A Collection of Artful Dodgers, So to Speak

I had no idea when I was at the launch party for Brooklyn Noir last week that Dinitia Smith might have been there covering the anthology for the NYT arts section.

Three stories in Brooklyn Noir happen to be by clerks in the same Kings County courthouse. Mr. McLoughlin's "When All This Was Bay Ridge" is about a man who searches for the identity of a woman in a photograph with his father, a woman who is not his mother. Mr. McLoughlin's colleague Lou Manfredo contributed "Case Closed," set in Bensonhurst, about a detective drawn to a woman who is a victim of a sexual assault. A third story is by C. J. Sullivan, who also writes a column for The New York Press. Called "Slipping Into Darkness" and set in Bushwick, it is about a Latino woman who is pulled inexorably back into the life of the ghetto that her family has tried so hard to escape.

The launch party may have been at Manhattan's Partners & Crime, but the beer was from Brooklyn--and the summer tour will hit just about every one of the borough's neighborhoods. Be sure to catch at least one; the stories I've read so far have been great!