Shelf Life

Tag: Noir

  • Fiendishly Noir: Friend Indeed by Elka Ray

    Fiendishly Noir: Friend Indeed by Elka Ray

    “How far would you go for a friend in need if it meant your life and liberty might come crashing down upon you?”

    “Jo crawls over the bench and squats beside me. One sharp yank get the motor going. ‘I’ll drive,” she says tightly. ‘Move to the middle. And keep an eye out for debris.’

    “I crawl to the central bench and sink down. Jo turns us toward shore. Distant lights twinkle. Wind catches my hair.

    “It’s a relief to be moving, to flush my lungs with cold air.

    “I pull my hands into my sleeves. I’m wet through and chllled. My teeth chatter. For some minutes, we ride in silence.

    “’Dana?’ Although she’s driving slowly we’ve started to bounce again. Jo sounds ill.

    “’Did you love him?

    “I look back over my shoulder, toward my huddled friend and the black knuckles of islands. I find the spot we left Stan. I bite my lip, hard and spin the way we’re headed.

    “’Yes. I still love him.’”

    Two best friends, always there for each other. When Jo is fired from her job and her husband files for divorce, empties their bank account, and leaves her and their daughter homeless, she turns to Dana, married to Stan and living the life of an affluent wife in a ritzy subdivision in Texas. Dana is there for her, encouraging Jo to move back to Texas and gets her a job at the posh private school her children attend, even though Jo is without references.

    So, of course, when Dana calls in the middle of the night needing help, Dana gets into her dilapidated car with her daughter and speeds over. But while Jo’s situation had been dire, the trouble Dana is in takes it to a whole other level. She killed her husband during a domestic assault. Stan, she tells Jo, has been abusive throughout their marriage and she was defending herself. Is that true? It’s difficult to know at first.

    Dana has lived a life many women dream of—a handsome, filthy rich husband, a beautiful house, three children, and all the accoutrements that go with such a set-up. But Jo owes Dana big time and though she wants to call the police, Dana begs her to help dispose of the body.  So the two trundle Stan down stairs and into a boat, weigh the body down, and drop him in the water and then return to the house to scrub, hopefully, everything clean. Exhausted, Jo gets her sleeping daughter into the car to head home and accidentally blows a stop sign causing a speeding motorist to swerve and hit a pedestrian walking her dog. He speeds on but Jo stops and calls 911 though she knows it will tie her to a location near Dana’s home.

    It is not a good evening any way you look at it, but what will happen next will  only get worse as Jo and Dana seem to be surrounded by vultures including malicious gossiping neighbors, zealous cops wanting to crack the case, and a blackmailer. Will the two women, who have known each other for 30 years, withstand all these external forces coupled with their own horror at what happened and what they’ve done?

    Friendship is one thing but author Elka Ray, who was born in Canada, raised in the United Kingdom, and now lives in Central Vietnam, writes suspense novels, often with a touch of noir and poses intricate questions and situations. Her previous books include Divorce is Murder and Killer Coin. In her latest, A Friend Indeed (Blackstone Publishing), she asks, How far would you go for a friend in need if it meant your life and liberty might come crashing down upon you?

    This article originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

  • Article: The Best Noir Fiction of 2022

    The Best Noir Fiction of 2022 https://flip.it/fcHesx

  • An Honest Living

    An Honest Living

    “Noir land is always smoke and mirrors, and for those who like entering that world, be assured that Murphy is already at work on his next book.”

    Anchored in life by little except a few friends, a love of books and cinema, and his nascent law practice—a downward slope from his previous position with a prestigious law firm—we never learn the name of the narrator in An Honest Living, Dwyer Murphy’s first novel. Even his clients seem unsure of who he is, and when one gives him a going away present with his name misspelled, our narrator can only ruefully observe “they were only off by a few letters.”

    A guy like this makes a perfect patsy and that’s what happens when Anna Reddick hires him to determine if her husband is selling off her valuable collection of rare books. It seems easy enough. Staging a meeting with Reddick’s husband at the Poquelin Society which he describes as “a scholarly society dedicated to the art, science and preservation of the book, whatever that meant,” he quickly scores the proof he needs.

    Case solved. Ha! As it could be that easy in a neo-noir novel set in a time and place where everyone seems to have a secret to hide and nothing is as it seems. And that applies also to the people the detective meets. It turns out the woman who hired our detective is not Anna Reddick.

    Now, one of the noir fundamentals dictates that there’s a femme fatale, the kind of dame a hero shouldn’t fall for, but of course, always does. And that dame is the real Anna Reddick, a successful author and heir to old New York money. She hires and beguiles our detective to investigate the disappearance of her husband. Marital strife, a possible suicide or maybe murder, theft, and mystery—why wouldn’t you fall for a woman like that?

    There are layers to this droll, atmospheric novel including the inside jokes the author wants us to get. If you’re wondering about the Poquelin Society, don’t bother trying to join. It doesn’t appear to exist, at least according to a Google search. But there was a French playwright and actor named Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, though he was better known by his stage name, Molière.

    But the biggest of the wink and nods is for movie buffs familiar with the 1974 Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway movie Chinatown, directed by Roman Polansky. The plot of An Honest Man is an homage to this great noir classic and the book echoes many of its plot components. The book’s title derives from a conversation Nicholson had in the barbershop scene Chinatown.

    But Chinatown is all Los Angeles in 1937 and the story revolves around water rights, incest, and murder. An Honest Living is New York through and through from the scenes that our detective spies from the G Train and the window of his brownstone or the streets he walks littered with trash and 24-hour diners. It’s Manhattan before the financial meltdown—urban, somewhat gritty, and unhomogenized.

    Murphy has taken that time period and our knowledge of the looming crisis and created a compelling mystery set in a world of jaded hopes and ambiguous relationships. There’s the overwhelming sense that the other shoe will drop and when it does, it will come down heavy on our somewhat hapless narrator.

    Noir land is always smoke and mirrors, and for those who like entering that world, be assured that Murphy is already at work on his next book.

    This review previously appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

    Published by Viking Books, it is also available in audiobook and Kindle formats.