BOOK: Brooklyn Noir 2 - The Classics
Edited by Tim McLoughlin - Paperback, 309 pages (Akashic)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson

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How do you follow a best seller like Brooklyn Noir? Well, I'd imagine the immediate tendency would be to put together a book that's exactly more of the same, which would mean another collection of new stories that focus on various aspects of life in Brooklyn, New York. That's not too far off, except this time the stories aren't new. For Brooklyn Noir 2, editor Tim McLoughlin went looking for existing short stories by known writers, mixing the very old with the fairly new. As a result, it doesn't flow as a whole as well as the first volume, but taken in bites it has a lot to offer. With stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Donald Westlake, Thomas Wolfe, Carolyn Wheat, Lawrence Block, Pete Hamill, Paule Marshall, Stanley Ellin and Paul Auster, among others, Brooklyn Noir 2 gets into the bloodstream of the borough and sets out a hell of a pot luck of flavors. From Westlake's fatalistic, unhealthy Detective Levine, to the loud and the lost near Red Hook in Wolfe's Only The Dead Know Brooklyn and the drunken cabbies desperately and tragically trying to control their own destinies in Irwin Shaw's Borough Of Cemeteries, Brooklyn Noir 2 is alive with all the various spirits of Brooklyn. The writers are not of uniform stature in the literary world, but there's not a middling talent in the bunch. The series has obviously done well, as Akashic has now released Chicago Noir and San Francisco Noir. It's not a bad idea at that. There are plenty of cities with distinct sounds, sights, flavors and ways of talking and doing things. Pawtucket Noir, anyone?

© 2005 - DJ Johnson