Brooklyn Noir 2

About the contributors:

Lawrence Block is one of the acknowledged masters of the mystery genre, winning numerous accolades, including the Edgar, Maltese Falcon, Nero Wolfe, and Shamus awards. His column on fiction writing was a popular feature of Writer’s Digest magazine for many years, and his books for writers include the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit. A longtime New Yorker, his books about Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, like his big New York novel Small Town, span the five boroughs. Block lived on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a year and a half in the early ’80s; these days he’s at home in Greenwich Villege.

Maggie Estep has published five books, most recently Gargantuan, the second in a series of crime novels involving horse racing. She is currently working on a third crime novel as well as a nonfiction book entitled Bangtails: Ten Dazzling Horses and the American Rogues Who Raced Them. Maggie lives in Brooklyn.

Pete Hamill was born in Brooklyn in 1935. He is for many the living embodiment of New York City. In his writing for the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the New Yorker, and Newsday, he has brought the city to life for millions of readers. He is the author of many bestselling books, including the novels Forever and Snow in August, as well the memoir A Drinking Life. He currently divides his time between New York City and Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Salvatore La Puma was born in Brooklyn in 1929. A novelist and short story writer, La Puma received the 1987 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a 1988 American Book Award for his first story collection, The Boys of Bensonhurst. That book was followed in 1991 by A Time for Wedding Cake, a novel, and in 1992 by a second story collection, Teaching Angels to Fly. Most of La Puma’s fiction takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, his own neighborhood until 1959. He now lives in Santa Barbara, California.

H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. Frequent illnesses in his youth disrupted his schooling, but Lovecraft gained a wide knowledge of many subjects through independent reading and study. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction — three short novels and about sixty short stories — has exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn from 1924 to 1926, and he died in Providence in 1937.

Tim Mcloughlin was born and raised in Brooklyn, where he still resides. He is the author of Heart of the Old Country (Akashic, 2001), a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and winner of Italy’s Premio Penne Award. McLoughlin edited the first Brooklyn Noir anthology, to which he also contributed the story “When All This Was Bay Ridge.”

Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn in 1928. He dropped out of school at age fifteen and joined the Merchant Marine. Physically disabled by tuberculosis, he lost a lung at the age of eighteen and was sent home, not expected to live long. For the next decade, Selby remained bedridden and frequently hospitalized with a variety of lungrelated ailments. Unable to make a living due to health concerns, Selby decided to become a writer. After the publication of Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1964, Selby became addicted to heroin, a problem that eventually landed him behind bars. After his release from prison, he moved to Los Angeles and kicked his habit. Selby was married three times and had four children. In recent years, Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream have been adapted to film. He died in Los Angeles of chronic lung disease in April 2004.

Irwin Shaw was born in 1913 in the Bronx and moved early in life to Brooklyn. He received a B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1934 and began his career as a scriptwriter for popular radio programs of the 1930s, before moving to Hollywood to write for the movies. Disillusioned with the film industry, Shaw returned to New York. His first piece of serious writing, an antiwar play entitled Bury the Dead, was produced on Broadway in 1936. His first collection of stories, Sailor off the Bremen and Other Stories (1939), earned him an immediate and lasting reputation as a writer of fiction. His first novel, The Young Lions, published in 1948, won high critical praise as one of the most important books to come out of World War II. The commercial success of the book and the movie adaptation brought Shaw financial independence and allowed him to devote the rest of his career to writing novels, among them The Troubled Air (1951), Lucy Crown (1956), Rich Man, Poor Man (1970), and Acceptable Losses (1982). His stories are collected in Short Stories: Five Decades (1978). He died in Davos, Switzerland in 1984.

Gilbert Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn in 1929. He has published over thirty volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays. For much of the 1950s and ’60s he published literary journals and magazines, and in 1965 he took a job at Grove Press where his first editing assignment was Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Sorrentino’s first novel, The Sky Changes, was published in 1966 and was soon followed by Steelwork, in which he draws upon memories of his Brooklyn childhood. He taught literature at Stanford University for many years, and rumor has it that he is currently living in Brooklyn.

Donald E. Westlake was born in Brooklyn, but didn’t stay long, moving to Manhattan, Yonkers, Albany, Binghamton, and Manhattan again, before returning to deepest Brooklyn, a.k.a., Canarsie. That was a two-year stay, followed by Manhattan, Queens, Manhattan, New Jersey (the dark years), more Manhattan, a year in London, Manhattan again, and finally Columbia County in upstate New York. What he was doing among all those moves was attending college (no degrees) and the Air Force (no medals), getting married more than once, raising children, and writing. He has published about forty-five novels, others under different names, along with movie scripts, notably The Grifters, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Westlake has won four Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America — for best novel, best short story, best screenplay, and Grand Master. In 2002 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America, East, but kept on writing anyway.