Dark, Twisted, and Clever, in JEWISH NOIR, ed. Kenneth Wishnia

Kenneth Wishnia's been touring a lot this fall, and there are still some significant appearances ahead on his calendar, from Holbrook NY (Long Island) to the Poisoned Pen (Arizona) to City Lights (San Francisco). (Check his website, here.) It would be fun to catch up with him at any of those locations -- but it's even more fun to read his new anthology, JEWISH NOIR.

The range of authors here is stunning: Jonathan Santlofer, Moe Prager (aka Reed Farrel Coleman), Wishniak himself, S. J. Rozan, Wendy Hornsby, Robert Lopresti, even Marge Piercy. And among the 30+ tales, there's even one from 1912, making its first appearance in English (in 1912 it was in Yiddish). I enjoyed the finale from the extraordinary Harlan Ellison. A special pleasure was a clever tale from Dave Zeltserman, whose writing is often quintessential in this area. Zeltserman's narrator, an embittered writer who's broken through into being well published in spite of an early and very nasty rejection letter, pauses to talk about noir itself, and I really like his summary:

... there are no heroes or happy endings in noir. And there's certainly no hope. True noir is about the alienated, the hapless, the broken.Things start off bad in noir fiction and only get worse. Moral lines are crossed that can't be uncrossed and characters fight a losing battle to keep from tumbling into the abyss.

Zeltserman's crime-pondering protagonist in this tale is borderline psychotic, too, which will give you a good taste of where his dark fiction tends to roam!

But Prager's tale "Feeding the Crocodile" is at least as dark, with a cameo for an SS lieutenant. And then there's the diversity -- Michael J. Cooper takes us to Jerusalem in 1948; B. K. Stevens opens with a faculty meeting; S. J. Rozan delighted me with Jews in Shanghai; and there's a midnight-dark tale of adoption form Travis Richardson that is probably going to sit malignantly in my brain forever.

More than 400 pages of malice, despair, conceit, sometimes heroic actions, and yes, alienation -- JEWISH NOIR should probably be read in very small doses, with a warning label. (Grim grin here.) But oh, what a collection!

This Dilys is a Dilly - Tomorrow is the big day!!

Things at Kingdom Books have been wildly busy this week, so I haven't posted as many recaps of Dilys winners as I'd hoped to this week -- here's the list:

DILYS AWARDS - Winners

1992, Carl Hiassen, Native Tongue

1993, John Dunning, Booked to Die

1994, Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

1995, Janet Evanovich, One for the Money

1996, Michael Connelly, The Last Coyote

1997, Michael Connelly, The Poet

1998, Janet Evanovich, Three to Get Deadly

1999, Dennis Lehane, Gone, Baby, Gone

2000, Robert Crais, L.A. Requiem

2001, Val McDermid, A Place of Execution

2002, Dennis Lehane, Mystic River

2003, Julia Spencer-Fleming, In the Bleak Midwinter

2004, Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book

2005, Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

2006, Colin Cotterill, Thirty-Three Teeth

2007, Louise Penny, Still Life

2008, William Kent Krueger, Thunder Bay

2009, Sean Chercover, Trigger City

2010, Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Poe

2011, Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead

2012, S. J. Rozan, Ghost Hero

 I'll toss a few quick notes here: Although Mystic River is one of the finest Dennis Lehane books for reading, I'm just plain hooked on the film version of Gone, Baby, Gone -- Dave and I must have seen it three or four times already, and I'd watch it again. I love the Boston tough-tender of Lehane's books.

Dave's the Crais reader in the house -- honey, are you listening??

Whenever I've read a not-so-great-yet author and need to get the "awkward" out of my head, Val McDermid is one of the authors I return to. A Place of Execution is stunning, and worth re-reading.

I've collected Jasper Fforde's first five or six books -- the puns are wonderful fun, although it would help if I had more of a "literary" background (I gained my book sense mostly by reading and listening, not from college classes).  But a good familiarity with Alice in Wonderland made the first few of his books hit home for me. I think of them as "caper books for classic readers"!

Darkly Dreaming Dexter proved that Jeff Lindsay's writing could reach at least two generations at once -- I like the book, gruesome though it can be, and one of my sons is an ardent fan of the TV series ("Dexter"). How about you?

Colin Cotterill writes wonderful fiction set in Laos and Cambodia; he's also a great person who sent us signed and illustrated bookplates to use in his books here. I line up his newest as a pre-order, to give myself a treat. Always a book I'll feel good about, as well as intriguing plotting.

I've written so much about Louise Penny and her remarkable arc of narrative across multiple novels that I can't add more -- browse this blog using her name if you have a moment.

Back to Dave for Krueger and Chercover. I do mean to read Krueger; we're just suffering from a scarcity of his books, and the Kingdom Books law is, you can't take a signed copy to bed with you (somehow the bottom of the spine always gets soft that way), so I have to wait until our stock of these expands. Chercover is definitely in Dave's area more than mine.

How on earth did Allan Bradley's "young adult" fantasy-mystery get onto the list of mysteries booksellers enjoyed selling the most? Simple -- it's a really, really enjoyable book, so one can't help talking it up to other readers. Bend your own self discipline and dip into this series about Flavia De Luce. Worth every minute (and a reminder that Good Books come in all age ranges).

Last: S. J. Rozan, whose Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series is both entertaining and a classic mystery series. Read about GHOST HERO here -- http://kingdombks.blogspot.com/2012/02/chinatown-mysteries-s-j-rozan-henry.html

Tomorrow we welcome Archer Mayor, to celebrate his 23rd Joe Gunther book, PARADISE CITY. We'll nominate his work, once again, for the Dilys (maybe enough others will join us this year, to push it to the top!). S. J. Rozan is a friend of his, and we'll honor DILYS week by giving away a signed Archer Mayor book at our event tomorrow, as well as two signed copies of the trade paperback of GHOST HERO.

Are you going to be here? If not, you can still order a signed copy of Archer Mayor's PARADISE CITY -- just drop us an e-mail at kingdombks@gmail.com before noon tomorrow!