Noir doesn’t necessarily embody crime and violence, though that’s what we tend to think of when we hear the word. Most but not all of these stories are crime stories, even as most but not all are the work of writers of crime fiction, but the exceptions take place in a world where crime and violence are always hanging around, if not on center stage.

Noir is very contemporary, but there’s nothing necessarily new about it. In cinema, when we hear the word we think of the Warner Brothers B-movies of the ’30s and ’40s, but the noir sensibility goes back much further than that. When I was sending out invitations, one of the first went to Annette and Martin Meyers, who (as Maan Meyers) write a series of period novels set in old New York. Could Maan perhaps contribute a dark story from the city’s past? They accepted, and in due course the same day’s mail brought Maan’s “The Organ Grinder” and a present-day story from Marty.

Every anthologist should have such problems. Both stories are here, both show the dark side of the same city, and both are far too fine to miss.

Most of our contributors live in New York, though not necessarily in Manhattan. (It’s hard to afford the place, and it gets harder every year. New York is about real estate, and Justin Scott’s “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” illustrates this fact brilliantly.) Jeffery Deaver lives in Virginia and John Lutz in St. Louis, yet I thought of both early on; they both set work in Manhattan, and reveal in that work a deep knowledge of the city, and, perhaps more important, a New Yorker’s sensibility.

It seems to me that I’ve nattered on too long already, so I’ll bring this to a close. You’re here for the stories, and I trust you’ll like them. I know I do.

Lawrence Block

Greenwich Village

January 2006

THE GOOD SAMARITANBY CHARLES ARDAI

Midtown