As a long-time fan of Nordic Noir detective stories, I never expected to
see a home-grown version. You might call Michael Elias’s “You Can Go
Home Now” Queens Noir since it is set mostly in that dreary stretch of
two-story houses and strip malls that will be familiar to anybody who
has left Manhattan on their way to the airport. I confess never having
stepped foot in this wasteland and only know it as the place that Archie
Bunker personified in the 1960s and 70s. I even wonder if Elias knows
this area except as a background for his breakthrough novel. To render
it accurately might have taken the same kind of dedication that would go
into a story about a serial killer in the French Riviera, except with a
lot less opportunity to savor local restaurants. For some of the
characters in “You Can Go Home Now”, McDonald’s is a night on the town.
Written in the first person singular, “You Can Go Home Now” tells the
story of Nina Karim, a cop working in the Long Island City police
department. Like just about every cop featured in a Nordic Noir novel or
a TV series based on one, Karim is not typical. She reads the refined
short stories of V.S. Pritchett rather than the pulp fiction of V.C.
Andrews that is ubiquitous to airport bookstores. After Andrews died, a
novelist named Andrew Neiderman became her ghostwriter and a very
successful one at that. I should add that Neiderman and Elias were a few
classes ahead of mine in Fallsburg Central High school in upstate New York.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/07/31/queens-noir/
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