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More About This Book

Overview

Fiction. Edited by Dennis Lehane. In keeping with the Akashic Noir Series tradition, each story in BOSTON NOIR is set in a different neighborhood of the city; the impressively diverse collection extends from Roxbury to Cambridge, from Southie to the Boston Harbor; and all stops in between. Brand new stories by Dennis Lehane, Stewart O'Nan, Patricia Powell, John Dufresne, Lynne Heitman, Don Lee, Russ Aborn, Itabari Njeri, Jim Fusilli, Brendan DuBois, and Dana Cameron

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In the best of the 11 stories in this outstanding entry in Akashic's noir series, characters, plot and setting feed off each other like flames and an arsonist's accelerant. These include Lehane's own “Animal Rescue,” about a killing resulting from a lost and contested pit bull; John Dufresne's “The Cross-Eyed Bear,” in which a pedophile priest is caught between the icy representative of the archdiocese and one of his now adult victims; and Don Lee's “The Oriental Hair Poets,” which charts a literary feud that escalates into a police case. Two populations that define the city for outsiders—the elite WASP “Brahmins” and the hundreds of thousands of college students surging through to earn their degrees—appear only in passing. While Lehane expresses the fear in his introduction that Boston is becoming “beiger,” less tribal and gritty and more gentrified and homogenized, this anthology shows that noir can thrive where Raymond Chandler has never set foot. (Nov.)

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781933354910
  • Publisher: Akashic Books
  • Publication date: 11/1/2009
  • Pages: 270
  • Sales rank: 214,441
  • Series: Akashic Noir Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.20 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane is the author of the New York Times bestseller Mystic River; Prayers for Rain; Gone, Baby, Gone; Sacred; Darkness, Take My Hand; A Drink Before the War, which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel; and, most recently, The Given Day. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, he splits his time between the Boston area and Florida.

Biography

Dennis Lehane knows Boston like the back of his hand. Born and raised in Beantown, he left to attend college and graduate school in Florida, but -- like a homing pigeon -- he returned soon thereafter. In order to support himself while he focused on his writing, he took a number of odd jobs that included counseling mentally handicapped and abused children, loading trucks, parking cars, working in bookstores, and waiting tables.

While he was still in college, he wrote the first draft of A Drink Before the War. Published in 1994, this Shamus Award winner introduced Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, private investigators who live and work in Dorchester, the same blue-collar Boston neighborhood Lehane grew up in. Since their compelling debut, Kenzie and Gennaro have gone on to star in a gritty crime noir series acclaimed by readers and critics alike.

The idea for his breakout novel , 2001's stand-alone thriller Mystic River, came to Lehane while he was still writing the Kenzie-Genarro installment Prayers for Rain. The story of three childhood friends who share a dark past, Mystic River is a murder mystery with powerful psychological overtones. An immediate sensation, the book achieved blockbuster status when Clint Eastwood turned it into an award-winning film in 2003. Then, in his 2007 directorial debut, Ben Affleck adapted Lehane's favorite Kenzie-Gennaro novel, Gone, Baby, Gone, for the big screen.

Lehane's career shows no signs of slowing down, Since the success of his Boston-based mysteries, he has broadened his oeuvre to include television screenplays and short stories -- one of which, "Until Gwen," was adopted into a successful, limited-run play.

Good To Know

Some interesting outtakes from our interview with Lehane:

"My favorite job was parking cars."

"My favorite game is pool."

"I have an obsession with the color blue -- blue house, blue car, lots of blue shirts."

"I love good writing. Unequivocally. I think competition between writers is wonderful and healthy, but I never understood envy. When a peer writes a book that I know I couldn't have written, I feel the strangest elation because at this point I learn as much if not more from my peers as I do from the old masters."

"I unwind to Red Sox games and am a Patriots season ticket holder. The worst months of every year are February and March -- no baseball, no football, no point."

