Charyn, Jerome 1937–

views updated

Charyn, Jerome 1937–

PERSONAL: Born May 13, 1937, in New York, NY; son of Sam (a furrier) and Fannie Charyn; married Marlene Phillips (a writer), January 24, 1965 (divorced). Education: Columbia College, B.A. (cum laude), 1959.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY; Paris, France. Office—American University of Paris, 34 ave. Bosquet, 75007 Paris, France. Agent—Georges Borchardt, 136 East 57th St., New York, NY 10022; Vivien Green, Richard Scott Simon Agency, 43 Doughty St., London WC1N 2LF, England. E-mail—jeromecharyn@aol.com; charyn@aup.fr.

CAREER: Writer. Department of Parks, New York, NY, recreation leader, early 1960s; high school English teacher, New York, NY, 1962–64; City College of the City University of New York, New York, NY, lecturer in English, 1965; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, assistant professor of English, 1965–68; Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York, Bronx, NY, assistant professor, 1968–72, associate professor, 1972–78, professor of English, 1978–80; Rice University, Houston, TX, Mellon Visiting Professor of English, 1979; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, visiting professor, 1980, and lecturer in creative writing, 1981–85; City College of the City University of New York, visiting distinguished professor of English, 1988–89; American University of Paris, Paris, France, professor of film studies, 1995–.

MEMBER: International Association of Crime Writers, PEN American Center, Mystery Writers of America, Actors Studio, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grants from National Endowment for the Arts, 1979 and 1984; Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1981, for Darlin' Bill; Guggenheim grant, 1982; decorated chevalier, French Order of Arts and Letters, 1989, decorated officier, 1996; Fiction Award, Deauville Film Festival, 1995; PEN/Faulkner Award nomination, 2005, for The Green Lantern: A Romance of Stalinist Russia; Commandeur of Arts and Letters, 2002.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

Once upon a Droshky, McGraw (New York, NY), 1964.

On the Darkening Green, McGraw (New York, NY), 1965.

The Man Who Grew Younger and Other Stories, Harper (New York, NY), 1967.

Going to Jerusalem, Viking (New York, NY), 1967.

American Scrapbook, Viking (New York, NY), 1969.

Eisenhower, My Eisenhower, Holt (New York, NY), 1971.

The Tar Baby, Holt (New York, NY), 1972.

The Franklin Scare, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1977.

The Seventh Babe, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1979, reprinted with afterword by Neil D. Isaacs, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1996.

Darlin' Bill: A Love Story of the Wild West, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1980.

Panna Maria, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1982.

Pinocchio's Nose, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1983.

War Cries over Avenue C, Donald I. Fine (New York, NY), 1985.

The Magician's Wife (comic book), Casterman (Tournai, Belgium), 1986, Catalan Communications (New York, NY), 1988.

Paradise Man, Donald I. Fine (New York, NY), 1987.

The Good Policeman, Mysterious Press (New York, NY), 1990.

(With Massimiliano Frezzato) Margot in Badtown, Tundra Publishing (Northampton, MA), 1991.

Elsinore, Mysterious Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Maria's Girls, Mysterious Press (New York, NY), 1992.

Montezuma's Man, Mysterious Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Back to Bataan (juvenile novel), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1993.

Little Angel Street, Mysterious Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Family Man, illustrated by Joe Staton, Paradox Press (New York, NY), 1995.

El Bronx, Mysterious Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Death of a Tango King, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Citizen Sidel, Mysterious Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Captain Kidd, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Hurricane Lady, Mysterious Press (New York, NY), 2001.

The Green Lantern: A Romance of Stalinist Russia, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Also author of the screenplay Crayola Detective, 1971. Contributor of short stories to Commentary, Mademoiselle, Transatlantic Review, and other periodicals.

"THE ISAAC QUARTET"

Blue Eyes (also see below), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1975.

The Education of Patrick Silver (also see below), Arbor House (New York, NY), 1976.

