The Best American Noir of the Century

Bradford Morrow (1951-) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but grew up in Colorado, receiving a BA from the University of Colorado, then undertaking graduate studies at Yale University. He traveled for the next ten years and worked in various jobs, including as a jazz musician, translator, rare-book seller, and medical assistant. He has taught at Princeton, Brown, and Columbia, and has been a professor of literature at Bard College for twenty years, where he has been the editor of Conjunctions, the prestigious literary journal, for its more than fifty issues.

After five volumes of poetry, Morrow turned to the novel; his first, Come Sunday, was published in 1988. The Almanac Branch (1991) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His next novel, Trinity Fields (1994), which the author identified as the first volume of his New Mexico Trilogy, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Giovanni’s Gift (1997), among readers’ favorites of his books, came next, followed by the second volume of the New Mexico Trilogy, Ariel’s Crossing (2002). He has also written two children’s books: A Bestiary (1991), illustrated by eighteen contemporary American artists, and Didn’t Didn’t Do It (2007), charmingly illustrated by Gahan Wilson.

Among Morrows awards are an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998), the O. Henry Prize, for his short story “Lush” (2003), the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing (2007), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007).

“The Hoarder” was first published in the anthology Murder in the Rough (New York: Mysterious Press, 2006).

I have always been a hoarder. When I was young, our family lived on the Outer Banks, where I swept up and down the shore filling my windbreaker pockets with seashells of every shape and size. Back in the privacy of my room I loved nothing better than to lay them out on my bed, arranging them by color or form — whelks and cockles here, clams and scallops there — a beautiful mosaic of dead calcium. The complete skeleton of a horseshoe crab was my finest prize, as I remember. After we moved inland from the Atlantic, my obsession didn’t change, but the objects of my desire did. Having no money, I was restricted to things I found, so one year developed an extensive collection of Kentucky bird nests, and during the next an array of bright Missouri butterflies preserved in several homemade display cases. Another year, my father’s itinerant work having taken us to the desert, I cultivated old pottery shards from the hot potreros. Sometimes my younger sister offered to assist with my quests, but I preferred shambling around on my own. Once in a while I did allow her to shadow me, if only because it was one more thing that annoyed our big brother, who never missed an opportunity to cut me down to size. Weird little bastard, Tom liked calling me. I didn’t mind him saying so. I was a weird little bastard.