I have a theory about why I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed another entry in in Akashic Books noir series, Delhi Noir. Seattle Noir solid, but it didn’t grab me quite like the earlier anthology.
Theory: I have a lot of biased assumptions about Delhi that made the setting very foreboding. But being Seattle born and raised, I know this place much better and have a much harder time seeing its seedy underbelly. Oh, we have our problems. In its early days, Seattle could hold it’s own against any up and coming city. But today this is not a place where crime runs rampant, the cops are on the take, or organized crime takes a cut of everything.
In addition, with a few exceptions, the stories don’t mine the reputations and possibilities of the Seattle neighborhoods in which they’re set. Or they do use genteel areas which limit the crime possibilities to a fairly narrow set. Where’s Lake City, or Aurora, White Center, Rainier Valley? Conversely, a couple of the stories set in places I wouldn’t have expected to be so scary turned out to be quite good at imparting a dark mood.
- Blood Tide by Thomas P. Hopp (Duwamish)
- The anthology starts out in an area just south of downtown. The Duwamish river has been dredged and shaped into a shipping hub, surrounded by the medium heavy industries that like close proximity to easy international freight. The land once belonged to the Duwamish, a branch of the Salish tribe that inhabited the area when Europeans moved in. Unrecognized, the Duwamish dwindled in number without a reservation or a dedicated tribal government to keep them together. The tribe persevered even so. Hopp’s story interacts more with a few Duwamish members rather than the Duwamish area, which doesn’t have the distinctly Native American feel implied by the text. The crime is that of red tide poisoning, where someone has distilled the poisonous substances from the tide and used it to murder someone. The hero is Peyton McKean, a virologist of some sort. He stars in Hopp’s self-published novel The Jihad Virus. He has a journalist sidekick who comes running to write up McKean’s exploits in mutual symbiosis. While sufficiently noirish, it’s utterly predictable and clunkily written. Good for bringing some exposure to the Duwamish cause, however.
- Promised Tulips by Bharti Kirchner (Wallingford)
- Wallingford is not a neighborhood I would associate with dreaded crime. The essence of noir (I.M.H.O.), is the ominous knowledge that someone is going to get screwed, and that I both don’t want to watch and can’t help watching. A professional gardener who lives in Wallingford (this certainly fits the area) imagines what could have happened to her best friend who has disappeared, leaving behind a less than upset social climbing husband. The location is not dreadful, but it inspires a quietness that allows a person to think a lot, expanding worry into something huge. It’s all around a very good story.
- Golden Gardens by Stephan Magcosta (Ballard)
- This is another story that manages to be ominous despite the idyllic location. Magcosta uses Golden Gardens Park to set a tale of emotional revenge. The park’s beach isn’t remote, but it’s secluded from residences by the railroad and a steep bluff. Consequently, if you wanted to kill someone without being bothered by passersby, Golden Gardens wouldn’t be the worst place to do it. A Hispanic woman distraught over her soldier son’s death in Iraq wants to avenge him on the first convenient Middle Eastern looking person she can find, a cabbie. An ugly, inevitable end packs a lot of emotion. Recommended.
- The Center of the Universe by Robert Lopresti (Fremont)
- Fremont is yet another area that isn’t particularly seedy. It features a weird combination of left-wing free-thinking and good old crass American commercialism. Lopresti really nails the vibe of the neighborhood through the eyes of a somewhat mentally ill homeless person. He can’t always tell the difference between the true and the false already, and Fremont’s dichotomy doesn’t make things any easier. In the middle of this, our guy thinks he sees a girl get murdered, and the guys who did it to boot. Another recommended story.
- Blue Sunday by Kathleen Alcalá (Central District)
- Alcalá’s story doesn’t really work as noir for me. Someone’s gonna get screwed, but it happens right at the beginning so there’s little in the way of menace afterward. A couple of Iraq soldiers on leave party it up and get drunk when they run into a cop all to eager to suspect the worst of minorities. Alternates between scenes of the soldier recovering from his police encounter in the hospital and scenes of him handling Iraqis roughly. Well worth reading as a portrait of how racial bias fucks us up, and it’s an issue that comes up often in the Central District.
- The Taskmasters by Simon Wood (Downtown)
- The first of four stories where the person who’s going to get screwed is being set up to take a fall for the unscrupulous. A bar brawler gets taken in by an underground group called the Taskmasters, whose ostensible reason for existing is as a band of vigilantes, righting wrongs ignored by the police. They have one method: they decide someone is guilty and execute them. Sounds like a 70s T.V. movie plot. Predictable. Not a lot of downtown flavor. And I didn’t get a feeling of peril.
