»Manhattan Noir

This anthology features noir stories that have a distinctly Manhattan setting: the Lower East Side, Battery Park City, Inwood. It is part of a burgeoning series from Akashic Books, which wants to "reverse-gentrify the literary world". Ironically, one aspect that many of these stories share is that modern Manhattan is a boring, uniformly-gentrified place. Characters in the stories, just like contemporary bloggers, grumble about the ubiquity of storefront banks, chain-store pharmacies, and name-brand "coffee" shops.

Jeffrey Deaver contributes a riveting story about grifters and cops on the take in Hell's Kitchen. The anthology's editor, Lawrence Block, has a very different (and less gripping) take on the same neighbourhood, which in his story goes by the more gentrified "Clinton". Liz Martínez's story set in Washington Heights feels more like science fiction, not from its setting but from its ham-handed "guardian angel" appearances of actor-who-died-young Freddie Prinze. The stories set in the Lower East Side and in Yorkville are less engaging, despite the gritty promise of these locales. One might think, Yorkville? But after reading the opening of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, I am eager for more hardboiled stories set in Yorkville. The ambiguous morality typical of noir stories comes across best in Deaver's story, "A Nice Place to Visit", and in Charles Ardai's "The Good Samaritan", which makes excellent use of its Midtown setting.

I'm off to the library to find me some Luc Sante.