Marilyn the Wild (also see below), Arbor House (New York, NY), 1976.

Secret Isaac (also see below), Arbor House (New York, NY), 1978.

The Isaac Quartet (contains Blue Eyes, Marilyn the Wild, The Education of Patrick Silver, and Secret Isaac), Zomba (London, England), 1984, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2002.

FICTIONALIZED MEMOIRS

The Catfish Man: A Conjured Life, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1980.

The Dark Lady from Belorusse: A Memoir, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.

The Black Swan, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Bronx Boy, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2002.

NONFICTION

Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land, Putnam (New York, NY), 1986.

Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture, Putnam (New York, NY), 1989.

Sizzling Chops and Devilish Spins: Ping-Pong and the Art of Staying Alive, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2001.

Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2003.

Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel, Random House (New York, NY), 2005.

(Author of text) Fabrice Moireau, New York Sketchbook, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Raised by Wolves: The Turbulent Art and Times of Quentin Tarantino, Thunder's Mouth Press (Berkeley, CA), 2006.

EDITOR

The Single Voice: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, Collier (New York, NY), 1969.

The Troubled Vision: An Anthology of Contemporary Short Novels and Passages, Collier (New York, NY), 1970.

The New Mystery: The International Association of Crime Writers' Essential Crime Writing of the Late Twentieth Century, illustrated by Vidal Centero, Dutton (New York, NY), 1993.

Inside the Hornet's Head: An Anthology of Jewish American Writing, Thunder's Mouth Press, (Berkeley, CA), 2005.

Founding editor, Dutton Review, 1970–72; executive editor, Fiction, 1970–75.

SIDELIGHTS: Jerome Charyn writes unconventional novels both within and outside the realm of mystery. "I do not think of myself as a 'genre' writer," Charyn told the St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers. "My own crazy wanderings have led me toward the crime novel. Where else could I go? New York is my heartland, and the heart of New York is crime." Critics often have called Charyn's prose brilliant and have characterized his novels as antirealist, wild, satirical, experimental, and surreal. St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers contributor William Malloy described him as "a prose poet who writes crime novels."

Charyn's focus on crime has come in the latter part of his career. His works outside this genre have much in common with his mystery novels, though; they tend to be set in New York City, and they display a sense of the fantastic and bizarre. His earliest efforts, however, are conventionally organized and written. "Charyn's talent at the outset," wrote Albert J. Guerard in Tri-Quarterly, "was traditional in a fine uninhibited way: Dickensian, but within a New York Jewish world." Guerard saw Charyn's Dickensian tendency in his "richly loquacious, irrepressible caricatures."

In his first three books, Once upon a Droshky, On the Darkening Green, and The Man Who Grew Younger, Charyn uses a typical narrative structure, something Guerard believed "tended to limit rather than encourage Charyn's natural impulse to the fabulous." Although these early works were successful, Charyn did something different in Going to Jerusalem, beginning the novel in a traditional manner but slowly transforming it into a more and more fantastic story. What begins as a fairly plausible tour by a chess prodigy becomes a wild odyssey across the United States. Critical reaction was mixed. Stephen Wall of the Observer Review found that Going to Jerusalem "illustrates the increasing American recourse to fantastical modes," but he judged the book "an arbitrary accumulation of irrational incidents." Guerard observed that "Going to Jerusalem is a novel full of fictional ideas, rich in Dickensian geniality and comic life, admirable in its effort to achieve a freer form; finally boring."

