New Jersey Noir Read Free Page A

charismatic Cherry Hill rabbi Fred Neulander was a tabloid sensation for having commissioned a hit on his wife Carol in 1994. (Neulander was found guilty of conspiring to murder his wife, following the testimony of the hired assassin.) But most New Jersey crime falls far below the radar of the tabloids, as most New Jersey citizens will never merit the hysterical attention accorded a resident celebrity like Charles Lindberg.
    Of the contributors to New Jersey Noir , only Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini take on a “sensational” subject—the assassination of teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared from public view in July 1975 and was declared officially dead seven years later. In Malzberg and Pronzini’s first-person confession, “Meadowlands Spike,” we learn that—possibly!—the late, not-much-lamented teamster boss has found a resting place in just the right corner of the Garden State.
    Based upon an event out of New Jersey history, though much transformed by Bradford Morrow’s gothic imagination, “The Enigma of Grover’s Mill” evokes the notorious 1938 Hallowe’en broadcast by the young Orson Welles of H.G. Wells’s terrifying The War of the Worlds, which Wells set in a fictitious “Grover’s Mill, New Jersey” invaded by Martians—unfortunately, residents of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey and vicinity, who heard the broadcast without realizing that it was fiction, panicked and tried to flee. Morrow makes of this serio-comic situation a suspenseful, mysterious, and finally poignant story of an orphaned young man coming of age in the generation following the Martian invasion. (If you visit Grover’s Mill, which is not far from Princeton, you may want to take photographs of the ruin of a water tower allegedly shot to pieces by terrified local residents, mistaking it for a large Martian.)
    Sexual/erotic allure, seduction, and betrayal, the very essence of noir , is depicted by Jonathan Santlofer with such finesse, in “Lola,” that this cautionary tale set in a partly gentrified Hoboken will take the reader by surprise—as it takes the narrator by surprise. An eerie, unsettling variant on the theme is Sheila Kohler’s “Wunderlich,” which unfolds like one of the crueler Grimm’s fairy tales, set in the quintessence of seemingly imperturbable Jersey suburbia, Montclair. The mysterious circumstances of a yet more complex betrayal are investigated in the painfully realistic Asbury Park of “Excavation” by Edmund White and Michael Carroll: significantly, the dreaded epiphany comes on a Hallowe’en night amid campy goth celebrants like a demented chorus in the final act of a tragedy.
    Richard Burgin’s sparely narrated quasi-minimalist evocation of a doomed relationship, “Atlantis,” takes its lovers inevitably to Atlantic City to meet their fates; what is surprising is that, for all its grittiness, revealed with Burgin’s characteristic blend of irony and sincerity, “Atlantis” is still a love story. Newark, synonymous in New Jersey with urban decay, financial collapse, and physical peril, is vividly rendered in two very different stories—S.J. Rozan’s suspenseful “New Day Newark” (set in a ghetto neighborhood) with its unexpected ending, and S.A. Solomon’s suspenseful “Live for Today” (set mostly in the county morgue). Though each story has a female protagonist at peril in her Newark environment, and each story is written by a woman, no two stories could be more unlike.
    Betrayal that isn’t sexual or erotic but related to more purely masculine noir activities like drug-dealing, theft, and murder is explored with exacting verisimilitude in Jeffrey Ford’s surrealseeming “Glass Eels” (Greenwich) with its stunning conclusion, as in Robert Arellano’s “Kettle Run” (Cherry Hill) with its achingly convincing portrayal of teenaged and older “losers.” Jersey City, a place of ethnic diversity as well as long-entrenched political corruption, is an ideal setting