It is odd that Eight Very Bad Nights exists. Was there a demand for a col­lec­tion of noir sto­ries about Hanukkah? How, a prospec­tive edi­tor might’ve asked, would a col­lec­tion like that work? Would the sto­ries sim­ply take place dur­ing Hanukkah, or would they grap­ple more direct­ly with the themes and ideas of the holiday? 

How­ev­er it came to be, Tod Gold­berg has put togeth­er a won­der­ful book that scratch­es an itch many read­ers might not know that they had. Com­posed of eleven sto­ries writ­ten by heavy­weights in the crime fic­tion genre — includ­ing Ivy Pocho­da, Lee Gold­berg, and Tod Gold­berg him­self—Eight Very Bad Nights is a thrilling col­lec­tion that touch­es on the breadth of what noir can offer. There’s a hard-boiled cop look­ing for a killer in James D. F. Hannah’s piece; a heist gone wrong in both Nik­ki Dolson’s and J. R. Angelella’s sto­ries; and a weath­er­man-turned-drug-addled mur­der­er in Tod Goldberg’s sto­ry, in addi­tion to plen­ty of oth­er wild anti­heroes. Although the qual­i­ty of the sto­ries may vary, the fact that the col­lec­tion is able to demon­strate so many shades of noir will keep fans of the genre turn­ing pages.

Hanukkah is expe­ri­enced dif­fer­ent­ly by all the char­ac­ters: for some, it’s a time of nos­tal­gic bliss that they try to revis­it each year, and for oth­ers, it’s an after­thought, a fes­ti­val that they feel they should know more about sim­ply because they are Jews. While the hol­i­day exists as a help­ful back­drop in each sto­ry, char­ac­ters’ engage­ment with the actu­al sto­ry of Hanukkah and its themes is lim­it­ed. Cer­tain char­ac­ters, like the pro­tag­o­nist in David L. Ulin’s sto­ry, take time to med­i­tate on Hanukkah’s themes, but they’re the odd ones out.

Noir has his­tor­i­cal­ly been a non-Jew­ish genre, which is part of what makes Eight Very Bad Nights such a grat­i­fy­ing read: it adds the Jew­ish voice to the noir canon. There are a few oth­er famous mod­ern exam­ples of Jew­ish noir, such as Michael Chabon’s The Yid­dish Policeman’s Union and the Shi­mon Adaf’s Lost Detec­tive tril­o­gy, but the genre has need­ed sup­port for a long time. Eight Very Bad Nights offers that sup­port, and it’s a delight to experience.