It was not until Eisenhower, My Eisenhower that Charyn left the conventional novel entirely behind. The book, Guerard wrote, is "Charyn's first genuinely antirealist, mythologizing extravaganza and first major effort to reflect the absurd aspects of contemporary urban violence." Eisenhower, My Eisenhower is about the Azazians, a race of gypsies living in modern United States. They are discriminated against by the Anglos, the dominant group in society, and so engage in urban guerrilla warfare against the Anglos, using a wide variety of absurd disguises and stratagems. Although named in the title, President Eisenhower does not appear as a character in the novel. Critics praised Charyn's humor and intensity but criticized his lack of structure and coherence. Washington Post Book World critic Paul Theroux claimed the work is "simplified to a freakish cartoon, with enough obscurities and flourishes to pass as serious writing…. Charyn's fluency and humor is apparent, but it is entirely a glib surface horror; there is not a coherent thought anywhere." According to Robert Scholes in Saturday Review, "This comic distortion of contemporary American reality is certainly amusing, and sometimes the satire bites pleasantly." But Scholes found that "something is lacking in the work of this talented young man…. The problem is, in the broadest sense, structural…. The ingenuity of the parts is greater than the intelligibility of the whole."

Charyn's subsequent novels have continued in the antirealist vein, violating conventional expectations in narrative structure, characters, and subject matter. Guerard wrote that, although Charyn's work is experimental, "one discovers certain constants in book after book: the irrepressible comic impulse and the delight in playful inventive language." These elements can be seen in The Franklin Scare, for example, a fantasy concerning the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Although reference is made to the important events during Roosevelt's administration, the focus of the novel is on Oliver Beebe, a sailor befriended by Roosevelt and given a room in the White House attic. New York Times contributor John Leonard explained some of the novel's plot this way: "[Beebe] eats Tootsie Rolls and dreams of sleeping with his sister; his sister is actually sleeping with a Spanish Chancellery official on the payroll of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; a Trotskyite poet from Charleston, S.C., plots to assassinate Eleanor Roosevelt with a penknife; the Wild Man of Tangier, naked in a closet, is hiding from the Secret Service; and the Empress of Bulgaria is dying." Charyn "takes apparently factual details … but he dwells upon them so that they become 'magical' and distorted," Irving Malin observed in his review of the book for the Hollins Critic. "Charyn continually stresses the unexpected…. His plot refuses to adhere to any 'sane' arrangement…. I believe that the world Charyn presents is so arbitrary—but deliberately so!—that it is, to use his title-word, 'scary.'" Leonard claimed that Charyn "has tamed his prose and makes it perform tricks. It is a New York prose, street-smart, sly and full of lurches, like a series of subway stops on the way to hell." Malin concluded that The Franklin Scare is "a wonderfully enjoyable, instructive novel."

Charyn ventured into fictionalized autobiography with The Dark Lady from Belorusse: A Memoir and its two sequels, The Black Swan and Bronx Boy. Reviewing the former volume for Publishers Weekly, a critic stated: "Charyn's portrait of his adored mother and his early life in New York City's East Bronx is so romantically enhanced that its characters and events appear more mythic than real." Some of those events the author relates include the involvement of Charyn's mother, an immigrant from Russia, with the black market, gangsters, and corrupt politicians. Booklist critic Mary Carroll commented that "through a child's eyes, Charyn captures the texture of another time and place," while Library Journal reviewer Linda McEwan called The Dark Lady from Belorusse "a beautifully written memoir that makes the reader want more." In contrast, the Publishers Weekly critic wrote that "the scant 112 pages that Charyn allots to his memoir is a puzzling, self-imposed handicap to order and clarity." Commenting on The Black Swan for the New York Times Book Review, Leslie Epstein noted that Charyn's publishers should have issued both volumes as one. Nevertheless, Epstein observed that "Charyn has in these two memoirs … found his true subject and his true voice," and further asserted that the two books together may represent "his finest piece of fiction."

Charyn himself, in The Black Swan, offered a disclaimer of factuality to his readers, stating: "Although this memoir was inspired by the experiences of my childhood, certain characters, places, incidents … are the product of imaginative recreation." "Even in the absence of this admission," observed a writer for Kirkus Reviews, "one needs a towering capacity to suspend disbelief over this charming, witty, and endearingly off-kilter account of a young truant, played against a supporting cast of … characters who, in an overtly fictitious setting, would be accurately described as Runyonesque."

