Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics (v. 2)
Brooklyn Noir(2004)^Bfeatured originals, but here, McLoughlin mines reprints, allowing him to pay tribute to "all the great stories that had given me the idea for such a book in the first place." These 13 Brooklyn-centric stories are slotted into the volume 1 categories ("Old School," "New School," "Cops and Robbers," and "Backwater Brooklyn") but with authors as wildly diverse as H. P. Lovecraft, Hubert Selby Jr., Donald E. Westlake, and Jonathan Lethem. (Pete Hamill and Maggie Estep make return appearances.) It's certainly possible to argue whether Lethem and Estep belong in a volume of "classics," or even whether the book is appropriately named (continuing the devaluation of the wordnoir, here it's a generic "dark fiction"). But, though stylistically scattershot, this is good stuff, from Lovecraft's baroque "The Horror at Red Hook" to Selby's "Tralala" (one of the stories inLast Exit to Brooklyn) to "By the Dawn's Early Light," a great Matt Scudder story by Lawrence Block. Terrific appeal for Brooklynites, but may seem an odd mix to the rest of the country.Keir GraffCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved