The Hoarder

When James Ellroy and Otto Penzler offer a book called The Best American Noir of the Century, noir fans, scholars, students should simply go out and buy it—or borrow it, steal it, take it out of the library—whatever.

Don’t worry about reviews, flaws, omissions, disagreements over definitions of noir. You HAVE TO have this book. Reading it is like taking a college course in noir fiction taught by the true experts.

The second-to-last of the thirty-nine chronologically arranged stories in this monumental book is Bradford Morrow’s “The Hoarder.”

“I have always been a hoarder,” begins this tale of a nameless young boy—intelligent, introverted, sensitive. Yet the boy doesn’t seem like an obsessive hoarder at all—just a collector.

In an almost idyllic description, the narrator tells of his younger days living along the Outer Banks and “filling my windbreaker pockets with seashells of every shape and form” and then of arranging them on his bed by color or form.

Not a very noir beginning. Or is there dark foreshadowing in a reference to this “mosaic of dead calcium”? Or that his favorite piece was the complete skeleton of a horseshoe crab?