#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

#813 The Shiny Car in the Night- Nick Mamatas

#813 The Shiny Car in the Night- Nick Mamatas

Northport, Long Island is famous for a few figures. Jack Kerouac lived there during his later years and Ricky Kasso known as the “Acid King” once murdered someone in the summer of 1984 in a satanic ritual. Pete remembers that summer. He was the son of a connected Italian father who ran the Garbage removal business in those parts. It was a odd time to live there. 

Pete was the smart one of the family and was steered away from the family business. He gravitated towards the Kerouac side of things and wanted more than anything to go On The Road. He did, but came back to protect his father when things got hairy. Together, he hopes On The Road can become a family fairy tale, leaving all those roots behind.

Notable Passage: “I got over romanticizing poverty, and the road, but I never got over Kerouac.”

Rating: 7-7-7-8 Total= 29

#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

#456 Briley Boy- Robert Mailer Anderson

#456 Briley Boy- Robert Mailer Anderson

Briley could dodge a punch. That’s what he was good at. Which was pretty convenient because he had a knack for making people take swings at him.

“He had learned to become elusive, especially from himself. He didn’t stand in front of a mirror long enough to see his own reflection. It helped when he was stealing cars, scouting houses for a B & E, scoring drugs.”

So when his new stripper wife clocked him in the head, breaking his nose, he laughed. He stood there and took all her blows, until something would give, something had to give.

This is a classic noir story, and with every good noir story you get some pretty choice lines. Here were some of my favorites:

-Her eyes were like tunnels. No train coming.

-You can’t kiss a shadow or a memory, he had been told. It was hard enough to stare at someone in the eyes and wish them dead.

-He wanted to say something. Not and apology, maybe an epitaph.

-Waiting. He heard sirens in the distance racing toward him as if there was something left to save.

Rating: 7-7-9-7 Total= 30

#449 Kid's Last Fight- Eddie Muller

#449 Kid's Last Fight- Eddie Muller

Three paths converge one day. Danh, a lowlife thief with a fantasy about cutting a woman’s ring finger off and tossing it on a bar to pay for a round of drinks—Hannah, the woman he tries this gruesome attack on—and Bud Callum, a washed-up boxer that saves the day.

“My lucky day…at precisely the right moment, this guy came into my life.”

Bud is addled from years of head trauma, so when Hannah offers him a ride and a conversation, there is a lot of confusion. But he did save her life and she is more than happy to hear his rambling tales of his boxing hey-day. But no good deed goes unpunished. Somehow the thief that got a beating comes out of this the best. At least he knew where the beating came from.

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

#442 Genesis to Revelation- Peter Plate

#442 Genesis to Revelation- Peter Plate

This is another short story from the San Francisco Noir collection. It’s Christmas Eve and a surprisingly sweltering ninety-six degrees on Market Street. Slatts Calhoun, three days released from San Quentin Prison in on the streets looking for trouble. He’s dressed as Santa Clause, and he’s packing a .357.

He forces his way into a medical marijuana shop, and robs the register.  It was almost a clean getaway but the police got there faster than he thought. So much for Santa.

“The Gods of crime were not smiling on Market that afternoon.”

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

#436 The Freeze Dried Groom- Margaret Atwood

#436 The Freeze Dried Groom- Margaret Atwood

We’ve seen a lot of short stories the past 435 days or so that involve a cold, loveless marriage. They generally aren’t my favorite stories. This one however, is better than most. Atwood adds a little noir to the mix.

Sam eats breakfast while Gwyneth tells him that their marriage is over. Without much discussion he packs and leaves. He is after all used to transience, having a career in shady dealings:

“He’s relied on them all his life, those big blue eyes of his. Round, candid eyes. Con-man’s eyes.”

“If anyone could fix him, she could…But she’s failed.”

