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When we moved to Seattle in 1990, we learned a lot about the city from a local television comedy show called "Almost Live". There were jokes about Ballard, Fremont, Renton and Wallingford. Jokes about lutefisk, bad driving, coffee and pirates. It was great. Seattle is a city of neighborhoods. That's how we identify and locate each other. For 20 years, I've had the good fortune to live in a soon to be defined untrendy neighborhood. Don't tell anyone This clearly successful series of "noir" anthologies from Akashic Books has been a mixed blessing for me. I've long felt that many of the authors with stories in these books don't truly understand what noir is. Reviving it is fine, but I've read too many stories that seem to suggest that noir solely means amoral, dark and depressing and the stories are comprised of trappings and iffy anti-heroes without a sense of what the roman noir or its sister, the film noir ever meant. With trepidation, then, I read SEATTLE NOIR, hoping that I'd get stories by local authors who knew the city and who understood the theme. The stories in this collection mostly got it right. I didn't want a "Frazier" reality where you get impossible images and easy jokes about coffee and Microsoft millionaires. With one wholly wrong inclusion (noir stories should not be unfinished chapters from a work-in-progress and out of context, sorry Bharti Kirchner) the dismal, the difficult, the dark of this city comes out in these stories. Sadly, a couple stories, if you changed the street names, could have gone into almost any other of these city-based anthologies. As much as I liked Simon Wood's tale about some vigilantes who are not at all what they seem to be, it was generic, except for the street names and the neighborhood mentions. I felt the same about Curt Colbert's clever and plausible tale about divorce and two bickering spouses. One tale was predictable from the first description where a beautiful woman looks like two movie stars, and ends with a trite touch that's been around for decades. Come on, I thought, you can do better than this. Another story relied heavily on an implausible coincidence - a little better editing or a few lines might have fixed that. There are many good stories in SEATTLE NOIR, entertaining, and maybe even noir. Good solid stories using the realities of Seattle, now and then, are the prize here. I expected true Seattle from Skye Moody and G M Ford, who came through, but didn't know what to expect from Kathleen Alcalá whose genre isn't usually crime fiction. She showed a sure hand with Blue Sunday, a deft and wholly plausible account featuring cops, a Latino vet and fundamental right and wrong. Mostly. Pat Harrington brought the homeless communities to life here in What Price Retribution? which truly got the community it was portraying. Rob Lopresti's superior story really hits the mark, using the people in the city, good and bad, to tell a story that works on several levels. The Center of the Universe like these other stories, seems to succeed best when telling tales about the down-and-out. Is that noir? Could be. It's always difficult to evaluate the success of a theme anthology. Often the theme's in there but the story's not great, or there's a great story but it doesn't have the extra oomph that uses the book's theme, whether it's setting, historical period, type of protagonist or here, noir. Works by Thomas P Hopp that look at the conflicts between doing right and getting by, while Lou Kemp uses the city's history for his "Sherlock's Opera" again fit well. There are at least 30 anthologies in this line with at least another dozen in the works. So far, as noted, I've had issues with the definition of "noir" because many of the books haven't succeeded in that regard. I think SEATTLE NOIR did pretty well.
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, April 2010
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