly love triangle with organized crime at the edges. They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee adds Hollywood disappointment, family trouble, campus drugs, and a missing nephew. Across all three books, Dylan is helped and complicated by ex-detective Johnny MacClough, whose presence gives the series some of its rough muscle.

Brooklyn is already central here, as are family strain, Jewish identity, and the feeling that the city can pull you backward just when you think you have escaped it. The tone is a little wilder than Coleman's later series, but the concerns are familiar: loyalty, class, old secrets, and people trying to improvise their way through danger.

If you want the early version of the writer he would become, this is the place to look. The Dylan Klein books are looser and scrappier, but they already show his ear for dialogue and his interest in damaged men who keep stumbling toward the truth.