San Francisco Noir (Akashic Noir)

David Henry Sterry Goodreads Author. Brand new stories by: San Francisco Noir lashes out with hard-biting, all-original tales exploring the shadowy nether regions of sce Brand new stories by: San Francisco Noir lashes out with hard-biting, all-original tales exploring the shadowy nether regions of scenic "Baghdad by the Bay.

From inner city boroughs to the outlands, each contributor offers an original story based in a distinct neighborhood. At times brutal, darkly humorous, and revelatory--the stories speak of a hidden San Francisco, a town where the fog is but a prelude to darker realities lingering beneath.

Here the city becomes the central character, the strongest on the page. There's enough here to cause us to want more. Luring you deep into the criminal heritage of your own backyard, each piece of the collection transcends the traditional elements of noir and helps redefine the moody genre. As the bodies drop in the strong stories here, steep, fog-wrapped, fratricidal San Francisco comes alive: These top writers are of the 'As bad as it gets' brand, and then worse. Paperback , pages.

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Lists with This Book. Apr 12, Andrea rated it really liked it. This collection had a lot of authors that I like in it. There were a few duds but overall it was good. I especially liked the Michelle Tea story. Oct 27, Audrey rated it really liked it Shelves: Of them, a majority are good. Six are very good and three are balls-out fantastic, gamechangers that make you look at short stories entirely differently ever afterward: Three are just so-so and three are terrible. That's a pretty good ratio for an anthology and San Francisco looms large in all of them.

Solid, bleak 15 black beauties set in the city by the bay. Solid, bleak and psychedelic entry in the series. Jun 24, Rachel rated it it was ok. A disappointing read - I mainly stuck with it because I bought it in SF on honeymoon. There are a small number of good stories here, but lots of the authors seem to think "noir" just means "gritty, with a side of sexual exploitation".

Noir is one of my favourite genres, so this was rather disappointing. Noir is hard to define, but this treats it just as a style, I think, resulting in stories that by and large lack any emotional punch. Sep 09, Shawn rated it liked it Shelves: Basic remit - crime stories taking place in [city x: I say a little bit more about the set-up in my intro to the review of Brooklyn Noir. It's funny how many parameters one can apply to a critique of this series. If you know the city featured, you can say "does it remind me of there? You can ask, "does this work as a crime story?

Sometimes, you can even ask, "was that a story at all? There's also the question - is there a presumption that these should be set in the present? Ideas and concepts of the city loom large in the popular culture, even for someone like me, who's never been. This portends good things. And there are some good stories here, although we'll start, as usual, with the dregs. Barry Gifford 's "After Hours at La Chinita" features a sordid shooting of a singing star in a sleazy hotel late one night in Then all the dead characters argue about the truth of what we just read.

Some might think this Rashomon -styled story is profound, I just found it silly. I can't tell if I really hated "The Neutral Zone" by Kate Braverman or just really disliked the characters and the prose style - two female acquaintances one predatorily wealthy, one less so hook-up every once in a while to "be bad" together because they shared an emotionally damaging adolescence. Unfortunately, they speak in GILMORE GIRLS postmodernese and while that may be true to life, it sure doesn't make me want to slap their smug, over-privileged faces any less oh, but wait, they grew up in poverty, or maybe just lower middle class, so it's okay for them to be terminally disaffected What there is, in this book, is a lot of "just okay" kinda stories, a good set-up that ends up botched, or a promising character that wanders around to very little effect.

Still, very "noir" in its own way. Set in the early 70's, the story is interesting as an exploration of a particular mindset Communist at a particular moment in time, although despite a lot of traveling to Red China, no less the story didn't seem to have much narrative drive. Michelle Tea 's "Larry's Place" is well written and a solid sketch of a hillside neighborhood in which the main character, a high-priced call girl, lives. There's a break-in, a robbery and an accidental death and some very sharp character stuff, but it also ends a bit oddly. Not bad, not great - solid pulp, I'd guess.

Some of these stories seem more like scene sketches or character outlines. It's scuzzy and seedy and authentic, but not much of a story. It's very short, and again pretty much just a character outline in search of a story, but the writing is sharp and jagged and the story is almost non-stop violence. I also liked "Double Espresso" by Sin Soracco although some reviewers didn't, it seems.

A "working homeless" very San Fran woman, an ex-con, escapes from the city to the rustic burbs for a few days, hooking up with an old friend, meeting other ex-cons and homeless people and getting into or witnessing a fight or two. Not much in the way of story, but its got a nice redemptive chord to it that's more striking when laid against the lives of desperation these characters inhabit. Will Christopher Baer writes a tense little thriller scenario in "Deception of the Thrush", in which a street-wise pickpocket is trapped by a killer.

It might not scream "San Francisco", per se, but it kept me reading with its character detail and real-life, clock-ticking suspense. Eddie Muller delivers a great set-up and a nicely amoral punchline in "Kid's Last Fight", in which an aging, punchy ex-boxer rescues a woman from a deliberately horrible assault, but only the reader knows that life isn't ever fair. For some reason, I saw Willem Defoe in my mind the whole time. This is a thick spread of nice pulp full of vivid characters and great details it's set in an area of the city where a lot of the skin trade happens, Polk Gulch, which lies between Knob Hill and the Tenderloin, so we're told its nickname is "the Tender Knob"!