The Bronx of Charyn's youth, as described in the second volume of his memoir, Bronx Boy, is a grimy world full of gangsters, prostitutes, drug dealers, pimps, and juvenile delinquents, along with rich immigrant Jews. In this memoir, Charyn is called "Baby," and the Bronx Boys are his gang. Baby excels at making ice cream sundaes and telling stories, and ultimately in seducing the leader of a rival girl gang. He reads to his blind mother in his spare time, and is hired by gangster Meyer Lansky as the resident soda jerk at a New Jersey club. The mostly fictional "memoir" takes him up to the age of eighteen, when the social dynamics of his neighborhood are changed forever, and Baby leaves for Manhattan. A critic for Kirkus Reviews called the story "mesmerizing," and stated that it is "so gloriously embroidered" that it is impossible to determine the truth about the author's youth.

Charyn also published the highly satiric novel Captain Kidd. Comparing the book to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, a Publishers Weekly reviewer stated: "This densely plotted, sometimes brilliant but often hectically unfocused comic novel follows General Patton's retinue from the end of WWII in Europe to wars among dry-goods dealers in Manhattan." The "Captain Kidd" of the title is actually Roland P. Kahn, an American soldier who pirates and sells a cache of Nazi wine during the war, and after returning to America becomes involved in pirating stock from Macy's department store and selling it in a department store owned by his mother. Other characters in the novel include Roland's true yet unrequited love, a Nazi assassin, a young male prostitute who becomes a New York crime lord, and Roland's African-American war chums, who aid him in his blackmarket dealings. The Publishers Weekly contributor felt that "Charyn's lambent prose, neat rhythms and compositional flourishes make the few quiet parts of the novel shine."

Charyn's crime stories, like his other efforts, contain many elements of the bizarre. "He is a writer of police fantasies, not procedurals," remarked Malloy in the St. James Guide. Washington Post Book World contributor Paul Skenazy observed that "Charyn has been remaking the detective story into a kind of Ebbetts Field bleachers where no one's quite kosher, everyone's schmoozing with someone they've barely met, and a fight's about to break out."

Several of Charyn's crime novels center on a character named Isaac Sidel, initially a New York deputy police commissioner, later commissioner, and eventually mayor. This character is featured in the volumes that make up The Isaac Quartet and in some subsequent novels. Sidel displays "the sort of idiosyncrasies that link him to the great tradition of eccentric detective heroes," Malloy wrote. For instance, after criminals infect Sidel with a tapeworm, he keeps a bottle of milk handy to satisfy it. Armchair Detective critic Norma J. Shattuck, in a review of Montezuma's Man, pronounced Sidel "decidedly outré (and possibly certifiable)." Sidel's adventures are as peculiar as he is. Skenazy noted that in Little Angel Street, "issues of historical preservation mingle with tales of old baseball players; the art of ping-pong blends with Dostoevsky and Dickens; gruesome murders and illegal adoptions share the page with bad jokes, men with metal shards in their brains and blind ambulance drivers."

Skenazy found Charyn's frenetically paced storytelling a bit hard to take at times, but allowed that "the Sidel stories are great literary farce, a satiric hothouse of fast talk and low life." Malloy called Charyn's work "an acquired taste" but one worth developing: "Once the adventurous reader allows himself to enter Charyn's dangerously enchanted 'forest' of New York City, he will find fruit unlike any other in crime fiction."

Charyn's first crime-mystery novel to depart from the environs of New York is Death of a Tango King. The book tells the tale of Yolanda, imprisoned after her first attempt at bank robbery, freed from prison by an underground group known as the Christian Commandos, and sent on a mission to South America, ostensibly to enlist the help of her brother, a drug cartel kingpin, in saving the rain forest. Critical response to the book varied. Library Journal critic David Keymer called Death of a Tango King a "wondrous, picaresque tale of modern horrors," and Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction contributor James Sallis remarked that it "may be the only paranoid novel to rival [Thomas] Pynchon." Writing in Booklist, however, David Pitt described the novel as "loud, crude, [and] politically incorrect."

