Palm Springs Noir

 Edited by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Akashic     2021

293 pages     Noir

I was at loose ends on Monday after a busy holiday prep weekend. I picked up Palm Springs Noir, knowing  that I would be entertained and enlightened about a city that I had been to several years ago. What I remembered best about the Palm Springs experience were the fields of wind turbines in the valley. Those wind turbines show up frequently in the short stories in the book, but apparently I didn’t have the same kind of Palm Springs experience that the characters in these stories had. I may have to go back.

In her introduction, DeMarco-Barret defines noir thus: “In noir, the main characters might want their lives to improve and may have high aspirations and goals, but they keep making bad choices and things go from bad to worse.” She goes on: “In noir, characters follow the highway to doom and destruction. They are haunted by the past, and the line between black and white, right and wrong, dissolves like sugar in water. The hero rationalizes why it’s ok to do whatever dark thing they are about to do.”

DeMarco-Barrett used that definition as she selected the stories to go into this volume of noir. The stories are just as sleezy as you might expect in a book of noir fiction, but the reader also experiences a lot of suspense and darkness. There are references to famous stars that have lived in the area and includes the music of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Through the stories we visit the places the tourist knows, like the golf courses and the pools, the mountains and the desert. My favorite place, Joshua Tree, however is spoiled by homicide, and a beautiful pool by a drowning. DeMarco-Barrett’s story concerns a brother who drowned in a mother’s pool. Could the sister have caused the drowning?

There are fourteen stories by several well-known Southern California authors. They are pure naughtiness happening in one of America’s most beautiful places. As steamy as the air. A great review in the NY Journal of Books.

I have written extensively over the years about the Akashic series of more than 100 noir books in settings all over the world. You might also like to read my description of noir and neo-noir literature. You can find it here. Stay tuned for the February arrival of Paris Noir: The Suburbs, which I will review the next time I have a day of loose ends.

The Sentence

 By Louise Erdrich

Harper     2021

400 pages     Literary

Louise Erdrich owns the bookstore Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, which specializes in indigenous materials. Her newest novel takes place in that bookstore, and the major protagonist is Tookie, a bookseller at the store. Louise, herself, makes an appearance as well as a ghost named Flora, who haunts Tookie every day at the store.

The first half of the book is a delight. We learn about how Tookie, an indigenous woman, makes a very stupid move and ends up in prison for ten years. She reads everything she can get her hands on while she is in prison, and when she gets released, she gets a job at Louise’s bookstore. She is really intimidating looking with black eyeliner, black stompers, a nose ring and eyebrow cuff. She says, “Who would dare not buy a book from me?”

Tookie is quite an incredible woman, and the reader is totally drawn to her. Her marriage to Pollux has its ups and downs. He was the tribal policeman who was involved in her arrest. He  says, “You could be anything. You make my brain boil. You make my heart flip over. Twist in a knot. It’s like you never learned that our choices get us where we are.” But when she reaches out her arms to meet his—he slaps handcuffs on her and arrests her. When she is released from prison, they meet again, fall in love and get married.

Life improves for Tookie and the reader is drawn into her brilliance as a bookseller, as a wife, and as a stepmother/grandmother to Pollux’s daughter and her baby. But then the pandemic hits followed by the murder of George Floyd, just down the street from the bookstore. The tone of the book changes, and the reader is caught with the ferocity of life in Minneapolis as it is engulfed in protests. Everyone is scared; everyone is worried, and the air around the bookstore is filled with tear gas.

The bookstore has closed because of the pandemic and the protests, so Tookie spends a great deal of time alone in the store, pulling books from the shelves for online orders.  “Everyone who wasn’t out on the streets wanted to read about why everyone else was out on the streets.”  Oh—and Tookie spends a great deal of time fending off Flora, the ghost, who is bound and determined to inhabit Tookie’s body, mind, and spirit. Flora plays an pivotal role in the plot so I won’t go into more details about her. The reviewer in the Washington Post says that “The novel’s ectoplasm hovers between the realms of historical horror and cultural comedy.”

Interspersed with the crazy plot is the world of books and bookstores. Tookie really knows her books and is able to pick the perfect book for her customers. Titles of books are everywhere in the text—so much so, that there is a bibliography at the end of the book. Tookie also consults a dictionary frequently, and the book begins and ends with her defining her word of the day.

There is so much going on in The Sentence that I hesitate to go much further. I was entranced with a chapter about a dinner party where the conversation is about wild rice—a conversation that could only happen in Minnesota. I laughed aloud because I had cooked a wild rice casserole for Thanksgiving and I had trouble softening the wild rice, a problem that the wild rice chapter was able to solve for me.

Additionally, the narration about the protests after the George Floyd murder was compelling and profound. Obviously the author had witnessed the mayhem firsthand. I read those chapters with great attention. My niece, Cory, had been involved in the protests as a medic, and I could almost find her on the streets with Tookie’s coworker and Tookie’s husband. Spellbinding.

Louise Erdrich is one of America’s best authors. Her recent book, The Night Watchman, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, and I read and reviewed The Round House in  2013. She has the unique ability to weave indigenous wisdom and history with modern sensibility. One reviewer has said, "Novelists who can create vivid, plausible, living characters are rare, but novelists who also can create a believable world and a compelling story for those characters are blessed. Louise Erdrich is blessed."

Here is a terrific review of The Sentence in the New York Times. Next time I am in Minneapolis, I am going to be sure to visit Erdrich’s store, Birchbark Books.