It doesn't say much but stays very entertaining while not saying it. Finally, while some seemed disappointed by veteran crime writer Jim Nisbet 's "Weight Less Than Shadow" and that's understandable, there's barely a crime in it , his oddly futuristic take on how San Francisco solves the Golden Gate Bridge suicide jumper problem is very clever and, yes, kind of dark. The book opens with the other strong story, "The Prison" by Domenic Stansberry , in which the post-WWII riots at Alcatraz serve as a symbolic backdrop to one man's return to his roots in the Italian neighborhood, to settle old scores and dig around a bitter piece of American history.

If I had a complaint, there's a needless framing device that places the story as a flashback recollection from modern times, and that undermines the startlingly grim final cliffhanger. Still, it can be avoided. This is some great writing, comparing and contrasting all kinds of earthy, human details. So, in general, I was going to give this a 2, but I honestly think it deserves a 3, the best stories being evened out by the worst and there being just as many solid stories as okay.

Now, on to Chicago Noir! Jun 19, Marni rated it liked it. Noir to me brings up images of Philip Marlowe or some detective in a seedy office waiting for a client. Not gonna find that here. This is a collection of stories all based in neighborhoods of San Francisco which is what attracted me to the book.

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Some of the stories are good; other stories didn't hold my interest. A few were superb. No happy endings here. Jan 17, Alan rated it liked it Shelves: Pretty good collection of hard-boiled stories all set in different neighborhoods in and around SF. Some better than others, some gorier than others.

San Francisco Noir 2

Sep 06, Jarrett rated it really liked it Shelves: Feb 20, Barry rated it it was amazing. Stories may be a bit uneven in terms of quality, but when the quality selections are fantastic. Thoroughly enjoyable read for noir fans and sf history geeks alike. May 17, Katherine Long rated it really liked it Shelves: Read on a recommendation. Like all short story collections, there were some I did not like at all and some I loved.

That's where San Francisco Noir comes in. Upcoming Noir Series are planned spotlighting Washington, D. Any truly big city, locals can tell you, is really just a collection of smaller cities jammed together. San Francisco Noir is organized and sequenced on this principle, each story subtitled with a particular neighborhood or district. Akashic recruits local writers for these collections, and the stories all trade heavily on a specific and authentic sense of place. If you've ever lived in San Francisco, or have spent enough time there otherwise, then San Francisco Noir opens up -- flowers, even -- in a marvelously intimate way.

That's the real strength of the book -- and the series as a whole, I would expect. I don't know about Brooklyn or Havana, but I do know about San Francisco -- for several years I kicked around that amazing city and fell completely in love. Dumped my car, walked everywhere, and read everything I could get my hands on about the history of the place.

I'd be there still if it were at all possible to afford. San Francisco is the place to be if you want to see the disappearance of the American middle class happen right in front of your eyes. San Francisco Noir is like a drunken trip down the nightmare alleys just off Memory Lane.

• San Francisco Noir?
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• Singapore Noir (Akashic Noir).

David Corbett's "It Can Happen" chronicles the traditional double-crosses between haves and have-nots in Hunter's Point. These first stories are the most straightforward and plot-driven of the collection, and make for a good easing-in. Alvin Lu's "Chinatown" is steeped in the radical politics of s counterculture, when a young man might find Huey Newton and Chairman Mao both laying claim to his soul.

The real rough trade comes in the last section, titled with grim irony "Flowers of Romance. David Henry Sterry's "Confessions of a Sex Maniac" concludes the book with a tour of the city's notorious Polk Gulch, and it can be said unequivocally that the story is accurately titled. In the end, it's the more restrained and heady stuff that lingers: Lu's "Chinatown" is the collection's true highlight, with its noir-framed examination of a specific time and place in America's history of cultural spasms.

On the other end of the scale is Robert Mailer Anderson's "Briley Boy," little more than a skillful prose poem of blood and rotten sex that could be just as easily set in Cleveland or Cairo -- hard to know what it's doing here at all. And it's here that a critical distinction can be made, in terms of evaluating just how much fun this book really is. Because, in the end, it really is about fun; if you're into hard-boiled genre fiction, you already know what you're looking for.

Singapore Noir (Akashic Noir) - San Francisco Book Review

These stories are noir-ish all right, every last one of them. But they're also essentially pulp fiction, heavy on atmosphere and style, disinterested in much else. And that's, you know, perfectly okay. Fans of the genre will be satisfied -- the collection is strong overall, and suitably eclectic relative to its stated milieu.

A few of the stories successfully test the elasticity of the noir tag, and nothing here truly sucks. The fun is in the details, and San Franciscans past and present will get the most out of the tour. Juno-winning Canadian songwriter Dan Mangan's love of his influences and peers has lead him to craft something quite joyous: