Monotaur Noir Night at KGB Bar

I attended a reading at KGB Bar on 4^th St., an event titled Monotaur Noir Night, with readings by Dan Friedman and Steph Cha. Both have just completed mystery novels, which I didn’t know before I went, but I found very interesting. I feel like not many young writers are writing mysteries today.

Friedman’s book, called Don’t Ever Get Old, revolved around a WWII veteran who pursues a Nazi fugitive who had tortured him during the war. He had thought the Nazi had been killed, but a fellow veteran calls the protagonist to his deathbed, where he tells him that the man is still alive. The tone of the book does not quite reflect the plot, however. Told from the first person perspective of an 87-year-old man, there was a lot of comic edge to the section Friedman read—he complains a lot, doesn’t want to be bothered, he claimed the hospital where his friend was “stank of piss and death” and complained the entire time he was there. I thought Friedman did a great job of capturing the mindset of a grumpy old man.

Friedman also read from a new novel he is working on, written from the perspective of the poet Lord Byron when he was attending Cambridge in 1807. It read very much to me like a Sherlock Holmes story, as Friedman wrote Byron as an arrogant, drunk, silly young poet who has a sel-perceived knack for detective work. In the story Byron is “investigating” a murder which occurs on the Cambridge campus. Friedman said of the novel, “except for a few biographical details, I completely fabricated it, to make it better.”

Steph Cha, who said she is new at the reading thing, seemed it. She had a very awkward and self-deprecating nature. Cha’s novel, her first, is  called “Follow Her Home.” It is also a mystery, and is, as Cha called it, a homage to both Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, his famous detective. Cha was not kidding about the homage thing—she points out passages which are almost directly from Chandler, which she wanted to write from a feminine perspective, as her protagonist is a woman who falls into investigating a murder when she discovers a body in her trunk after a night at a party. Cha had a great way with language and detail, creating beautiful passages with such abundant and intense detail, but eloquent enough that it wasn’t overwhelming. I thought her writing was great.