As a kid growing up in New Jersey in the '50s and '60s, nobody I knew had any sense of inferiority regarding where we came from - the only Jersey locale that anyone ever made fun of was Secaucus, a small town nestled in the Meadowlands that had the double misfortune of having a funny sounding name along with an abundance of foul smelling pig farms. I grew up in Passaic and although I did occasionally encounter folks who thought that the sound of that name was worthy of a chuckle or two, a general reference to New Jersey usually did not conjure up expressions of hilarity or mirth. The place that was good for any easy laugh was Brooklyn, home to tough guys with uneducated accents (Toity Toid Street, anyone?) and a general lack of couth. Of course, there have always been portions of Brooklyn that were elegant and high brow, but that was a well kept secret, at least until the '70s brought with it a phenomenon called urban gentrification. When young urban professionals brought their brand of respectablility to previously undistinguished neighborhoods, Brooklyn stopped being funny, at least in the way that it used to be.
Come to think of it, people used to think that Hoboken was funny too, but that's not the case anymore either.
A front page article in this past week's Star Ledger gives prominence to the fact that there have been no fewer than eight reality shows set in the Garden State; much of the credit for this trend is attributed to the popularity of The Sopranos, the HBO series about the New Jersey mob that aired from 1999 to 2007. During my childhood, New Jersey had been a non-entity on television; only in the mid '70s did a specific New Jersey presence emerge on the small screen with a short lived series about a working class family, Joe and Son, that was set in Hoboken. In 1979, a blatant rip off of Saturday Night Fever called Makin' It was set in Passaic and featured John Travolta's sister as the mother of the disco crazed protagonist. The first dramatic series set in New Jersey that I can recall was a cop show called Toma , based on the real life adventures of Newark undercover officer Dave Toma. After running for only one season, Toma morphed into the more popular Baretta; although the storyline implied that the show was set in Newark, the streetscape was clearly that of Sourthern California. According to Wikipedia, there were only two TV shows pre-Sopranos for which the New Jersey location was truly essential to the story line: The Street, a cop show from the late 80's that was filmed on location in Newark and other north Jersey cities and Down the Shore, a sitcom precurser of Jersey Shore that was set in Belmar.
New Jersey was also mostly ignored as a literary setting until Philip Roth burst on the scene with Goodbye Columbus in 1959, making Newark the setting for a string of brilliant novels that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning American Pastoral, The Plot Against America and, most recently, Nemesis, a poignant depiction of a fictional 1944 polio epidemic that laid waste to Newark's Jewish Weequahic neighborhood. Yet, when people think of Roth, he is associated specifically with Newark, not the entire state.
So what does all of this have to do with mysteries and crime fiction?
I think I can make a persuasive argument that the whole "Jersey Cool" movement began, not in 1999 with The Sopranos, but with the appearance in 1994 of One for the Money, the first in a series of mystery novels by a then unknown author named Janet Evanovich. The series features quintessential Jersey girl Stephanie Plum, along with a supporting cast of eccentric characters whose identities are inextricably bound up with the Chambersburg neighborhood of Trenton where most of the action takes place. The release of Explosive Eighteen in November and the opening of the movie version of One for the Money on January 27 are only going to add to New Jersey's cachet as a place that is crawling with oddballs, loveable or otherwise.
When people think of Stephanie Plum, she is equal parts Trenton and New Jersey. When people think of Tony Soprano, he is associated with New Jersey, not North Caldwell. Maybe that's because Tony and his friends got around more.
More on Jersey Cool next week.
