Blind to Midnight by Reed Farrel Coleman

Published by Blackstone Publishing on August 13, 2024

Nick Ryan (at least his name isn’t Jake or Jack) is a tough guy. Tough Guy fiction is populated by one dimensional characters, the dimension being toughness. That makes them boring. No character in fiction is more tedious than a self-righteous cop. Nick is a self-righteous Tough Guy cop, meaning he’s both boring and tedious.

Ryan has the usual binary view of the world that characterizes fictional Tough Guys, few of whom have room in their brains for nuanced thought. He is proud of his enhanced ability to discern the difference between right and wrong (an ability that evolved from his military service, where “right” meant “what superior officers tell me to do” and “wrong” meant “whatever the enemy is doing”). He is untroubled by his inability to perceive any gray area between right and wrong. Nick also prides himself on not making moral judgments, as if right and wrong are not abstract, contextualized judgments. Instead of moral judgments, Nick makes “professional assessments.” Much less messy than worrying about right and wrong, not that he needs to worry because he always knows what is right and what is wrong. Lucky guy.

Tough Guy fiction is all about establishing the Tough Guy’s credentials. Nick says “tough isn’t about having a gun. Tough is how you handle having one stuck in your face.” He tells this to a wealthy woman who wants to sleep with him despite his banal dialog (Nick understands that women can’t resist “real men”) but Nick can say no to her because he knows another woman is just around the corner. Such are the benefits of being a Tough Guy in Thrillerworld.

To prove his toughness, Nick fights several armed men at a time without pulling a weapon. And while tough isn’t about having a gun, Nick usually has at least two within reach and doesn’t hesitate to kill bad guys with them. He feels sad about it (sort of), but never regrets killing because regret, like hope, gets you nowhere. Nick assures us that he has feelings; he just doesn’t “surrender to them.” Of course not, because Tough Guys can’t let their feels get in the way of their toughs. When Nick explains that he has separated himself from his daughter to protect her from all the bad guys he attracts, he’s making it clear that his feelings consist of self-love and little else. I mean, the dude could just move to a different state with her and stop killing people, but that wouldn't be the Tough Guy thing to do.

Nick is a detective in NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau. He’s also the city’s “shadow watchman.” He isn’t quite Batman, although his masters have given him a fast car and a bunch of tech, everything short of a mask and a Batarang. When Nick isn’t performing his regular duties, he works as a “fixer,” solving the city’s problems in exchange for unprecedent access to resources. While Nick has little contact with the people who control him, he prides himself on his independence, which he furthers by blackmailing his immediate superior so he can do things the say he wants to do them — the Tough Guy Way.

Nick’s former partner planted blood evidence that he hoped would lead to the conviction of a child killer. The cop’s attempt to defraud the court was exposed and the cop “ate his gun” when the killer went free. Instead of heeding the obvious lesson that cops shouldn’t plant fake evidence, Nick decided to execute the child killer. After all, if Nick thinks the perp is guilty, why bother to give the guy a fair trial? Nick might think he knows the difference between right and wrong, but he has a warped sense of justice.

Having established that Nick is boring and indistinguishable from dozens of other Tough Guy protagonists, let’s take a look at the plot. Nick is working undercover because he is truly gifted at developing the convincing stench of a homeless person. He’s going after Shea Flannery, the president of the laborer’s union. His masters want to prove that Flannery is dirty, even if Nick has to supply the dirt. The fact that Nick didn’t quit on the spot after receiving that order is evidence of Nick’s inability to make moral judgments, not to mention an impaired sense of the difference between right and wrong.

Nick rescues a boy from a likely beating. The boy’s mother is Victoria Lansdale, the rich woman who wants to shag Nick. “Wealthy women smelled different,” Nick tells us in a moment of great insight. Thugs later use mild violence to deliver a message to Victoria’s husband: “Tell him the bill is long overdue.” Nick’s involvement in Lansdale drama is part of the story.

Nick’s dad is a retired cop. He testified against corrupt cops and is now unwelcome in their company. His dad’s best friend, Tony Angelo, also a retired cop, is murdered. Nick decides that investigating Flannery is less important than solving Angelo’s murder. Tough guys never follow orders. Nick’s investigation of Tony’s death is another part of the story. So is the Flannery plot thread.

Nick’s beloved independence allows him to investigate the murder of Vlado Markovic, who was supposedly killed in New York City on 9/11. The official conclusion is that Markovic was mistaken for an Arab and was killed in a hate crime. Not true, but Reed Farrel Coleman ties Markovic’s unlikely murder to more plausible plot threads.

The plot is no worse, and in some respects more clever, than is traditional for Tough Guy novels. Unfortunately, Nick is just another Tough Guy. Coleman gives the reader no reason to care about what happens to him. Dialog is uninspired. So are sentences like “He had somewhere to do and something to do.” I have nowhere to go and some other book to read. I hope the next one is more original than Blind to Midnight.

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