Columbus Noir

Edited by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Akashic Books     2020

284 pages     Noir/Short Stories

Columbus, Ohio, is a city that I know fairly well. My son, his wife, and my grandchildren lived there for several years when the children were young, and I currently have a niece and a nephew who live there, as well. So, the neighborhoods are familiar to me—especially German Village, which houses The Book Loft, one of the largest independent bookstores in the country.

Thus, I approached Columbus Noir, the new edition of the Akashic’s noir series with anticipation. The introduction was very appealing. The book’s editor is a journalist and author, and I really enjoyed his introduction to the idea of the ordinariness of Columbus, a concept that apparently no longer exists. He says, “Those who consider the old Columbus a comfy couch conveniently ignore the guns and knives that were hidden under the pillows.”

The collection contains 14 stories from 14 authors, including Welsh-Huggins. While the stories range in both content and quality, the most common aspects are sex and greed. Of course, some of the stories take place at Ohio State University, the pride of the state and the arch nemesis of the University of Michigan. Two of the stories introduce the reader to The Satin Fox, which must be a notorious strip club.

A story by Daniel Best is a great introduction to the well-known Short North neighborhood, and Welsh-Huggins story concerns the governor and his security guard/driver. The governor is on the short list to be Vice President, and his philandering must be covered up. A great story, by the way.

There is a very good interview with Welsh-Huggins in the Columbus Monthly. About Columbus as a setting for noir fiction, Welsh-Huggins says, “Columbus is the perfect noir package. On the ‘good’ side we have iconic neighborhoods, a diverse population, a strong economy and all our foodie and arts and fashion trend-setting. On the ‘bad’ side we struggle with opioids, street violence and political corruption. To top it off, we have a chip on our shoulders after decades of being looked down upon as ‘Cowtown,’ which sometimes makes us overeager to reach for the stars, with all the light and dark consequences of such striving.”

It's been my pleasure to review several of the Akashic Noir books over the past couple of years, and I have several more coming up. I like them because I am so curious as to the variety of interpretations of the term “noir, “ the variety of settings, and the vast numbers of authors who have contributed.

Here are some of my reviews: Montana Noir, Nairobi Noir, Vancouver Noir, Milwaukee Noir.

Real Life

by Adeline Dieudonné

Translated by Roland Glasser

World Editions    2020

234 pages     Literary

A coming-of-age story about an abusive father, an abused mother, and a protective big sister trying to save her little brother suffering from PTSD after a horrifying tragedy. This is the debut novel from Belgian author, Dieudonné, translated into English after winning several awards in Europe.

The narrator is the young girl who begins the tale at about age 10 and ends when she commits an unspeakable crime at about age 16. The two young children see the ice cream man die in an accident, and Sam, who is about 5 at the time, has a terrible time recovering from the trauma. He retreats to their father's trophy room, which is filled with the spoils of all his hunting trips. It is supposed to be off-limits for the children, and they are both a bit afraid of the room's contents, particularly the hyena. The girl, who remains unnamed, tries to invent a time machine ala "Back to the Future" to whisk the two of them back to the time before the accident, so that Sam can grow up unscarred. Her interest in time travel leads her to a major interest in Physics, and we see the depth of her intelligence.

The narrator is able to describe her life in great and beautiful detail. For example, this is her description of her entry into middle school: "The boys began to chase the girls and the girls played at being women. This whole little world was in effervescence, completely absorbed in the great hormonal muddle. Each person sported the proof of their admission to puberty like a trophy." Sometimes I felt that perhaps her thoughts, her musings, and her observations were way too mature for her purported age, but I enjoyed the brilliance of the writing none-the-less.

This is the third or fourth book I have read recently about parents not being responsible for their children, i.e. the abandonment in The Dutch House and the escape in This Tender Land. One begins to believe that all children suffer greatly in childhood. Even my childhood favorite, The Secret Garden, is about two children treated badly. Real Life is perhaps an extreme example of childhood mistreatment, so that readers who are sensitive to childhood trauma may find this a hard read.

The Kirkus review closes with this analysis: "Dieudonné's startling debut tackles dark themes with grace, wit, and sincerity."  The reviewer calls it “furiously tender.” It will be interesting to see how the author’s career develops. I hope she will be able to move beyond childhood trauma as a theme.

Nobody's Looking at You

By Janet Malcolm

Farrar, Straus and Giroux     2019

289 pages     Essays

I was drawn to Janet Malcolm’s book of essays by its cover. I happened to see the cover and I did a double-take. I know that woman! The picture shows a young woman in ultra-high heels, a dress that hardly covers her body, and a cigarette hanging from her mouth as she sits at a grand piano. She is Yuja Wang, a world-renowned pianist. As a teenager, she was named the Gilmore Young Artist and came to Kalamazoo to perform at the 2006 Gilmore International Keyboard Festival. My volunteer job for that festival was to drive her around, offer her a practice space at my house, and listen to her talk. I have a lot of stories I could tell!

Malcolm’s essay about Wang of course discusses her clothes as well as her career. In this essay, Malcolm helps us to understand this brilliant musician—writing in an impressive style that helps the reader to realize that she is not just any writer; Malcolm tries to really know her subject. Not many musicians would tell their interviewer: “Mozart is like a party animal. I find I play him better when I am hung over or drunk.” I loved what Malcolm did with her interview of Yuja Wang—it was almost like I was with that crazy young woman again.

Each of the interviews in the book has that kind of intimacy. Malcolm really knows her subjects. The title of the book comes from her article about the clothier Eileen Fisher, who told her that her mother emphasized to her that “nobody’s looking at you,” and that she had spent her life trying to hide in plain sight.

