Cleveland Noir, edited by Michael Ruhlman and Miesha Wilson Headen, is the latest in the long line of dark short story collections from Akashic Books. As in past collections, the selected authors are all from the title city, and they still live in, or have close connections, there. What makes Cleveland Noir a little different is that eleven of the collection's fifteen stories are written by women, only four by men. Women have been writing in the noire genre as long as it has existed, of course, but their work completely dominates this particular collection. A bigger surprise here is that the darkest and most violent stories, especially those about female victims, are stories authored by women.
Among my favorite stories in Cleveland Noir are Susan Petrone's "The Silent Partner," Dana McSwain's "Bus Stop," D.M. Pulley's "Tremonster," and Daniel Stashower's "Lenny, but Not Corky." The Petrone story uses the real life 1920 death on the baseball field of Ray Chapman to explore what might still happen today if some enterprising reporter were to delve too deeply into the tragedy. Was it an accidental beaning or was it murder? One reporter is determined to find out.
McSwain's "Bus Stop" is about a man who sees dead people, specifically young women who meet with him on the anniversary of their deaths to offer a little more information about what happened to them. Is there a serial killer still out there, and is it all starting to make too much sense to ignore?
Pulley's "Tremonster" is about a neighborhood monster who preys on young women without much concern that the Cleveland police will spend a lot of time trying to solve the murders of the young women he chooses. The suspense builds slowly but steadily all the way up to the story's climactic ending.
"Lenny, but Not Corky" by Daniel Stashower is a fun story about ego and how it affects a 73-year-old man who still believes that he earned a bigger reputation than the one Cleveland music fans grant him. What happens when a reporter interviews him almost fifty years after his limited impact on the Cleveland music scene has largely been forgotten, surprises both of them.
Cleveland Noir is one of the most consistently good collection of short stories I've read in the Akashic series, and I've read near twenty of them now. Fans of really dark crime fiction will enjoy it, and it will serve as a good introduction to readers not overly familiar with the noir genre already.
This is a good collection, Tracy, but like all compilations the story quality can vary greatly from one to the other. In order to get a feel for a collection of stories, I usually rate each one separately and then average them to get a feel for the entire book itself. I don't always rate the book based entirely on the average but it helps me compare it to other similar collections. This one had more 5-star stories than average, but it also had the only 0-star story I remember ever encountering anywhere. With fifteen different writers - and fifteen very different people - that's going to happen.
ReplyDeleteThese collections are probably not for me, but I thought the name Micheal Ruhlman sounded familiar. He's a Cleveland-born writer... mostly about foodie topics. I enjoyed his book Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America. Looking over his other titles, I've found a couple more for my wishlist! Thanks.
ReplyDeleteRuhlman, as does the other editor, has a story in the collection, too. That's the way all of the Akashic collections are done, I think. It wasn't among my top four, but it was complicated enough that I looked forward to seeing if I had guessed correctly about where it was heading. Sadly, because that was the predictable ending, I was right.
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