In The Green Lantern: A Romance of Stalinist Russia, Charyn portrays a Russian provincial acting troupe in the grand city of Moscow, where it hopes to mount a modest and brief production of King Lear. When the inexperienced set builder Ivanushka is unexpectedly called upon to substitute for the title character, a miracle happens. Ivanushka becomes an overnight sensation, playing to sold-out crowds and attracting the attention of the celebrities of Moscow, including Stalin himself. Ivanushka's adventures and romances fill the pages of this novel in typical Charyn fashion, which was described by a contributor to Kirkus Reviews as "endlessly quirky."

Charyn's body of work also includes nonfiction books and a juvenile novel. Among his nonfiction efforts are Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land and Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture. The former is a book of essays about the varied social, cultural, historical, and ethnic aspects of New York City. In the latter, Charyn examines the history of American cinema, pointing out ways in which the movie industry has influenced American culture.

Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway is Charyn's tribute to the oft-depicted golden era of New York City. Much of the detail will not be new to the informed reader, though the narrative is liberally sprinkled with tidbits that are generally not considered common knowledge. Charyn's goal may have been to capture in his numerous vignettes the amicable chaos that characterized the city in its glory, but some critics found the offerings too superficial to be useful and the "disorganized narrative," as a Publishers Weekly contributor described it, overwhelming. Charyn ended Gangsters and Gold Diggers, according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor, with "an unsurprising rebuke of what we're left with" after the glory is gone.

Charyn has long been fascinated with the Soviet regime and the legacy of Russian Jewish writers, including Isaac Babel, the novelist who courageously continued his literary career during Josef Stalin's murderous regime. In Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel, Charyn investigates Babel's wretched existence in the Soviet Union and explores many of the myths and legends that have surrounded the writer, who was eventually executed in 1940 after being found guilty on trumped-up charges of espionage in a twenty-minute trial. A vast body of unpublished work perished with him. The "Savage Shorthand" of Charyn's title refers to Babel's ability to summarize the horror of the wars he witnessed (both the Russian Revolution and World War I) in prose as compressed as that of Ernest Hemingway. Charyn writes of Babel's death at the hands of the Stalin regime, and the cover-up that followed, as well as the many myths Babel perpetrated about himself in an effort to protect his life. Donna Sea-man, writing in Booklist, called the biography a "zestful and revelatory appreciation of a great and courageous writer."

Charyn's next biography seems as far removed from Savage Shorthand as possible. Raised by Wolves: The Turbulent Art and Times of Quentin Tarantino examines the early life of the popular American filmmaker, an unfocused student who spent his youth largely watching television and reading comic books. However, Tarantino found a mission in life only after he wound up working at a Los Angeles video store and became obsessed with filmmaking. Charyn, who teaches film at the American University in Paris, mixes elements of biography, film criticism, and script analysis (particularly regarding Tarantino's break-through hit, Pulp Fiction) in the book. Ultimately, wrote a critic for Kirkus Reviews, the subject comes off as "a baby in a giant's body [and] an egotistical artist in possession of an odd sort of brilliance."

Critical reaction to Charyn's work has varied, but it usually has been anything but indifferent. Emphasizing the energy of Charyn's writing, Malin stated that Charyn "uses short sentences which startle us; we are shaken by their bursts of energy and juxtaposition…. The sentences are charged; the details move so swiftly and surprisingly that we are unbalanced." Essayist Michael Wolf of Contemporary Novelists likewise felt that Charyn's prose "makes startling conjunctions, dramatically synthesizes the magical and the mundane. He thrusts the reader out of the known world and then back into it with a radically altered perception."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Charyn, Jerome, The Black Swan, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5, 1976, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 18, 1981.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Armchair Detective, fall, 1993, Norma J. Shattuck, review of Montezuma's Man, pp. 20, 92.