Sam runs an antique shop, one that has at least two secrets. His partner is an expert at faking antiques, artfully distressing newer cheaper furniture to look older and more valuable. His second secret is drugs. A different silent partner drops drugs in a piece of furniture stowed in a storage unit up for auction. He bids on the unit, and “sells” the furniture to a knowing third party. He’s merely a go-between.

On one of his auctions he finds something very strange in the unit, and finds someone very interesting wanting to buy it from him.

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#421 The Prison- Domenic Stansberry

#421 The Prison- Domenic Stansberry

Jojo was back from the war, everything had changed. North Beach was still the old neighborhood, but his father wasn’t there any more. His father used to be a respected newspaper man, ran a local Italian weekly. At the start of the war, he was brought before a hearing and sent to an interment camp.

Now Jojo is caught between San Francisco and Reno where his father is. He won’t return, he has been shamed publically and his pride will not allow him to come back. Jojo resents his whole neighborhood for allowing this to happen to his family while he was serving his country.

All this happens as they watch Alcatraz burn in the failed prisoner revolt of 1946.

Notable Passage: “I hadn’t planned to be here, but here I was. There are things you don’t escape. In the dark.

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

#331 Larry’s Place- Michelle Tea

#331 Larry’s Place- Michelle Tea

This was another story out of the San Francisco Noir collection. It’s an interesting read, standard noir feel. A prostitute lives in a shitty run down apartment on Bernal Hill. Her ex girlfriend breaks in and robs her. At the same time, her landlord dies upstairs. She hides the body, lives in his apartment, uses his car, and waits for the inevitable.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#323 Double Espresso- Sin Soracco

#323 Double Espresso- Sin Soracco

I got this story from San Francisco Noir, one of a series of City Noir collections.  The series uses local writers to “…help expose the psycho-geography of a city. Hidden and repressed memories are a focal point…”

Here Gina is a homeless woman sleeping in a park built above a filled-in waterway. Water is a big theme here, and rivers dried-up, or controlled by civilization. Gina takes a trip just outside the city to visit a friend. She learns that the world is crazy when you don’t know the lay of the land.

“She discovered a fondness for the city buried somewhere deep in her chest, most noticeably when she was leaving.”

Notable Passage: “Civilization treats pain with lectures.”

Rating: 7-6-7-6 Total= 26

#143 Entropy- Thomas Pynchon

#143 Entropy- Thomas Pynchon

'Entropy' is a lack of cohesion, a steady and unavoidable erosion and spiral into chaos. When this march is inevitable, what would you do? Throw a party of course; thus we have a look into the dark, and brilliant mind of Thomas Pynchon.

When you are waiting for change to happen, you are done with your current situation and you can’t see what’s next, despair often sets in:

“He was forced, therefore, in the sad dying fall of middle age, to a radical reevaluation of everything he had learned up to then…he did not know if he was equal to the task.”

Pynchon offers such demented, muddy, surroundings and it’s like peering into a dark room: you’re not sure if you want to see what’s inside, and when you inevitable give it a peek, you don’t want to ask too many questions. The imagery is stark and the symbolism stings you like stepping on tack shoeless in the middle of the night. The story begins with a Henry Miller Quote:

“We must get into step, a lockstep toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.”

The temperature outside is 37 degrees and will not change, that is death looming for all of us. Why not keep checking the temperature, why not smash the windows and let it in:

“..and [she] turned to face the man on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion.”

Many people confuse styles like gum-shoe pulp with noir. This is true noir, black cutting satire of human weakness and misery. Nobody does this better. You read through the muck and lurid lives of these characters and them BAM, a joke hits even though it isn’t really funny, you have to laugh at the sheer sickness of it:

“How much more human can I get? There are Europeans wanderiun around north Africa these days with their tongues torn out of their heads because those tongues have spoken the wrong words. Only the Europeans thought they were the right words.”

“language barrier” Meatball suggested.

Notable Passage: “She crawled into dreams each night with a sense of exhaustion, and a desperate resolve never to relax that vigilance.”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40