A Preview of "Long Island Noir," Edited by Kaylie Jones THERE is plenty of mayhem for fans of dark fiction in the pages of "Long Island Noir": shootings, killings, all manner of brutality. And Long Island, too, comes in for a beating. One story in the anthology, which will be released Tuesday as part of a series that began in 2004 with "Brooklyn Noir," refers to Long Island as a "rootless, soulless place." Characters elsewhere in the book describe it as having "all the inconvenience of the city and none of its perks," and call it "a hundred-mile-long dump for hamburger wrappers and toxic waste." Readers who feel offended are perhaps missing the point. "People say these are dark stories, but that's what noir is," said Kaylie Jones, an author and writing teacher who edited the anthology for Akashic Books, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn. Long Island is one of 50 locations where similarly bleak themes have been explored to date, in books ranging from "Paris Noir" to "Istanbul Noir" to "Philadelphia Noir." Once word got around about the project, more authors began calling than could be included, said Ms. Jones, who believes "The Great Gatsby" could be seen as Long Island's first noir novel. Besides violent acts, the 17 stories in the anthology revolve around "cheating, lying, having affairs - all those lovely things," she said. Many of the writers represented are from Long Island. According to one of them, Kenneth Wishnia, a crime writer who lives in East Setauket and has been nominated for the Edgar and Anthony Awards, local residents frequently tell him about shadowy events that don't make the news - things they would never tell an outsider. "That's sort of our job," Mr. Wishnia said of writers. To peel back the curtain and show that every place has stories they don't want you to know. These literal crimes and moral transgressions occur in Amagansett, Great Neck, Huntington and other familiar locales. Often, the tales involve a person who tries to remedy a grim situation, only to make it worse. In the story "Ending in Paumanok," by Richie Narvaez, a female literature professor at Stony Brook University is drawn into an affair with a student that quickly turns deadly. In Mr. Wishnia's "Blood Drive," a laid-off construction worker angered by his deteriorating lifestyle becomes a thug for hire. Things get out of hand for a teenage girl in Wainscott in Ms. Jones's story "Home Invasion" after she meets a wild-haired surfer dude from an old-money family, who is described as looking "like a WASP kidnapped by Apaches." The ending features a scene in which the girl wields a handgun she was taught to use by her father. The story was based somewhat on a real experience, said Ms. Jones, who lives in Manhattan but spent much of her childhood in Sagaponack. Her own father, James Jones, the author of "From Here to Eternity," taught her and her brother to shoot when they were young. "He was a veteran of World War II, and he never felt completely safe," she said. One of the themes the book explores is how easily disaster can befall even those leading so-called normal lives, said Tim McLoughlin, who lives in Brooklyn and edited the first book in the series, "Brooklyn Noir." His story in the Long Island anthology involves a once-successful financial investor with a gambling habit that leads him to commit an armed robbery. Mr. McLoughlin said he had seen similar types in Brooklyn Supreme Court, where he works as a clerk. They look just like us, he said, because they are. "Of course, there are evil people in the world, but most crimes are committed by people who just had a bad day or made a bad judgment call," he said. I'm fascinated by how close each of us can come to that in our lives. One of the more unlikely entries is from the author and Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who lives on eastern Long Island. His graphic short story concerns a man obsessing over the breasts of a strangled woman he finds in his bedroom. Slowly, we discover that the man is less the innocent he at first seems and more like Norman Bates from the movie "Psycho." "There's only so many directions you can go with noir," said Mr. Feiffer, who added that he had had great fun working in a genre where he didn't have to be funny. And if you don't meet Hitchcock somewhere down the line, you're going the wrong way. But suburban noir? The substitution of lawns and malls for the shadowy streets and ominous skyscrapers of the city doesn't bother Mr. McLoughlin, who spent many weekends as a child visiting his aunt and uncle in Wantagh. "This is about the dark side of aspirational culture in America," he said. Long Island is the perfect setting. In fact, he said, suburbia may be even meaner than the big city. People involved in nefarious doings in an urban environment often don't know one another. In the suburbs, it can be more personal. "It's a different world for all the players involved," Mr. McLoughlin said. "Here, they live in each others" pockets, and you're more likely to have people on the lower rung working for people on the upper rung." Mr. Wishnia, an associate professor of English at Suffolk County Community College in Brentwood who will moderate a panel of "Long Island Noir" authors there on May 5, said the book had just scratched suburbia's surface. "We have our own serial killers," he said. There's Joel Rifkin, the Gilgo Beach murders. Who knows, maybe there will be a "Long Island Noir 2." "