Booklist, October 1, 1997, Mary Carroll, review of The Dark Lady from Belorusse: A Memoir, p. 301; April 15, 1998, David Pitt, review of Death of a Tango King, p. 1379; April 1, 2002, GraceAnne A. De-Candido, review of Bronx Boy, p. 1293; October 1, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel, p. 16.

Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1985, Herbert Gold, review of War Cries over Avenue C, p. 46.

Chicago Tribune Book World, April 20, 1980, Steve Kosek, review of The Catfish Man: A Conjured Life, p. E4; February 8, 1981, Bruce Allen, "Fiction You Might Have Missed but Shouldn't Have," p. E1.

Harper's, November, 2005, John Leonard, review of Savage Shorthand, p. 90.

Hollins Critic, October, 1977, Irving Malin, review of The Franklin Scare.

Kirkus Reviews, June, 2000, review of The Black Swan, p. 608; May 1, 2002, review of Bronx Boy, p. 630; October 15, 2003, review of Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway, p. 1259; September 1, 2004, review of The Green Lantern: A Romance of Stalinist Russia, p. 820; August 15, 2005, review of Savage Shorthand, p. 892; September 1, 2005, review of Inside the Hornet's Head: An Anthology of Jewish American Writing, p. 932; April 1, 2006, review of Raised by Wolves: The Turbulent Art and Times of Quentin Tarantino, p. 331.

Library Journal, September 15, 1997, Linda McEwan, review of The Dark Lady from Belorusse, p. 81; April 1, 1998, David Keymer, review of Death of a Tango King, p. 121; May 1, 2000, Linda McEwan, review of The Black Swan, p. 111; September 1, 2005, Anthony Pucci, review of Savage Shorthand, p. 140.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December, 1998, James Sallis, review of Death of a Tango King, p. 33.

New Criterion, February, 2006, Jeffrey Meyers, review of Savage Shorthand, p. 74.

New York Times, June 3, 1969, review of American Scrapbook, p. 45; January 23, 1975, review of Blue Eyes, p. 31; November 19, 1977, John Leonard, review of The Franklin Scare, p. 19; June 18, 1979, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Seventh Babe, p. C15.

New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1967, review of Going to Jerusalem, p. 45; March 28, 1971, review of Eisenhower, My Eisenhower, p. 4; May 2, 1976, review of Marilyn the Wild, p. 54; September 5, 1976, review of The Education of Patrick Silver, p. 5; January 21, 1979, Seymour Epstein, review of Secret Isaac, p. 14; May 6, 1979, review of The Seventh Babe, p. 12; April 20, 1980, William Pritchard, review of The Catfish Man, p. 15; December 7, 1980, Benjamin DeMott, review of Darlin' Bill, p. 11; July 16, 1989, Robert Sklar, review of Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture, p. 17; August 5, 1990, Marilyn Stasio, review of The Good Policeman, p. 29; July 9, 2000, Leslie Epstein, "Odessa in the Bronx," p. 13.

Observer Review, June 30, 1968, Stephen Wall, review of Going to Jerusalem.

Publishers Weekly, April 26, 1985, review of War Cries over Avenue C, p. 84; December 7, 1990, Penny Kaganoff, review of Billy Budd, KGB, p. 79; March 8, 1991, Sybil Steinberg, review of Elsinore, p. 68; March 16, 1992, review of Maria's Girls, p. 67; June 14, 1993, review of Montezuma's Man, p. 63; September 19, 1994, review of Little Angel Street, p. 53; September 15, 1997, review of The Dark Lady from Belorusse, p. 64; April 27, 1998, review of Death of a Tango King, p. 45; May 3, 1999, review of Captain Kidd, p. 68; May 8, 2000, review of The Black Swan, p. 213; March 25, 2002, review of Bronx Boy, p. 50; October 6, 2003, review of Gangsters and Gold Diggers, p. 70; October 18, 2004, review of The Green Lantern, p. 48; July 25, 2005, review of Savage Shorthand, p. 55; March 13, 2006, review of Raised by Wolves, p. 52.