Lola, by Jonathan Santlofer

"Lola," by Jonathan Santlofer, in New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Akashic Press, 2011 

I didn't think this story was going to be my favorite of the week.  It felt like a pretty ordinary piece at first.  But stories, like people for that matter, can surprise you.

The narrator is a would-be portrait artist who makes his living preparing stretchers for more successful painters.  One day riding the PATH trains back to Hoboken he becomes attracted to a young woman.  Pretty soon he is obsessed with her, and this is obviously not the first time he has gone down this path.  I was pretty sure I knew where this journey was headed.

Well.  Can't say much more without giving away the store.  Let's just say Santlofer has some surprises in store for his characters, and for us.

A perfect ending is one that leaves the reader saying: "I never saw that coming, but it is the only way the story could have ended."  "Lola" has a perfect ending.

Soul Anatomy, by Lou Manfredo

"Soul Anatomy," by Lou Manfredo, in New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Akashic Press, 2011.

Before we get to the story I have to start out with a grudge and a gripe.  

My grudge is this: as a writer for a previous Akashic anthology, and as a guy who spent his first 30 years in New Jersey, I was hoping for a chance to submit to this book.  Wires got crossed and that never happened.

Not a big deal, and I only mention it because, as I said, I have a gripe, and full disclosure applies.  You have a right to decide whether sour grapes are speaking here.

Now for the gripe: There are 1,300,000 African-Americans  living in New Jersey, making up 14%  of the population.  And not one of them was willing or able to write a story for this book?  Seriously?  Not typical for Akashic anthologies, either.

Joyce Carol Oates, the editor, knows it's a problem.  She mentions it in an interview with Publisher's Weekly.  "We tried , tried, and tried" to get African-American authors, she says.  Okay, but it sure looks like a big part of the state is missing.

All of which is tangentially relevant to this week's story, which is tangentially about race relations.

When a white rookie police officer kills an African-American man in Camden, one of the most Black and deadliest cities in the Garden State, trouble is pretty much guaranteed to follow.  So, even though almost the entire story consists of a lawyer interviewing the cop, there would be plenty of natural suspense here.

But Manfredo manages to ratchet it up a notch: the rookie is the son of an up-and-coming Republican politician and the attorney sent to rescue him is a well-entrenched Democrat.  In other words, the future of the reformer's family depends on the skills and motivation of the party hack.  How is that going to work out?

I wouldn't say there is a surprise ending, exactly, but there are some surprising revelations that will make you see the story from a new point of view.

And consistently good writing, too.  Here are two attorneys discussing  the rookie:

"This young cop has his own political juice, courtesy of his old man.  If becoming a cop was all he really wanted, his father could have gotten him assigned to bikini patrol in some shore town or crabgrass stakeout in our neck of the woods.  Why would he want to go to Camden?"
 
"Maybe," Cash offered with little conviction, "he just wants to be a real cop."

Sweet Croquette, by David Barba

"Sweet Croquette," by David Barba, in Barcelona Noir, Akashic Press, 2011.  

When I found out about the disappearance of Swiss gourmet Pascal Henry, I had no doubt that his body had become part of the larder for the liquid croquettes offered on the degustation menu at El Bulli.

Did that opening sentence get your attention?  It certainly grabbed mine.  I should say that Barba's story of madness, murder and cannibalism is not going to be to everyone's, uh, taste.  But it is fascinating and, as it rolls to a bizarre conclusion, hilarious.

The narrator has a job in his family's butcher shop and a wife who has become obsessed with literature at just the point when her husband has sworn never to read another book.  Not a recipe for marital bliss.  The narrator's ambition is to be a great chef and he becomes obsessed with the workings of the high-tech gourmet restaurants of Barcelona.  As you can tell from the first sentence, he draws a conclusion about their secret ingredient, and decides to experiment on his own... in more senses of that phrase than one.

A wild ride.

Love

Martyn Waites, hilarious!, a photo by annie_c_2 on Flickr.

"Love" by Martyn Waites. in London Noir, edited by Cathi Unsworth. Akashic Press. 2006.

I have been reading mostly web-based stories this week and getting frustrated by them. Here is the plot I seem to read over and over: bad guy meets bad guy. One of them gets killed.

Okay, it's a story, I guess. In fact it is the plot of "Loaded," which I reviewed here last week. But by itself, it is not enough. You have to make me care what happens, which bad guy gets killed.

There are lots of ways to make the reader care, and I will discuss this at length in a week or two at Criminal Brief.

But here is one method: give the character a shot at redemption. Whether they take it or not isn't the issue. Give them chance to redeem themselves, to fix the broken part, to take back the mistake. (Ever see the movie In Bruges? It is a sardonically funny, bloody little film, well worth seeing. All three of the main characters, two hitmen and a gang boss, find their individual redemptions in the end, turning out to be slightly better people than we - and maybe they - thought.)

Which brings us to the end of the rant and the beginning of the rave. I have never heard of Martyn Waites before but his story "Love" is one of the highlights in London Noir. The narrator is a skinhead, a racist foot soldier of a racist movement.

Fists an boots an sticks. I take. I give back double. I twist an thrash. Like swimmin in anger. I come up for air an dive back in again, lungs full....

Then I'm not swimmin. Liquid solidifies round me. An I'm part of a huge machine. A muscle an bone an blood machine. A shoutin, chantin cog in a huge hrtin machine. Arms windmillin. Boots kickin. Fueled on violence. Driven by rage.