- What Price Retribution? by Patricia Harrington (Capitol Hill)
- A half mile from my place is a steep hillside that separates the Capitol Hill neighborhood from my Eastlake home base. Between Interstate 5 and the incline, there’s only a few streets connecting the areas, at the north and south end of this bluff. However, there’s a couple of stair climbs that lead from us to them, which pass under wooded branches so dense that it’s dark in the daytime during the height of summer. Among those trees is a homeless camp according to Harrington’s story. When a homeless guy gets the crap beat out of him, the
Mayor
of the camp, an erstwhile cop, sobers up enough to seek revenge on the drug dealer. This one is great, not so much because I wanted to see the dealer live, but because the revenge could get really bad. (Though why a big time dealer would try to sell to penniless homeless folks in the first place is a little fuzzy.) - Till Death Do Us … by Curt Colbert (Belltown)
- The second story of
set ‘em up to take a fall
variety. 1940s Jake Rossiter stars as a P.I. who takes a bad domestic case because he needs the money. Coincidentally within minutes of each other, both sides of a divorce case hire Rossiter to prevent the other spouse from murdering them. A fun story, but not in a dreadful way. - The Best View In Town by Paul S. Piper (Leschi)
- Piper’s story is the first of two commit a crime against someone close to you for the money entries in the book. Here a drunk loser brings home a girl, only to find out the girl’s grandfather grew up next door, where he supposedly stashed away valuables that the family never recovered. And she’s damned pissed the new owners seem to have maybe found them. Just a little too predictable. Good portrait of a loser though. I liked that.
- The Wrong End Of A Gun by R. Barri Flowers (South Lake Union)
- The third of the set ‘em up to take a fall stories, and by far the worst story in the collection. Dude wants to get with a girl just because she’s hot, despite hundreds of warning signs that would make even the most besotted 17 year old run. And he’s a veteran of divorce court, who’s world weary tone should give him a clue. Flowers uses some awfully trite physical descriptions too:
Her complexion was like maple syrup over buttered waffles.
A) Food descriptions of skin tone are tiresome. B) Maple syrup I can see as a skin tone. Smooth and brown. On top of buttered waffles? Have you ever looked at buttered waffles after pouring syrup on them? They are blotchy, greasy and pockmarked. This is not attractive. Tasty and delicious in a waffle, but not so much for a complexion. - Paper Son by Brian Thornton (Chinatown)
- Thornton writes historical noir set in 1889, when Seattle wasn’t exactly welcoming to its Chinese immigrants. One of them washes up dead on Mercer Island, and a rookie Treasury Agent investigates. Triads and prostitution and drug running and multiple missing people! And I definitely didn’t see where the ending was … er … going to end.
- The Magnolia Bluff by Skye Moody (Magnolia)
- The second of the set up people you know for money stories. Circus clown midgets have a rivalry that spills into really good resentment when one of them makes it to Hollywood. Magnolia as a setting, although described accurately, didn’t lend itself to
bad shit happening
. - Sherlock’s Opera by Lou Kemp (Waterfront)
- Moriarity’s adoring little brother Jacob lures Sherlock Holmes to Seattle to take his revenge on the sleuth. Why? Why?
- Food for Thought by G. M. Ford (Pioneer Square)
- The final story is the last of the set folks up to take a fall ones, though this one works out a little differently. But again, a broke P.I. takes a domestic muscle case that he’d rather not, because he needs the money. A short, enjoyable story that broke the mold of the previous three.
A few standout stories but overall not as good as I’d hoped.
One other blogged review:
Title: Seattle Noir
Editor: Curt Colbert
Cover creator: Jon Resh (designer)
Series: Akashic Noir
Imprint / publisher: Akashic Books
Format: Paperback
Length: 268 p.
Publication date: June 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-80-4
I’m sorry to hear that. As a long-time resident you’re going to have a different perspective on it than someone who’s unfamiliar with the city and you’re going to see the places where the authors didn’t quite get it right.
They don’t exactly get the locations wrong so much as use them to throw out a few details that aren’t really important to the story. Frinstance, The Wrong End of a Gun could be set anywhere. Flowers takes a stock story and throws in a few references to some local landmarks.