#863 Hunter/Trapper- Arthur Nersesian

#863 Hunter/Trapper- Arthur Nersesian

        

A man connects with a woman in an internet chat room for S & M. She is shy and reticent but he is persistent. After a while of her not taking any kind of bait, he thinks she may be in the wrong room.

“It was as though some ponytailed Dorothy from Kansas had accidentally ventured into this Oz of Bondage and Domination. I could see why she didn’t get much action. No one else would have put up with her.”

Regardless, they chat for months becoming good friends, all the while he kept insisting they become closer. In private he is a real life predator and is planning to take her as his next victim. When she finally leads enough bread crumbs for him to find her, the cat catches the mouse.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#857 Crown Heist- Mansbach

#857 Crown Heist- Mansbach

With a name like Abraham Lazarus, you wouldn’t expect a dread-locked Rasta drug dealer, but there you have it. T met Laz when he moved into his building and realized his white neighbor was selling weed. They became pals and T spend most of his time next door with Laz and the neighborhood rastas. 

Laz came in one morning shaken up, he had just been robbed. When a drug dealer gets robbed in his house, it is usually someone he knows, and he is pretty sure he knows who did it. He grabs T and they go to try to recover the stolen goods and punish the guy who did it. T isn’t normally involved in this kind of stuff, but he feels obligated. They do the deed and Laz has to leave town. He asks T to take over his business for a while. Don’t yuo love it when a plan comes together?

Rating: 7-6-7-5 Total= 25

#806 When All This Was Bay Bridge- Tim McLoughlin

#806 When All This Was Bay Bridge- Tim McLoughlin

This a nostalgic story about old Brooklyn. Daniel visits the old neighborhood the day of his father’s funeral. He remembers a time when he was seventeen and arrested for spray painting a subway car in Coney Island. His father, a former cop, got him released and warned him that it was his free pass. His father laments the changing of the neighborhood.

“When all this was Bay Ridge. He was masterful, my father. He didn’t say when it was all white, or when it was Irish, or even the relatively tame when it was safer. No. When all this was Bay Ridge.”

On the day of his father’s funeral, he visits the old Irish neighborhood bar, the last bastion of the Irish working class in Sunset Park. He talks with his father’s friends and tries to get them to reveal a secret in a photograph he has. Like the solid wall that cops create to protect each other, the old guard won't budge. They protect their own secrets, even against kin. It’s generational, and with each passing one, they get further from their roots and from what they remember as the old days.

Rating: 7-6-7-7 Total= 27

#778 No Time for Seniors- Sidney Offit

#778 No Time for Seniors- Sidney Offit

Another selection out of the fun Brooklyn Noir collection, this one is just a little too gumshoe for my taste. Every sentence is packed with jargon, lingo and a bit over the top with the Brooklyn-ese dialect. Example:

“I need you pistol Pete…The cops have got Scoop in for murder. Murder. They say he done in Front Page Shamberger and Sherlock Iconoflop.”

Not that I can’t appreciate a good gumshoe name like Front Page Shamberger, but I generally like my noir a little darker and little more subtle. Short stories are too short to spend so much time getting into the “voice” of the piece. If I spend half my time trying to separate names from private detective jargon, I can’t enjoy the ride as much. Personal taste.

Rating: 7-6-6-6 Total= 25

#750 Hasidic Noir- Pearl Abraham

#750 Hasidic Noir- Pearl Abraham

In Williamsburg, Brooklyn during a morning service, a private investigator learns of a murder. He is the city’s first and only Hasidic detective he says and since it is an “inside job” he is the only one that can solve it:

“Anywhere else, murder, even when it occurs with some frequency, is front page news; in the Hasidic world, it’s kept out of the papers.”

In a Hatfield and McCoy type of local feud, the murder is someone in line for the Grand Rabbinical Throne. Two congregations pitted against each other, printing propaganda and hiding true intentions. The intrigue is deep and what seems cut and dry, of course is anything but.

Rating: 6-6-5-6 Total= 23

#722 The Book Signing- Pete Hamill

#722 The Book Signing- Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill is a New York writer. He has written for every major NY newspaper, several NY based weeklies and of course his novels and memoirs outline a New York life in a way that has made the name Pete Hamill synonymous with the great five boroughs. He is the perfect writer to open this collection of stories, Brooklyn Noir.

Buddy Carmody is also a writer. He moved out of Brooklyn and headed west in 1957, the same year and direction as the Brooklyn Dodgers. He needed to leave, to free himself, to allow himself the things that would make him a writer. Now, forty years and seventeen successful novels later, he returns for his first book reading in his home town.

Before the reading, he walks his old neighborhood, now clean and gentrified. His memories make him uneasy and a run in with the brother of the woman he left behind reveals some unpleasant truths. His past, one he didn’t know existed, now comes back to haunt him. His freedom came at a cost, and the bill is due.

Notable Passage: “On this high slope the harbor wind turned snow into iron.”

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#240 Bulldog- Arthur Miller

#240 Bulldog- Arthur Miller

I would imagine that someone so adapt at being a dramatist would also master the art of short story telling. Which is why I’m surprised that I’ve seen very little of Miller’s short stories.

This one, I guess, is a coming of age story. A thirteen year old Jewish boy from the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn wants to buy a puppy. What ends up happing is a rapid lesson in adulthood.

“He played feeling as though something inside him had sort of shaken loose or collapsed altogether. He was different than he had ever been, not empty and clear anymore but weighted with secrets and his lies, some told and some untold, but all of it disgusting enough to set him slightly outside his family, in a place where he could watch them now, and watch themselves with them.”

Besides the obvious dark, disturbing moment in here, a lot of this is a touching nostalgic look at Brooklyn as a child. The old rickety wooden subways, the kids playing in empty lots on hot weekend days, old baseballs hit over their fence from the amateur league games played in their neighborhood.

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34