We got a really wonderful, thoughtful review from a New York magazine, The Brooklyn Rail. Thanks to Becky Ferreira for her insights and her comments. She writes, “Siegal has subtly rejuvenated the (noir) genre.” See the original story on the Brooklyn Rail website, here.

Fiction: Spray-Painted Mysteries

by Becky Ferreira

If judged only by its synopsis, Nina Siegal’s debut novel, A Little Trouble with the Facts, would be quickly categorized as a neo-noir, a rehash of mystery/suspense structure contemporized by a slew of modern landscapes and references. This is both true and misleading. On the one hand, the novel certainly does not attempt to break noir convention. It is packed with corkscrew twists and dubious personages, and is piloted by Valerie Vane, a beleaguered obituary writer whose incisive first-person narration presents her as an amalgam of a reformed femme fatale and a classic PI. Additionally, in true noir fashion, the plot is rolling from page one, when Vane receives an ominous phone call regarding the obituary of a famous graffiti artist named Malcolm Wallace, aka Stain 149. “Who said [it was] suicide?” the caller wants to know. All Vane can answer is that the police report had said, “jump from bridge,” and she had inferred from there. When evidence accumulates to suggest that Wallace was, in fact, thrown from the Queensboro Bridge, Vane is placed on a fast track either to redemption or to that special rock they keep below rock bottom.

But while the novel never rebels against its heritage, Siegal has subtly rejuvenated the genre. The innovation of the book is in the subtext constructed by her carefully wrought extended metaphors, which surface under new aliases throughout the narrative just as the primary characters do. There is, for example, “the Incident” that instigates Vane’s plummet from grace, an event that leaves her screaming, “Don’t you know who I am?” What has become a clichéd yelp of the glitterati is gingerly subverted throughout the book to become a sweeping statement about the need to be seen, recognized, immortalized. It originates from the same place as that common vandalistic urge to write “I was here,” and—no matter how soothing it would be to believe such a compulsion is rooted in grand ideas of living on through art—is most often a by-product of chronic insecurity. That Vane and Wallace share it so fundamentally provides a connection between them that bridges life and death as naturally as the Queensboro bridges the East River. From here, the key symbol of the book emerges, the conceit of “the writing on the walls,” literally and metaphorically. Siegal expertly misdirects the reader with false clues, all the while spray-painting the truth in the tunnels and overpasses of the book, where we will decipher them only if we look closely out the window as the train trundles along.

One of Vane’s fellow reporters condenses the genre beautifully when he says of the Queensboro Bridge, “When I was growing up, this bridge was supposed to be the scariest place on earth […] Kids said they saw lights for trains that never came or else trains full of ghosts.” What else is mystery than evidence of something that cannot be seen, and what else is suspense than a vision of something that cannot be explained? This coy commentary on noir runs throughout the novel, adding a colorful depth and resonance.

Reporter-Murder Tale is Absorbing, By MALCOLM RITTER

Tue Feb 26, 12:08 PM ET

“A Little Trouble With the Facts” (Harper Paperbacks, 288 pages, $13.95), by Nina Siegal: Maybe you’ve read your fill of novels with a plot like this: A naive young woman moves to Manhattan, gets into big-time publishing, faces professional crises, falls in love and, in general, ends up transformed.

True? Make room for one more.”A Little Trouble With the Facts” is an absorbing tale that follows that path and throws in a murder as well.

We meet Valerie Vane, who by the time the book begins has already attained and lost a job as a hotshot style reporter at a major New York newspaper. After embarrassing her employer in a public incident at a nightclub, she was demoted to writing obituaries.

And that’s where she takes the phone call that sets the story in motion. She’d written a brief obituary that said a graffiti artist killed himself by jumping from a bridge. Not so, insists her mysterious male caller, who promises to help her find the truth.

Some 250 pages later she does find the truth, but the best part is her journey along the way. In this debut novel, Siegal is a delightful writer.

She tells of tabloid newspapers illustrating a sensational story with “enough file photos to crush a librarian.” And you can’t help but admire a sentence like this, as Vane describes being goaded by her mysterious caller: “His words poked me in the chest like a frat boy looking for a brawl.”

Siegal’s newspaper experience serves her well in descriptions of Vane’s newsroom, colleagues and journalistic world. Here’s Vane describing her top-dog status as a style reporter: “I had identified gray as the new black and Thursday as the new Friday. And later, when the trends shifted again, I was the one who’d let everyone know that Monday was the new Thursday.”

Truth to tell, Siegal occasionally gets a little out of hand in the flashiness of her writing. That’s when the reader is left to think that he’d probably get a real kick out of her turn of a phrase if only he could understand what it means.

But that’s a minor problem in a fun book. Siegal is working on a second novel, and I look forward to it.

Chick lit meets Raymond Chandler in this slick debut about a Gotham gossip girl’s rise, fall and resurrection in New York circa 1999.

Sassy, brassy journo Valerie Vane—née Sunburst Rhapsody Miller, born to a pair of hippies—wants to be famous and does so the old-fashioned way: by tossing gossip bricks. She’s quickly scooped up by the style section of the Paper (a thinly veiled New York Times), but becomes undone by cocaine nights and her social-climbing no-good boyfriend. After a drug-fueled rage that gets her mug on all the trashy tabs, Val is relegated to the obits desk. There, the disgraced writer learns to be a real reporter, investigating the mysterious death of revered graffiti artist Malcolm Wallace.

In the hunt for his killer, aided by her dark and handsome source, Cabeza, Val uncovers corruption that will put her name back on page one—and her life in danger. Siegal, a former journalist, blends glamour and gutter into a delicious cocktail, equal parts behind-the-scenes dish and crime novel. With a tantalizing if undeveloped side plot involving Val’s long-lost relatives, a sequel would be both logical—and welcome. (Feb.)

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