Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth

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One sweltering evening a couple of years ago I was giving a reading at Tillie’s, a café in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It was part of a summer-long blitz to help publicize the first Brooklyn Noir. The contributors and I did forty-two readings in New York City that summer, all but six in Brooklyn. Predictably, a lot of them are now a blur. This one, however, stands out vividly in my mind. Patricia Mulcahy, the proprietor of Tillie’s, welcomed me, and said, “I have a Brooklyn Noir story to tell you.” She then related the tale that is included in this volume, about the killing of “Bobby from Russia.”

“How does it end?” I asked.

“How does it end?” she said. “It’s a true story.”

I wound up at the Alibi Club that night, just down DeKalb from Tillie’s, drinking and scheming with Akashic’s publisher, Johnny Temple. We decided that at some point it would be interesting to do an anthology of true crime stories with the same mood and geographic structure as Brooklyn Noir. After all, it seemed as though every bar, bookstore, or library we read at had some connection to a sinister event. People were all too eager to point out back rooms or side streets where something had been heisted or someone had been whacked. What fun it would be to record those stories. What fun indeed.

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