As a retired Catholic, I don’t really care if Die Hard is or isn’t a Christmas movie. (And if we’re gonna settle that one, the film’s correct genre is “Shut Up, Just Let Alan Rickman & Bruce Willis Cook.”)
But at least we past or present followers of Christ have ample Christmas crime media to pick from. Home Alone is a Christmas cozy heist film. Grant Morrison’s beautifully gory and insane “Happy!” graphic novel is set during the holiday. And both Soho Press and the once beloved Thuglit have put out Christmas crime fiction collections.
But what of our friends who were only fans of the first season of the Bible and dipped out on the show after they introduced that Jesus fellow?
That’s the space Tod Goldberg was trying to fill. The best-selling author of the Gangsterland trilogy and all-around mensch chatted with me earlier this month to talk about why he and 10 other authors decided to put their stamp on the holiday crime genre with “Eight Very Bad Nights: A Collection of Hanukkah Noir” out now from SoHo Press.
JQ: How did we get here? “Let’s stitch together 300 pages of Hanukkah-themed bloodshed, sex-driven blackmail and punk rock violence” is not the thought of a healthy human brain. What inspired you to put this collection together?
TG: Like many things Hanukkah related, it started with a small miracle: I was asked to be part of a previous anthology Soho Press put out called The Usual Santas, which was edited by the great Peter Lovesey, and turned in a story called “Blue Memories Start Calling” that included, you know, a massacred family, a cop with a fungible moral center, and some tinsel. Because that says Christmas to me. The book was a big success and I suggested to my editor at Soho, Juliet Grames, that a book of stories set around Hanukkah would probably be just as happy and filled with seasonal fun as my Christmas story had been. She agreed. And now here we are. I really wanted a collection that would run the gamut of the genre and I think we really achieved that. I’m very proud of the stories this rogue’s gallery came up with.
JQ: What’s the greatest Hanukkah crime story ever told?
TG: That’s the thing. There’s not a lot of holiday crime fiction centered around eight nights of anything, really. Perhaps the greatest crime that took place during Hanukkah was whoever forgot to get more oil.
JQ: Are you saying there’s no great Jewish/Hanukkah crime story?
TG: There’s no signature book or film or TV special about Hanukkah – there’s no adorable ostracized animal with a strange appendage to hang the story on – and so part of the allure of putting this book together was to examine this holiday in a fictional setting, giving it some fun, some danger, some comedy, some darkness, all that. It’s a crime anthology so there’s nothing particularly warm and fuzzy about the stories contained in the book, but in my view it fills a niche that I’ve long yearned for – it’s not enough to get a single shelf at Target with blue paper plates, I want some actual MEDIA.
JQ: This collection has an impressive emotional range, which I think is emblematic of the Holidays, be they Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa or Festivus. The stress of seeing and caring for family, which might feel more like an obligation than a labor of love as the years go on. Money panic. Learning uncomfortable truths about those closest to us. David Ulin’s “The Shamash” nearly made me cry. Your piece had me cackling. Ivy Pochoda made me miss Brooklyn and want to beat the piss out of the nearest landlord at the same time. Did you prompt your writers to cultivate this kind of range, or did you go out recruiting people who would hit different beats across the spectrum?
TG: When I was trying to decide who to ask to take part in this book, I actually gave this idea of range a lot of thought. I think the challenge with a lot of these crime anthologies that you see every year is that there can be a real sameness to them even if the theme is 15 stories based on B-sides of Beatles singles, because the writers chosen for the anthology end up being of very similar ilk. Which is just fine. I love those anthologies as much as the next guy. But as this book is also centered around a religious holiday that’s also a memorial, I decided early on that I wanted some unconventional approaches to the noir form. A writer like Liska Jacobs, for instance, who doesn’t really write crime but whose voice is influenced by classic noir, I just knew that if she wrote something it would end up being super dark, a little funny, and probably completely unlike anything I would ever write. And I knew David Ulin would bring a closer look at the Jewish faith, which the book needed. Then with writers like Nikki Dolson and James D.F. Hannah, both are really short story masters and I suspected each would find a unique way into the theme, particularly since neither is Jewish.
JQ: Why didn’t you spell Hanukkah with a “C,” and how much am I allowed to yell at you about it?
TG: I just got some hate mail about this! A guy sent me a letter chastising me for my choice to spell it the way I’ve chosen to spell it. There’s about a dozen different spellings for Hanukkah and I picked the one I like, because I’m in charge. Also, I sometimes put mayonnaise on a corned beef sandwich, and we have six Christmas trees in our house (my wife is very into Christmas).
JQ: Were there tropes you were trying to avoid or had to chase out of people’s first drafts? I saw very little Hanukkah-themed weaponry outside of the occasional menorah to the skull.
TG: There’s so little Hanukkah fiction, there’s not really a trope to worry that much about. I figured menorahs would play a large role throughout the book and indeed they do, but to me that’s the funny part of the book – how many different ways people ended up getting brained with menorahs – but really, the only thing I asked for in a few of the stories was to make sure Hanukkah was more than just a background theme, that even if it wasn’t talked about much, the actual aspects of the holiday itself ended up showing up subtextually in the relationships within the story, or in how the plot works, or in the resolution of the story itself. Unlike a Christmas story where you can very easily put a tree in every scene … Hanukkah doesn’t have such easy identifiers, so for my taste I was more interested in seeing the essence of the holiday in the people foremost.
JQ: Have you personally ever committed or nearly committed a Hanukkah crime. If so, admit just a little bit more than you should on advice of counsel…
TG: I haven’t committed a crime, but I was the victim of a holiday crime. This was in 1995. I was living in a shitty house in Northridge with a bunch of guys – we’d all just graduated from college and were still in that odd phase where you didn’t know if you were supposed to still go to frat parties – and were prone to doing things like not locking the house when we left, because invariably one of us couldn’t find their keys. It was that sort of existence. At any rate, I’d just gone shopping for Hanukkah and Christmas and left the house to go get wrapping paper. When I returned, someone had broken in, stolen all of my CDs (and had the temerity to use my own pillowcase as a bag!) and walked away with all the gifts I’d purchased. We called the cops. A couple hours later, a lone cop showed up, took a report and told me he’d follow up with me as soon as he found my missing Jane’s Addiction CDs and the bracelet I’d purchased for my girlfriend. Still waiting.
JQ: What does Hanukkah mean to you, and which of these stories best exemplified that?
TG: Hanukkah is about the indomitable spirit of Jewish people. And in that way, many of the stories in this book have that at their core, even if that core is pretty dark. The Talmud tells us that the spirit of the Jewish people is rooted in truth, loving-kindness, and divine guidance – how those grand notions are achieved in a world where Jews have often been the witnesses to a brutal history is often more personal than universal, borne out of a need to live by a code rooted in empathy, and so pinpointing a single story that defines that feels antithetical to me. Your empathy is different than my empathy.
