BROOLYN NOIR
Edited by Tim McLoughlin
Akashic Books
$15.95 (366 pages)
Release date: July 2004
Brooklyn’s reputation as a gangland full of loudmouth goombas and cold-blooded wiseguys is deeply etched in the American imagination. It is, after all, the birthplace of such lowlifes as Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, and Salvatore “Sammy The Bull” Gravano. Mention Brooklyn today and people still think of Murder Incorporated or John Travolta strutting down 86th Street in “Saturday Night Fever.” Yeah, Brooklyn has a lot more to offer – a museum, botanical gardens, that bridge – but for those romantics who remember a time when men proudly displayed chest hair and real cars were equipped with curb feelers, the borough will always be about the criminal underworld and tough-guy swagger. So a collection of 20 new crime tales, each set in a different Brooklyn neighborhood, seems like a great idea, right? Well, the idea is good. It’s the book that sucks.
“Brooklyn Noir,” edited by Tim McLoughlin, takes the reader on an often bizarre, seldom entertaining trek through the borough’s dark and murderous streets – but you might want to wait for the next ride.
The first stop is Park Slope, the setting of Pete Hamill’s “The Book Signing.” In the pensive tale, a writer who abandoned Brooklyn for sunny California along with the Dodgers returns to the old neighborhood and confronts the past he thought he buried back in 1957. McLoughlin’s “When All This Was Bay Ridge” also reaches into the past to conjure up demons. In the story, a young man discovers his dead father’s darkest sins after a conversation in a Sunset Park bar. Several of the anthology’s other writers also build their stories on this tension between the past and present, but not to equal effect.
However, in the collection’s two best, and most gripping, tales the tension is very much in the here and now. The first, Arthur Nersesian’s “Hunter/Trapper,” is a creepy thriller about an obsessive Internet correspondence that leads to vivisection. And in the subtle suspense tale “Dumped” by Nicole Blackman, a trio of inconsiderate boyfriends are repaid for their bad behavior.
The rest of the ride, unfortunately, is full of dead-ends. Too many stories run like a bad Joe Pesci movie, idly exploiting the borough’s tough-guy image and employing wooden characters who talk as if they just took a Berlitz course in Brooklynese.. Or, the stories ignore Brooklyn altogether and instead offer bland cops-and-robbers fare. Brooklyn, with its rich history of shady characters, deserves better.
If you mind slogging through the muck to stumble upon the occasional good story, then fuhgedaboutit…. but for the curiosity seeker the odd cast of characters might be worth the fare. Not many mystery anthologies can boast such dramatis personae as a Hasidic private eye (“Hasidic Noir”), an East New York horse thief (“Triple Harrison”), a white Rastafarian drug dealer (“Crown Heist”), and a hardcore rapper seduced by a shemale (“The Code”). Diversity has always been among Brooklyn’s many charms.