Lost to it. No me. Just the machine. An I've never felt more alive.

Love it.

Is there a chance for redemption for this guy? Can he retrieve himself from the machine and find his own humanity?

Yes, but this being noir, the cost is extremely high. Impressive story.

Loaded

“Loaded” by Ken Bruen. London Noir, edited by Cathi Unsworth. Akashic Press. 2006.

Didn’t run across any new stories I liked this week so I went digging through older books in my collection I hadn’t read yet. Found this older Akashic noir book.

Here’s a doctorate dissertation waiting for somebody to write it: the classic noir story is an example of the hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell.
Specifically, it starts with what Campbell calls the Call to Adventure, in which an average joe runs into something extraordinary. Little girl meets talking frog. Man opens bottle, finds genie.

In the classic noir story the hero (or at least protagonist, cause noir characters ain’t generally heroic) meets a stunningly beautiful woman. From this encounter all his trouble springs.

Leroy is a smart, high-level, drug dealer. The beautiful enticement is an Irish woman named Kelly: “A woman in her late twenties, dressed in late Goth style, lots of black makeup, clothes, attitude… Her face wasn’t pretty, not even close, but it has an energy…”

Leroy is too smart to use his own dope but pretty soon he is hooked on Kelly. This being noir, things are going to end badly for somebody, maybe everybody.

This material could produce a tired, generic story, but it doesn’t because Bruen is a very good writer. He gives Leroy an attitude that keeps us reading. Here are his first words: “Blame the Irish. I always do.” Of course, Bruen is as Irish as Kelly, so who’s side is he on?

Leroy keeps his snotty attitude up right through the bitter end of the story. It’s a good read.

When The Time Came

“When The Time Came,” by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. Copenhagen Noir. Edited by Bo Tao Michaelis. Akashic Press.

I wish this volume came out last year, before my family vacationed in Denmark. It would have made a nicely twisted guidebook. I may be prejudiced in favor of this particular story because it is set in Ørestad, the area where my family had an apartment, and the authors perfectly captured the inorganic brutality of the scenery.

The building looked like every other place out here. Glass and steel. He’d never understood who would want to live in such a place…. The other brand-new glass palaces were lit up as if an energy crisis had never existed, but there was no life behind the windows. Maybe nobody wanted to live this way after all…

Chaltu is a very pregnant African woman, desperate to make it over the bridge to Sweden where she can seek asylum and be reunited with her lover. Unfortunately contractions begin too soon and she is left in an unfinished building in Ørestad. As it happens three Iranian men have chosen the same night to loot fixtures from the empty apartments. On discovering Chaltu one of them calls the “okay secret doctor,” actually Red Cross nurse Nina Borg, the authors’ series character.

By the time Nina arrives the situation has gotten worse , in the form of a murder. (This deserted building seems busier than Tivoli Gardens.) She has to do some fast thinking to get out of the mess.

This is not a true noir story, as I defined it a few weeks ago. And it doesn’t exactly feel like a crime story, in spite of the fact that just about everyone in it is at least technically a criminal. They are breaking the law, but are they evil?

The story is in the book section entitled "Mammon," not the part “Men and Women,” which contains mostly stories related to sex, but in some ways this story is very precisely about men and women. The event of childbirth has a powerful sway over the character's actions and as long as Nina is presiding over the labor she can order the men around, but once the baby is born, “Nina’s reign had ended.”

Powerful stuff.

The Leopard of Ti Mourne

“The Leopard of Ti Morne” by Mark Kurlansky. Haiti Noir. edited by Edwidge Danticat.

So, what is noir? Glad you asked. Here’s the essence: You’re a nobody, you try to be more, you get shafted and end up in a worse place than you started (likely dead or in jail).

The various books in the Akashic Press Noir Cities series have hundreds of stories, and probably the majority of them don’t fit that description very well. Some have nothing in common with it except being pessimistic.

Kurlansky’s story is probably the story in Haiti Noir that comes closest to my definition. That’s not the reason it’s my favorite, but I admit it helps.

The story is funny, in parts, at least. Our nobody-hero is Izzy Goldstein a Miami Beach Jewish guy who “felt in his heart that he was really Haitian.” After years of eating Haitian food, hanging around in Little Haiti, and learning Creole he decides it’s time to do something for his spiritual home. He buys a boat and starts a charity. Not surprisingly, the sharks start to circle, and I am not talking about the ocean.

Kurlansky makes nice use of Haitian mythology. It isn’t a major part of the story but he ties tales of the lwas, Vodou spirits, into the chain of events that Izzy accidentally starts.

Another main character is the wealthy Madame Dumas, very real, but effectively the spirit of malevolent greed that distorts everything Izzy tries to accomplish.

She was wrapped in a thick red fox coat. Her body stuck out at angles, a hard thin body. Her straightened black hair was swept up on her head. She wore shiny dark-purple lip gloss with an even darker liner. Her green eyes were also traced in black, which matched the carefully painted polish on her long nails filed to severe points. All this dark ornamentation on her gaunt face made her skin look pale with a fat finish, like gray cardboard.

Another good (and noir) story in the book is Katia D. Ulysse’s “The Last Department.” It’s full of wonderful writing, but the ending didn’t satisfy me.