The Eddie Moran Series

My latest novel, Millen, is the third in what will ultimately become a series of five books featuring the brash, brilliant and often infuriating lawyer, Mr Edwin Cassius Moran. Eddie first surfaced years ago in my second novel, Gone, and he has since re-appeared – along with his faithful Girl Friday, Slick, and his resourceful private investigator friend, the shambolic but indefatigable Frank Vagianni – in Crook as Rookwood, and now, most recently, Millen, the latest in the series. Two more instalments will follow in the next couple of years.

Ultimately, the five-book series will tell the story of Eddie’s colourful career in snap-shots that take him from a rough-and-ready debutant in the nineteen eighties to a highly-celebrated, but still every bit just-as-obnoxious veteran in the twenty twenties. It won’t necessarily be an entirely lineal progression, since several of the books are both a prequel and a sequel of some others, but like any career the true tale is best told by reference as much to what has passed as to what is yet to come.

The time frame of the Eddie Moran series largely coincides with the period of my own career as a criminal defence lawyer, but the books are in no sense a memoir. While some readers and critics have mused about whether Eddie is in fact my alter-ego, nothing could be further from the truth. He is a unique character, who says and does things I would never dare to, even though at times I might have wanted to.  Likewise, none of the books is really about Eddie himself, even though his ego would have probably liked to think they are. He is just the glue, the common thread that ties the stories of his clients in together as a series.

Like so many real-life lawyers, Eddie Moran is only notable for the people that he represents in court. The books are all about their stories, and the characters they come across in the context of their journey. None of them is true, but all are inspired by an amalgam of events and people I have encountered in the course of a long career in and around the criminal courts of law. I hope my readers will find them as fascinating as I have.
– Chris Nyst