Greewich Village Noir
I was talking to a friend about an out of print crime novel from the sixties that I’d been trying to track down for months when he happened to mention a bookstore in Greenwich Village called ‘Partners in Crime’, where I might find it. He suggested visiting their website, but since I happened to be going to New York the following week on business I thought I’d check the place out for myself. It would be more satisfying to find the book on a shelf than track it down on some list on the internet. After all, this was a book I really needed to own: The Manhattan Murders by Irving Wohleber. As far as I knew, no-one much read Wohleber any more, but I’d discovered his work by accident while browsing in one of the bookshops in Hay-on-Wye and found his prose strangely addictive. Imagine Chandler meets Simenon and add a dash of Thomas Mann and you’ll be somewhere near it.
I flew into JFK on a grey Saturday in November, headed into town and checked in at my usual hotel on the Lower Eastside. Normally I’d have taken time to unpack, relax, maybe get a coffee, but today I needed to be somewhere else and that was the Partners in Crime bookstore in Greenwich Village. Normally I’d have walked, but such was my excitement that I hailed a cab to get me across town faster.
Partners in Crime was in one of those beautiful little streets where the trees growing on each sidewalk meet in the middle. The shop itself was below street level, an unassuming little business with a discreet window display of the latest titles from Europe - England, Sweden, Iceland. I’d heard that Iceland was getting big in crime.
I hurried down the steps into the shop, barely noticing the assistant at the cash register next to the door, and made straight for the ‘out of print’ section at the back. I was pleased to see that the books here were not in alphabetical order: all the longer to savour the delicious uncertainty of whether I would find Wohleber’s novel. I started at the bottom shelf, working my way systematically from left to right, refusing to allow myself t be distracted by the numerous beguiling titles I came across. My eyes swept the next shelf, right to left. Still no joy. On the third shelf up my heart missed a beat when I saw Wohleber’s name, but it was a novel I already possessed and in the very same edition. The fourth shelf proved something of a disappointment and I was beginning to feel despondent by the time I’d stood up, feeling slightly dizzy, to check the top shelf. My eyes were travelling left to right again and the excitement I felt when I saw The Manhattan Murders, in pristine condition, three volumes from the end, was indescribable. As slowly as I could manage, I took the book from the shelf. It was a first edition, dated June 1969, and was priced at a mere thirty dollars. The cover was a brilliant piece of period art by Al Hardcastle, depicting in graphic detail as murder victim an improbably curvaceous blonde with a beehive hairstyle and a dagger through her heart. I closed my eyes, then opened them again to re-experience the excitement of my find.
Eventually I walked to the front of the store to make my purchase.
‘I’ll take this, ‘ I said, placing the book on the counter and reaching into my pocket for my wallet. The assistant did not respond.
‘I’ve been looking for this for months,’ I went on, checking my other pocket and finally locating my wallet. No response.
I looked up and saw at once that I wasn’t going to get a response from this shop assistant, not today. Her hairstyle was an anachronistic beehive, her waist tiny and her bosom huge. And, yes, she’d been stabbed - right through the heart. With a dagger.
Page(s) 17-18
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The