NEW JERSEY NOIR (The Jack Colt Murder Mysteries #1) by William Baer- Review and Guest Post

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ABOUT THE BOOK: Release Date February 26, 2018

On the bridge over Paterson’s Great Falls, a retired state trooper is murdered by a girl in a grammar school uniform. The victim was the beloved uncle of Jack Colt, a private investigator descended from the inventor of the revolver. While investigating his uncle’s murder, Colt realizes that it is intertwined with two other cases of his. These involve the family secrets of extremely powerful New Jersey figures, including the governor, a judge, and a mob boss.

  In New Jersey Noir, William Baer reinvigorates the detective genre while exploring the Garden State’s rich cultural history, glamor, and gore. Baer’s novel is fast-paced and utterly gripping, brimming with intrigue and suspense.

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REVIEW: NEW JERSEY NOIR is the first instalment in William Baer’s complex and intriguing contemporary, adult THE JACK COLT MURDER MYSTERIES focusing on private investigator and descendant of the inventor of the Colt revolver Jack Colt.

Told from first person point of view (Jack Colt) using present day and memories from the past, NEW JERSEY NOIR follows Jack Colt as he hunts for a killer. When his beloved uncle, a retired state trooper Tom Colt, is murdered along side a man with a criminal past our protagonist Jack Colt begins an investigation of his own wherein murder continues to follow in the wake of his discovery and research.

New Jersey has a densely rich population of crooked individuals: incest to adultery, betrayal and revenge, secrets and lies, and corrupt politicians such that Jack Colt, with his PA Roxanne Faulkner, uncover and decipher the backgrounds and histories that connect victims to survivors with dark and complicated pasts. The reader is inside the head of a man whose own nocturnal dalliances are questionable but there is no denying his ability to expose the truth, and unwrap the tightly wound secrets of everyone involved.

NEW JERSEY NOIR is a decadent look at an elaborate and multi-layered orgy of murders and revenge. The premise is intriguing imaginative and startling: the characters are numerous, dramatic and edgy. Like watching a crime drama unfold but the reader becomes one with the man in charge.

Copy supplied for review

Reviewed by Sandy

Influences, Mysteries, and Noirs by William Baer

Before my family moved to New Jersey when I was twelve, we lived in the Bronx, not far from Poe Cottage, and Poe has remained a primary inspiration in my life. At the time, when I was reading Poe, I was also reading Alfred Hitchcock’s various collections of mystery stories and watching reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone. Eventually, I started reading Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, along with the other classic mystery writers (Agatha Christie, etc.). I enjoyed them all, especially the noirists, Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye), but my absolute favorite was (and is) Ross Macdonald and his Lew Archer novels (The Chill and The Galton Case). Macdonald was a master plotter and a masterful writer, and I still consider him one of the best novelists of the twentieth century, along with Graham Greene, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner (who also wrote mystery stories!).

By the time we moved to New Jersey, I’d also discovered film noir, which I was able to study much more closely years later when I attended U.S.C.’s Graduate School of Cinema. My favorites were John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past. (I also loved Tourneur’s weirdly atmospheric horror classics, I Walked with a Zombie and Cat People.)

Much of my adult life has been spent as a literature and creative writing professor, and my books have been quite varied (short story collections, translations, interviews, plays, and poetry collections). But I’ve always wanted to write mysteries, especially in the noir mode, and when I’d finally created the opportunity, I realized that New Jersey was a natural setting for a noir mystery. Like California (where Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald set their mysteries), New Jersey has beautiful countryside, lakes, mountains, beaches, etc., but it also has cities that, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, have a noirish underside. I believe that I was even more aware of this than most people since my younger brother Robert is a criminal lawyer and a former New Jersey prosecutor and judge.

For the initial setting of the book, I chose the New Jersey city that I know best, Paterson, which was once an important industrial center and was originally founded by Alexander Hamilton. The novel’s main character, Jack Colt, is a direct descendent of Samuel Colt, whose gun factory was once located in Paterson. As Jack attempts to unravel three concurrent mysteries, he travels to many other parts of the state, but he always returns to Paterson. I must admit that I had a wonderful time writing New Jersey Noir, and I hope readers will enjoy it as well.

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William Baer, a recent Guggenheim fellow, is the award-winning author of twenty-two books, and his various plays have been produced at over thirty American theaters.  He grew up in the Bronx and Wayne, New Jersey, where his family was actively involved in “little theater.”  A graduate of Rutgers (B.A.) and New York University (M.A.), he completed his dissertation in creative writing at the University of South Carolina under the direction of James Dickey.  After attending the Johns Hopkins’ Writing Seminars (M.A.), he served as a Fulbright at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.  He then attended the University of Southern California’s Graduate School of Cinema (M.A.), where he received the Jack Nicholson Screenwriting Award.  The recipient of a Creative Writing Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently lives in North Jersey.