Richmond Noir (Akashic Noir) Review

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(More customer reviews)When my step-son Cody gave me this book in way of apologizing for what he did to my lawn (don't get me started), i was hesitant to believe that I would enjoy it. As a life-long Richmonder, I didnt believe that this town had anything in it worth writing about. I WAS WRONG. The stories contained within this volume are great, grimy gems that illuminate the under-side of this town with what my Uncle Otis used to call 'real panache.'
Actually, Uncle Otis would have loved some of the stories in this collection. He was a big reader. Used to scream about religion a lot, but mostly he liked reading.
Back to the book--what really makes the stories shine is that they're more than just blood and guts like your Jodi Picoults and Andre Dubus'. There's a depth to the material here. Not that they're not fun, too. Many of the stories contain both sexuality and violence.
It's a great collection put together by people as passionate about literature as they are about noir. I assume. These stories pack a lunch, and in that lunch they pack punches instead of chips.
As for Cody, if you see him, please tell him its safe to come on home. I liked the book enough that I've decided to let the lawn thing go.

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The River City emerges as a hot spot for unseemly noir.

Brand-new stories by: Dean King, Laura Browder, Howard Owen, Yazmina Beverly, Tom De Haven, X.C. Atkins, Meagan J. Saunders, Anne Thomas Soffee, Clint McCown, Conrad Ashley Persons, Clay McLeod Chapman, Pir Rothenberg, David L. Robbins, Hermine Pinson, and Dennis Danvers.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO RICHMOND NOIR:

"In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller tosses off a hard-bitten assessment of the City on the James: 'I would rather die in Richmond somehow,' he writes, 'though God knows Richmond has little enough to offer.' As editors, we like the dying part, and might point out that in its long history, Richmond, Virginia has offered up many of the disparate elements crucial to meaty noir. The city was born amid deception, conspiracy, and violence . . .

"These days, Richmond is a city of winter balls and garden parties on soft summer evenings, a city of private clubs where white-haired old gentlemen, with their martinis or mint juleps in hand, still genuflect in front of portraits of Robert E. Lee. It's also a city of brutal crime scenes and drug corners and okay-everybody-go-on-home-there's-nothing-more-to-see. It's a city of world-class ad agencies and law firms, a city of the FFV (First Families of Virginia) and a city of immigrants--from India, Vietnam, and Africa to Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. It's a city of finicky manners (you mustn't ever sneeze publicly in Richmond) and old-time neighborliness, and it's a city where you think twice about giving somebody the finger if they cut you off on the Powhite Parkway (that's pronounced Pow-hite, not Po-white, thank you very much) because you might get your head blown off by the shotgun on the rack . . ."

