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I'm not a huge fan of short stories, as many of them seem shoehorned into the format – they're either thinly disguised crime fiction, or they hurtle to a halt just as things are getting interesting. But Akashic Books have done well with their short story series focussing on the seamier side of cities in the UK, US and Ireland. They've found themselves some good editors who've selected wisely. And you won't have read any of the stories elsewhere either, which is one of the things that tends to infuriate me with anthologies. There are no really big names in TWIN CITIES NOIR – William Kent Krueger is probably the best-known writer on show – and I hadn't come across the editors, Julie Schaper and Steven Horwitz, neither of whom have stories in the book. All we learn about them from the brief biography at the back is that they both live in St Paul, one of the twin cities (the other is Minneapolis). OK, on to the stories. Often the crime angle feels very slight in short stories, and some of these are no exception. But among the gems are KJ Erickson's Noir Neige, which is witty and deadpan, and tells of three guys working at a car impound lot. Equally neat and equally deadpan is Pete Hautman's The Guy where the grandly-named Jane Day-Wellington has to deal with her poker-playing waste of space husband. And I absolutely adored Mary Sharratt's Taking the Bullets Out where we're transported to the world of an emergency room nurse. The description of the nurse's job, his back garden and his flute playing is so real that you'll be convinced you're sitting on the back porch with him trying to blank out the noise from the neighbours. The three historicals that didn't grab me, but then I'm not the audience for those. And Mary Logue's rather bizarre Blasted reads like the start of a book and had me muttering "yes, and . . .?" I was enjoying William Kent Krueger's Burns, where a down-on-his-luck hack is trying to find out what happened to a young homeless man, until the final paragraph when I ended up whimpering "no, please, you can't be doing this – it's the first thing we were taught not to do in writing classes at school!" TWIN CITIES NOIR isn't the best in the series, but if you've been reading the others, or you're a native of the two cities, it's worth reading. One thing does bug me with this series, though – where are the black and gay writers?
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, May 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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