Michael McGarrity delves into a new genre with 'Night in the City'

Michael McGarrity is back, but not where you’d expect him to be.

The Santa Fe-based McGarrity is widely known for his series of 14 bestselling crime novels featuring Kevin Kerney and the New Mexico landscape, and for his “American West” trilogy.

Now the author is boldly venturing into what is for him a new genre — noir fiction — with a terrific, edgy novel titled “Night in the City.”

It’s set in New York City in the 1950s with a new batch of characters.

The 1940s and ’50s were decades when noir fiction — and film noir — were popular.

In a phone interview, McGarrity said there are several characteristics that make a novel noir.

One is that the main character has to be flawed in some way.

In “Night in the City” that character is Sam Monroe, an assistant district attorney who is suspended from his job when he becomes a suspect in the death of Laura Neilson, a former lover, found strangled in her Manhattan penthouse.

Monroe finds work as a house detective for an upscale department store.

He also uses his private investigator license to probe Laura’s death.

Sam has several flaws. He has a penchant for breaking and entering buildings and offices. He’s even lifted some of Laura’s personal items from her apartment before police arrive.

And he behaves impetuously. After he teams up with DJ Ryan, a female private eye, to solve Laura’s murder, Sam sometimes leaves her to snoop for leads or meet tipsters without telling DJ where he’s off to.

What kind of partner is that, she rightly wonders. Sam thinks that keeping DJ safe from the potential danger he may face is in her best interest.

The second point for a novel to qualify as noir, McGarrity said, is that there needs to be a femme fatale.

Laura Neilson fills the bill. She’s an attractive, seductive socialite, who’s been keeping track of her lovers in a diary Sam swiped. Sam was one of her lovers; even after her death, he pines for her.

Though killed in the first chapter, Sam and DJ search for clues of Laura’s death by examining her life from childhood forward.

DJ is definitely a femme, not fatale. She’s sexy, savvy and wise.

She and Sam have romantic moments that cool and reheat. DJ isn’t always sure of Sam’s emotional or professional constancy.

Another qualifying point for a novel’s noir status, McGarrity said, is the presence of bad guys. Mobsters are introduced, but there are crooked cops in spades.

The first bad cop is Johnnie Turner, who clubs Sam into unconsciousness.

Sam wakes up in a police precinct interview room with a swollen, bloody face. He’s handcuffed to a table.

Turner has it in for Sam. When he was in the DA’s office, Sam made public that Turner had planted marijuana on a defendant that was stolen from an evidence room. It was one of seven Turner false arrest cases.

Turner also wants payback because Sam’s revelation blocked his promotion to detective from vice cop.

Sam is tough, polite and, as McGarrity half-joked, parboiled. Definitely not hard-boiled.

“I didn’t want to do a Mickey Spillane. I didn’t want a guy who couldn’t redeem himself,” McGarrity said.

Spillane wrote the Mike Hammer detective novels that were big in the 1950s and ’60s. Sam is more like Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch.

In “Night in the City,” after-dark street life, dim-lit bars, and a seedy Bowery hotel give Sam’s New York a gritty authenticity. Not all of the story is set in Manhattan. Several scenes shift to locales in New Jersey — Hoboken and rural Sussex County.

The sky helps set a gray, noir-ish tone through the story. Here are a few examples:

• “Clouds that looked the color of soot hung low over the city.”
• “A thick carpet of low clouds smothered the island, obscuring the tops of tall buildings, trapping the lingering odor of garbage and pollution.”

McGarrity isn’t making plans to write a sequel. Pity.

Michael McGarrity delves into a new genre with 'Night in the City'