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Edited by Washington DC native and brilliant crime fiction writer George Pelecanos, DC NOIR is the latest in Akashic Books' series of multi-author short story anthologies focused on cities. The series has already covered London, Dublin, Brooklyn (two volumes!) Chicago, and, of course, Dashiell Hammett's familiar terrain, San Francisco. DC NOIR is a vibrantly diverse collection of stories, ranging in style from police procedural mystery, psychological thriller, 20th century historical, Joycean memory montage, to acidic satire and passionate social drama. Each takes place in a different neighbourhood, scattered across a map conveniently printed at the beginning. Several established writers share its pages with emerging ones, most of whom definitely pull their own weight. I know I've added some new must-read authors to my list. Washington DC has a lot of problems -- from its lingering conjoined legacies of segregation, extreme economic divide, and local corruption, to the worse-than-New-York crime rate, political corruption on the biggest scale on Capitol Hill, and the unbelievable yet true fact that the residents have what Pelecanos aptly calls "no vote or meaningful representation in the Senate or . . . Congress." Really. If there's one thing that the best stories in DC NOIR avoid, it's escape fantasy. Through compelling storytelling and loose homage to some noir conventions, the authors of the stories confront all these issues, and then some. The quality of the stories vary widely. There are some great ones, definitely worth buying the book for. I really liked Pelecanos's gritty, empathetic, and strikingly realistic The Confidential Informant, playwright Quintin Peterson's modern fable Cold as Ice, and Norman Kelley's The Messenger of Soulsville. The last of those, a mystery with a Byzantine plot involving music industry moguls, the Mafia, and a fictional cult that reads like a transparent satire of Louis Farrakhan's followers, could have been expanded into a thoughtful, riveting novel. Maybe sometime it will be. I hope so. In A.R.M. and The Woman, by Laura Lippman, Chevy Chase model housewife and reluctant divorcee Sally Holt will try anything to keep her kids in the prestigious Dutton School -- including murder. Ruben Castaneda's Coyote Hunt follows a maverick journalist for the Metro section of The Washington, um, "Tribune" as he solves a murder by means that his superiors would never understand. Richard Currey's The Names of the Lost is a quiet yet powerful tale of a European Jewish liquor store owner who survived a Nazi concentration camp only to confront white supremacism again in Shepherd Park, Northwest. Robert Andrews's Solomon's Alley combines suspenseful thriller writing with a character sketch of a Nigerian street vendor of counterfeit designer accessories who intends to defend his independent venture against an intimidating Somali racketeering gang by wit alone. Then, there are a few that clearly don't equal those in ingenuity, craft, or warm depth of characterisation. Jim Beane's Jeannette begins with the promise of an interesting tale set during the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, but then becomes a pedestrian paean to a deceitful femme fatale whose deceit should have been obvious to even the dimmest of smitten suitors. Lester Irby's God Don't Like Ugly features Fifi Taylor, a two-dimensional femme fatale who needs to confess her role in the death of the "curvaceous and strikingly beautiful", but even more simplistically sketched Sarah Ward. The narrative voice begins in alienatingly formal third-person ("at approximately 12.30 pm"), then is revealed to be Fifi's and continues in a completely different, more natural tone. Irby's straight female protagonist's descriptions of women gush about their beauty and seductiveness in a way not matched in her description of her dangerously sexy boyfriend. Perhaps these inconsistencies can be excused because this is Irby's first published story, and he wrote whilst incarcerated, having spent "more than 30 years in federal prisons for crimes ranging from bank robberies to two prison escapes." It's probably absolutely horrible of me to write this, but I wondered if Irby has some stories to tell that are more interesting, detailed, and emotionally plausible than the formulaic one published here. Robert Wisdom's The Light and the Dark segues from a murder almost-witnessed by a young boy whose Caribbean immigrant parents keep a boarding house in the 1950s, to that boy's growing up to be a writer and finding the courage to write the stories he knows instead of the myths he's been taught, but that process happens too quickly, and it's just gotten started when it ends. It is another budding novel mischievously masquerading as a self-contained short story. While Pelecanos and the other authors scathingly criticise the District and its powers that be for its considerable problems, they also celebrate the city. Like DC, DC NOIR has much to admire. It's not perfect, but it's fascinating.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, June 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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