Berkeley Noir

 

Edited by Jerry Thompson & Owen Hill

Akashic     2020

242 pages     Noir

Isn’t Berkeley a nice city, full of wonderful, young, progressive college students? I always thought so, but not so fast. Berkeley Noir exposes the underbelly of this idealized city. As the editors’ say, “Where’s the noir in that perfect view of the Golden Gate, cutting-edge lettuces served in a ghetto dubbed ‘gourmet,’ the parking lot with reserved spaces for Nobel Laureates?” “Grifters? Dames? Cops? In Berkeley?”

There are sixteen stories in Berkeley Noir, but very few of them follow classic “Noir” patterns. One that does is The Law of Local Karma by Susan Dunlap. It is a cop drama with a body, a perp, some cops, and an unsolvable case. Lucky Day by Thomas Burchfield is a neo noir story about a worker at the Berkeley Public Library.

A favorite story is The Tangy Brine of Dark Night by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. In it, a young woman goes out into San Francisco Bay to bury her grandma. She is stopped by the police on the way, with a kayak sticking out of trunk and a dead grandma strapped into the front seat. Another brief but great story is Barroom Butterfly by Barry Gifford in which Roy’s grandfather introduces him to noir fiction. The review in Publisher’s Weekly notes that “Readers will be glad that many of these tales are fun in a way that traditional noir isn’t.” The editor of the book, Jerry Thompson says, “There are no happy endings in noir.”

As you know, I enjoy Akashic’s Noir series. I am currently reading Addis Ababa Noir and Tampa Bay Noir, and will report on them later this week. Join me in some great short stories.

A video interview with Jerry Thompson and Owen Hill.