Another essay is about a New York antiquarian book store called Argosy and the three sisters, now all in their seventies, who have run the book store since the early nineties. These charming women took over the business from their father, and Malcolm does a deep dive into the antique book business by spending a considerable amount of time with the sisters. While I was reading this essay, I happened upon an article about a movie about the antique book business, and the Argosy bookstore is going to be in the movie. Called The Booksellers, the promo says that the movie will "takes viewers inside their small but fascinating world, populated by an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers."

Then there is the long and important essay about Rachel Maddow, which I really loved because I watch Maddow several times a week. I think she is brilliant, and Malcolm is equally brilliant about how she gets inside Maddow’s mind and heart.

Nobody’s Looking at You  was the first book by Janet Malcolm that I had read, although I had read several of her essays in the New Yorker. All of the fourteen essays in the book have appeared in other publications. I was so impressed by how she interjected herself into all the stories, making her a very revealing author. She has really lived these interviews—they were not a chore, but they were the “substance of a lived life,” in the words of the New York Times book reviewer.

A View from the Borderline

By Charles Souby

Self-Published     2020

223 pages     Short Stories

A View from the Borderline serves as my introduction to the author Charles Souby. Each story in the volume  is unique, in part because the characters that fill the stories are unique. They are on the “borderline” of normal—some are not normal at all—that is if we have a common understanding of what the word “normal” means. The publicist who sent me the book acknowledges that  the characters range from “quirky to deranged.” I found the characters fascinating—some of them I might actually know. I am curious about his other published books; are all those characters as quirky?

Leonard is a person who can’t stop gambling but is so easily distracted by women that he can’t win. Meet Cindy, who  is a new receptionist at a law firm and decides to interview a potential client, with absolutely no experience, and has a great time doing it. “She wondered if her best years lay ahead or if they were where she was right now.” Or Otto who is struggling to find the right woman and has a successful first date with a woman who has “naughty” eyes. She is attracted to him as well. She tells him, “I like your mind, Otto. I like how you think.” He responds, “Really?” And I love her response: “Yeah, most guys are just a firewall of unexamined agenda.”

Well, I could go on and on describing terrific characters. My favorite story, however, has little to do with humans, and everything to do with antelope in the Serengeti. After a chance meeting with a young American savant, a herd of antelope decide to take charge of their lives, and operate in a way that keeps them from being part of the lions’ diet. In the end they create an autocracy. “Despite the daily struggles to make ends meet and a regular fear of both criminal violence and police abuse, it was a decent life for the average antelope on the Serengeti. They soon forgot about their primitive past and became fully adapted to a life of industry and productive growth.”

It caused me to remember my own trip to the Serengeti, when we watched a herd of antelope alertly listening to the frantic calls of some birds. The birds were warning the antelope of the imminent arrival of lions. It was fascinating to watch the birds turn the antelope in the opposite direction, and the antelope then ran away to safety. Perhaps they were the same herd that Souby was writing about.

Each story is short and totally unique. A View from the Borderline was a very fun book choice.

Charles Souby website.

Nairobi Noir

Edited by Peter Kimani

Akashic Books     2020

256 pages     Noir Short Stories

The newest Noir short story collection by Akashic Books is published today. Nairobi Noir has three parts: The Hunters, The Hunted, the Herders. Each story in each section takes place in a unique area of the city. 

Kimani is quite a well-known African author, who obviously knows Nairobi intimately, and after I read his story “Blood Sister,” I realized that he was the perfect person to edit the book.

The introduction to Nairobi Noir is especially impressive. Kimani calls it “Concrete Jungle.” He says that in Nairobi, “traffic jams are so bad, even lions come out of the wild to marvel at the snarl-ups. This is no exaggeration; Nairobi is the only city with a game park, and the kings of the wild occasionally stray on major city highways to kill boredom. . .” It is one of the most unequal cities in the world, and the stories in the collection expose that huge inequality.

The first story is called “She Dug Two Graves” by Winfred Kiunga, and it is absolutely heartbreaking in its rawness. A young man in the Muslim neighborhood is killed, and his sister, Fawzia, is heartbroken. Somali refugees, the two young adults had shared a home, and Fawzia had helped to raise her brother. Ahmed was just one less Somali Muslim that the Nairobi police have to deal with, but there are a group of terrorists, with revenge on their hearts, who seek to enlist Fawzia to their cause. The results are painful to read as Fawzia seeks vengeance on the deputy Police Commissioner.

The ending of the story “Number Sita” by Kevin Mwachiro is particularly poignant, when the lives of some young men living communally are saved from the police by a group of women who place their bodies over the prostrate bodies of their sons and neighbors.

On the other hand, the story by Kimani called “Blood Sister” is a delight. Bobo, or Bob, is a swaggery young guy in the hood neighborhood called Karen. The reader can instantly recognize the type. Told in the first person, we see how Bobo goes about impressing the neighborhood and impressing the outsiders who come to document the activities of the neighborhood. Two women, one old and one young, are sufficiently impressed with Bobo that they call upon him to help with their efforts. The older woman is up front with what she needs from him, while the young woman hides her purposes. Is the story traditional noir? Probably not, but it is a fascinating story.

Nairobi Noir follows the highly successful Akashic formula, which focuses on one city per book. I have read and loved several previous books, including Montana Noir, Vancouver Noir, Lagos Noir, and Milwaukee Noir. To show you the quality of the stories in the Noir series, one story “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” from the Milwaukee Noir collection just won a special recognition from the Edgar Awards for 2020. I have five more books on my pile, Tampa Bay Noir, Alabama Noir, Berkley Noir, Columbus Noir and Santa Fe Noir. Can’t wait to delve into all of them.