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Black Wings Has My Angel Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a great mid-century "pulp" novel that, like James Cain's "Postman Always Rings Twice," has been celebrated for it's skillful writing (the 1934 "Postman" was much earlier, however, than this 1953 work). In addition to the action, which is deftly conveyed, Chaze makes the surroundings come alive as well. The suburbs of Denver, the abandoned gold mines nearby, the American road just before the Eisenhower freeway system, the smells of the South, the lack of smells in the West...it's rich, but not in purple or overstuffed prose. The writing wasn't groundbreaking, it wasn't Hemingway, but it was quite good, certainly for a pulp.
The narrator is an interesting mix of hard guy, college boy who didn't make good, and amoral alcoholic depressive. His "angel" is more two-dimensional, as she's perfectly formed physically and has a perfectly icy heart ("made of dollar bills" as the cover says). There's a wonderful back and forth between them, as their trust in each other and desire for each other shifts from day to day. Here's an example (the two are swimming in a quarry pool):
"....She was wonderful in the water, almost professionally good, and the water was clear because its bottom was solid rock and there was nothing to stir up and cloud it. It must have been about nine feet deep and cold, achingly cold. It felt so fine to my head I'd take a deep breath and go limp and sink down to the bottom and squat there. From below the surface was a sheet of mercury and then I'd see it break roughly as she kicked against it coming down to me. It was like watching her through a sheet of clean green cellophane. She came and curved around me and slid along my back and shoulders. A futuristic kind of love. Love with all the heat taken out of it.... (p.39)"
When they get out of the pool, you don't know if they'll be making love or trying to run each other over with the Packard next. Probably, they'll do both.
"Black Wings" has also been one of the rarest pulps of note, and 52 years after it's last publication, it's finally back on the market.
I second everything "Baron Von Cool" wrote earlier about this particular edition. While there may have been typos in the original Gold Medal version (which any decent publisher would silently correct), there are clearly plenty of new ones introduced here. Some errors in this reprint seem the result of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), used to digitize paper texts. For example: the lower case "l" starts a sentence where the pronoun "I" is clearly intended (p.19). Or this beauty: "In the South the roses explode out of the weeds in the yards o&.pound; the poorest shanties." (p. 21). Somehow the html coding for "£" got printed instead of the British pound symbol, which was how the publisher's stupid OCR software read the letter "f" on the original page. The sentence must have originally read "...in the yards of the poorest shanties." But you'd never guess that without typing the raw text into a web brower and then publishing it on Amazon, whereupon the "£" sign magically appears and you figure out what the **** all that garbage in your novel was.
Unfortunately, there are more than a few typos. They leave you scratching your head and wondering "what letter, if I changed it, would make this sentence make sense?" Then, for instance, you'll realize that the characters "ni" are in the place of what is supposed to be an "m", and the meaning becomes clear. Meanwhile, you've been thrown out of the reality that Chaze has skillfully created for you.
And then there's the page and chapter layout that looks like a seventh grader did all the book design in Microsoft Word, with no special templates or section formatting ("amateur hour," like the Baron says). The title page is numbered at the top, the story begins on page 4, the sections and chapters are crammed together with no white space, and so on. All these little things really do distract the reader, bringing things to a grinding halt on occasion.
Of course, a crummy version of a lost classic is better than no version at all or paying an outrageous sum for an original copy. I am greatful that someone out there bothered with a book that probably isn't going to bring in much of a financial return. Buy the book while it's around--it's not beyond redemption in this form.
Edit: Turns out Blackmask publishers is/was run by David Moynihan, a Don Quixote-esque guy battling The Man for the public's right to publish works that should properly be in the public domain. He's published hundreds of public domain texts on his website, so he's certainly due his props. It doens't change the sloppy presentation of "Black Wings...", but I suppose it's a mitigating factor. Good luck, David. May your mission continue.

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A Single Shot Review

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(More customer reviews)One of the great unknown literary noir novels of the last ten years, Matthew Jones' A Single Shot is set in mountainous back country where, at its outset, John Moon, a local farmer, divorced, goes hunting. At the same time two young drifters, male and female, are temporarily settled in around Moon's hunting grounds. Tragedy ensues.
What makes this so compelling and powerful is the author's unrelenting portrait of a man who cannot stop thinking about what he has done, to the point of manic obsession, to the point of visualizing his victim appearing before him in ghostly form, and to the point of wild indetermination about what to do with the stash of cash found in the temporary nesting ground. The revelation of criminal activity adds just the right element to this dark fever dream of a novel that pushes the reader forward, further and further into John Moon's world.
As we travel down this path of dread we realize that his inner world more and more becomes his outer one until the boundary between the two is blurry indeed. As well, the intermittent involvement with his ex-wife, decidedly frustrating, is the "two" in a one-two punch adding to the burning emotional intensity here.
The author's grasp of rural speech patterns, behaviors, and lifestyle is flawless, giving the novel the authenticity it needs to make it truly masterful.
Highly recommended.

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Numb: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)Sean Ferrell grabs you by the collar and forces you to feel the physical, psychological, and emotional pain that Numb is unable or unwilling to feel. He jars you with the bizarre, distracts you with pretty women, and while you're looking the other way, pounds nails into your heart. Unlike Numb, you feel each swing of the hammer. It's like Palahniuk meets Steinbeck in a lion cage. They sit, have coffee, and play chicken with a pairing knife. You are wondering who is going to lose a finger and if the other will sew it back on. The read is refreshing and real, and I can honestly say I can't wait for his next book.

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