John Freeman

A private detective fueled with booze and soused by desire falls for a dangerous dame in Kevin Young's new book, "Black Maria," a noir in verse that will give Raymond Chandler's best a run for its money. The action starts, as it always does in noirs, with a woman asking for a light.

A.K.A. Jones, the hard-luck narrator, cheekily quips that he can give Delilah Redbone dark instead of light, she accepts, and off we go to the races: the dog track, the moody night, the velvet betrayals and the hung-over mornings.

Many a night ends with Jones alone, bent over a Formica diner table asking for "Two eggs/over queasy." Then it's back to his apartment and his "Murphy bed like a booby/trap."

Like Young's last book, "Jelly's Blues," a series of hilarious licks about heartbreak in the vein of the great Jelly Roll Morton, "Black Maria" is essentially an homage--only this one tips its fedora to film noir.

Turning phrases left and right, spangling his story with the occasional rhyming couplet, Young evokes the form's conventions without simply duplicating contours. "Snake oil sales/were slow," Jones says at the start of this tale, "so I hung/out my shingle on a shadow."

It's only a matter of time before someone has Jones done in: "Even my shadow/has me followed," he drawls. Which is what makes Redbone so attractive; she is both salvation and damnation, a chance to self-destruct, but to do so beautifully.

Once again, this love affair with oblivion is a familiar trope of the urban noir, but it is also a theme of the blues, a form Young, who edited the "Everyman Anthology of Blues Poems," knows so well he probably says his nighttime prayers to a 12-bar beat.

Jones has seen too much unkindness to know better than to mess around with this no-good woman. He feels in his bones "love's an iffy lease," and that most of these smash-bang affairs end badly with someone sneaking off at lunch hour. And yet he presses on, "Wisdom this tooth/aching I want removed." It's a testament to the narrative gusto of this sweet and lowdown work of genius that we practically reach out to supply the pliers.

Kevin Young reads from "Black Maria" at The Newberry Library, 60 West Walton, (312)787-7070, on April 19, at 6pm.

Black Maria

By Kevin Young

Knopf, 240 pages, $24.95

(2005-04-12)

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