The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Murders? Odd characters? They’re all in this book of New Haven stories
In her introduction to “New Haven Noir,” Amy Bloom grapples with the true meaning of noir and how this city lives up to it.
“If noir is about corruption, absurdity, anxiety, the nightmare of bureaucracy,” she wrote, “New Haven, with multiple universities and multiple clinics and multiple, and sometimes clashing, neighborhoods, is a noir town.”
She continued: “If it’s about sex, money, and revenge, we have a lot of that, played out against a backdrop of the stately homes in East Rock, or the food carts ringing the hospital, or a bocce game played by trash-talking centenarians who believe that murder is a better solution than divorce.”
But Bloom, a well-known novelist who for the first time agreed to edit an anthology of dark short stories set in New Haven, likes this strange old place.
“We may be a noir town,” she wrote in that introduction, “but, even though noir usually manages not to, we have heart.”
She also said New Haven has “a moral center,” albeit “shabby, frayed and in serious need of a facelift.”
Bloom calls New Haven “my adopted hometown,” although she lived here for only about a year-and-a-half. In 1973, if you were at Clark’s Dairy, she might have served you an omelette or a milkshake.
“My relationship with New Haven began when I was waitressing at Clark’s,” she told me during a phone interview last Thursday.
“I ran into a lot of difficulty with the owners,” she recalled. “They felt I was a little over-generous with my ice cream sundaes.”
She also ran into a spot of bother with Yale security guards, who discovered her living illegally, as she described it, “in the tunnels of Yale, beneath Branford College.” She sneaked upstairs to use the showers once too often.
And so, having been “kicked out of Yale,” Bloom found an apartment off of Chapel Street. After her Clark’s gig, she bartended for a while at the Anchor, that fabled classic on College Street.
The Anchor provided great grist for noir material but that’s not the only place where she served up drinks. Again from the book’s introduction: “In every place I bartended, the cook or the manager carried a .38 in his waistband.”
Ah, but that was in the ‘70s, when things were a lot rougher around here. (I arrived in 1977, rented a funky brownstone apartment on Trumbull Street and quickly became a Clark’s Dairy regular. Unfortunately, Bloom had moved on.)
“I feel very attached to New Haven,” Bloom told me. “So I was disheartened when it was in difficult straits and heartened when it seemed to be improving.”
Bloom now lives in Stony Creek and teaches creative writing at Wesleyan University. She also taught at Yale (more on that place later).
I asked her if she’s worried that this book, due to be published Aug. 1 by Akashic Books, will play into New Haven’s long-time reputation as a dangerous, crime-ridden place — despite the continued drop in the crime rate.
She replied, “As I said in my introduction, I find it a warm town, not a cold place. It’s not a scary place to me.”
“The stories I picked are not just: New Haven is a dangerous place. They emphasize relationships and that people are full of surprises.”
Each of the 15 stories is set in a neighborhood or at a specific site such as Union Station, Yale’s Beinecke Library or the Food Terminal Plaza on Sargent Drive.
Bloom contributed one of the stories, “I’ve Never Been to Paris,” set in East Rock. It opens with a murder mystery: Oliver Bullfinch, an unpop-
ular Yale literature professor, has been found in his office bludgeoned to death by a bronze bust of Herman Melville. The narrator, a rookie private investigator, pieces together the clues and focuses on a suspect.
Bloom’s story, like the 14 others, is laced with local references, including an allusion to the unsolved murder of Yale student Suzanne Jovin 19 years ago. One of the characters says of the Bullfinch cases: “The police’ll probably bungle it. Years ago, there was that poor girl who got stabbed to death in the middle of Edgehill Road. They never found HER killer.”
Here’s another: when the narrator is embarking on a romantic relationship and gets into the guy’s car, she wonders if he will “suggest a drive to the top of East Rock, a favorite place for sex and suicide.”
Hirsh Sawhney, author of the locally set “South Haven,” contributed the story “A Woe for Every Season,” which has scenes depicting drug-buying in the Dwight neighborhood but is loaded with sardonic commentary about “Stale University.”
Sawhney’s narrator, an English teacher at Wilbur Cross High School, says: “You see, we are all really sick of our tax-exempt imperialist overlords here in New Haven.” But he adds the university’s defenders correctly point out that without “Stale,” New Haven would be like Bridgeport.
Sawhney’s protagonist also makes a reference to “Snobkins,” which he characterizes as “an ancient and prissy New Haven private school.” It’s clear what real-life school inspired that name.
This character writes: “We headed back to New Haven, to the East Rock section, an apartheid neighborhood mainly filled with Stalies. Close to a million bucks for a Victorian these days, and $20,000 in taxes.”
But he admits he wants to save up to move into “a sweet two-family on the right side of Orange Street.” (Sawhney does live in a house on Orange Street.)
Bloom told me not all of the writers for “New Haven Noir” live in New Haven but each one has a connection to it. She noted Michael Cunningham (“The Man in Room Eleven”) and John Crowley (“Spring Break”) teach at Yale but don’t live in the Elm City.
“The Man in Room Eleven” is my favorite story in “New Haven Noir.” The setting is the Duncan, that old world hotel on Chapel Street populated by colorful characters. The main character has a lifetime lease there and has not been seen by any Duncan employee in at least 20 years. The boy who delivers the man’s meals also leaves a live rodent in a cage by the food tray. The following morning the cage is always empty, leading people to believe the man owns a snake.
The man in that room has a habit of looking out his window and rendering passersby catatonic if they meet his gaze. Don’t look up!
Other contributers include Karen E. Olson, a mystery novelist and former editor at the New Haven Register; the novelist Alice Mattison; Lisa D. Gray, who teaches at Mills College; the novelist Chris Knopf; David Rich, who writes for movies, TV and the theater as well as writing novels; Yale Law School Professor Stephen L. Carter; the novelist Chandra Prasad; Roxana Robinson, who has written nine books; mystery novel writer Jessica Speart; mystery/suspense writer Jonathan Stone and novelist Sarah Pemberton Strong, who teaches writing at Quinnipiac University.
Strong’s story, “Callback” contains a character who only drinks coffee at Willoughby’s. Rich’s “Sure Thing” features a waitress at Cody’s Diner: “She was six feet and close to 250 pounds, but her hands were quick and the gun within reach under the counter.”