H. Lovecraft: Brooklyn Noir 2

When I first proposed what ultimately became the crime-fiction anthology Brooklyn Noir to my publisher, Johnny Temple, he seemed intrigued, and asked a series of questions for which I was not prepared. How do you see it coming together? New stories or reprints? Strictly conventional crime? How would you pick the neighborhoods where the stories would be set?

I’d presented the concept as it popped into my head, in a fairly offhanded manner, and frankly, I didn’t have the answers. As I riffed and winged it, as he embraced some ideas and rejected others, the book began to take shape. We batted these and more questions around over the next few weeks, and compiled a dream list of contributors. After the first few writers agreed to craft original stories for the book, we decided that we would request new stories from all participants, written specifically for the volume. To me the book grew, almost organically, from there. A number of names from the list signed on, other writers heard about the anthology and submitted work, and I was able to include four stories from writers who had not been previously published. It became exactly the book I’d dreamed of when I pitched it, half-formed in my mind’s eye.

But. There was a price to pay. By going with original pieces, I lost all the great stories that had given me the idea for such a book in the first place. I still wanted to collect tales that I felt had fallen between the cracks of time, or had never been grouped geographically, to paint the ominous portrait that I saw lurking behind every laundromat, nail salon, and Starbucks.

The success of Brooklyn Noir, launched in the summer of 2004, surpassed all expectations, I’m pleased to say. One story from the collection received an Edgar Award nomination, another was a Pushcart Prize finalist, and yet another won the Mystery Writers of America’s Robert L. Fish Memorial Award. Two more were selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 . With my head properly swelled, I found myself once again on the phone with Johnny, riffing and winging it. So, here we are.

Working on this volume has been a different task than the first, in that there was little interaction, from an editorial point of view, with the writers, some of whom are deceased. This time I felt more like an archeologist, mining volumes old and new, looking for treasure. The rule for the first Brooklyn Noir had been that each story had to be previously unpublished. Here, just the opposite. Brooklyn Noir 2 stories had to have been printed somewhere else before they hit the doorstep. That was about the only difference. I tried again to capture the special dread, tension, and solid writing that good dark fiction possesses. The scary feeling of watching the average Joe getting in over his head, or accidentally brushing up against something sinister on the way to work.

Figuring how to order the stories was an issue that resolved itself almost immediately. When I scanned the contents page in manuscript form, I was surprised to see that the first three categories from the original Brooklyn Noir applied, and the pieces were easy to assign accordingly. The fourth and final section in the first volume was “Backwater Brooklyn” — overlooked or forgotten neighborhoods. This time around, the stories in the last section all fall under the ominous shadow of World War II — era America. The image of a Brooklyn soldier — always a great dancer; often reading his love letters aloud to the rest of the company — was ubiquitous in classic war movies. My mother, a teenager during the war, told me that every block in her neighborhood, Sunset Park, had at least one “gold-star” family with a banner hanging in their window signifying a child lost in combat. It wasn’t unusual to have three or more gold stars on a single street.

In the introduction to the first Brooklyn Noir , I said that what the writers captured brilliantly was the language of the borough, and that goes for this volume as well. Each story is a slice of neighborhood that rings true, whether the time machine has taken you back one year or eight decades. And, as in the first book, the tales cross all boundaries of past and present, well-known and unknown neighborhoods, literary and genre traditions. It all goes into that great cocktail shaker that is Brooklyn. As editor, I have the pleasure of picking the ingredients, mixing them, and serving them to you. And that makes me the luckiest bartender in the world. Enjoy.

Tim McLoughlin

Brooklyn, New York

May 2005

Red Hook

(Originally published in 1927)

There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.

— Arthur Machen

Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall, heavily built, and wholesome-looking pedestrian furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behaviour. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious, organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had undergone, and with downcast glance turned back up the Chepachet road, trudging out of sight without once looking behind him. It was a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the remarks of a bystander who had recognised him as the boarder of a well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.

He was, it developed, a New York police detective named Thomas F. Malone, now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which accident had made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden Colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.