    1. Hometown:
      Boston, Massachusetts
    1. Date of Birth:
      August 4, 1965
    2. Place of Birth:
      Dorchester, Massachusetts
    1. Education:
      B.A., Eckerd College, 1988; M.F.A., Florida International University, 1993
    2. Website:
      http://www.dennislehanebooks.com

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................17
Lynne Heitman Exit Interview Financial District....................38
Dennis Lehane Animal Rescue Dorchester....................65
Jim Fusilli The Place Where He Belongs Beacon Hill....................77
Patricia Powell Dark Waters Watertown....................95
Dana Cameron Femme Sole North End....................116
Brendan DuBois The Dark Island Boston Harbor....................137
Stewart O'Nan The Reward Brookline....................147
John Dufresne The Cross-Eyed Bear Southie....................175
Don Lee The Oriental Hair Poets Cambridge....................195
Itabari Njeri The Collar Roxbury....................212
Russ Aborn Turn Speed North Quincy....................238

First Chapter

Boston Noir

Akashic Books

Copyright © 2009 Akashic Books
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-933354-91-0

Introduction

Tribalism & Knuckleheads

No matter what you may hear to the contrary, noir is not a genre defined by fedoras, silver streams of cigarette smoke, vampy femme fatales, huge whitewall tires, mournful jazz playing in the gloomy background, and lots and lots of shadows. Nor is it simply skuzzy people doing skuzzy things to other skuzzy people, a kind of trailer park opera. One could argue that what it is, however, is working-class tragedy. Aristotle, when he defined tragedy, mandated that a tragic hero must fall from a great height, but Aristotle never imagined the kind of roadside motels James M. Cain could conjure up or saw the smokestacks rise in the Northern English industrial hell of Ted Lewis's Get Carter. In Shakespeare, tragic heroes fall from mountaintops; in noir, they fall from curbs. Tragic heroes die in a blaze of their own ill-advised conflation. Noir heroes die clutching fences or crumpled in trunks or, in the case of poor Eddie Coyle, they simply doze off drunkenly in a car and take one in the back of the head before they have a chance to wake up again. No wise final words, no music swelling on the soundtrack.

Eddie Coyle is a good example here because if there's a more seminal noir novel of the last forty years than The Friends of Eddie Coyle, I don't know of it. And more than just being a seminal noir, it's also the quintessential Boston novel. It captures the tribalism of the city, the fatalism of it, and the outsized humor of people who believe God likes a good laugh, usually at your expense. Boston is a city that produces guys-or, in the city's vernacular, knuckleheads-who once stole the replica of a cow that sat in front of a Braintree steak house. The cow weighed what a car weighed, and yet these knuckleheads had the industry to get it onto a pickup truck, drive it back to South Boston, and deposit it in the middle of Broadway. They did this solely so they could then call the Boston Police Department and ask them to respond to a "beef going down on Broadway."

In Boston something doesn't simply hurt, it hurts "like a bastid." Pisser is a noun that means something funny, but pissa is an adjective (and sometimes an adverb) that equates unequivocal greatness, although it's often equivocated with wicked, as in, "Big Papi hit a wicked pissa homa against the Yankees. Musta hurt them like a bastid."

So we have our distinct humor and our distinct accent and our distinct vocabulary. All of which-sadly, possibly-is now endangered by progress. Because one can't ignore that Boston has been beset by a new class war of late, one you'll see reflected in the stories herein. It's a war of gentrification. As the city continues to lose its old-school parochialism and overt immigrant tribalism, it's also losing a lot of its character. Whether that's a bad thing or a good thing is up for debate, but what can't be argued is that it is, in fact, happening. South Boston is no longer dominated by buzz cuts and bar brawls; these days, Charlestown's only "code of silence" pertains to failing to tell people about a new restaurant on Warren Street because you don't want to have to start waiting for a table. The Italian tongues of the North End are being phased out by voices questioning why there's no Crate & Barrel beside the Paul Revere House. It's a less violent city now than it ever was, but a beiger one too. I have no doubt the old Boston will rear its head with pride and fury for a long time to come, but I admit to feeling loss when I walk through Kenmore Square these days and see only a kind of soft-rock version of what it used to be. That's the paradox of the new Boston-what's lost has, in many cases, been taken; what's left is what people can't sell. Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times, so the changing times instead roll over them.

Often a noir hero or antihero doesn't die from being rolled over. But he might prefer he had. The Machine frequently leaves him crushed, attenuated, castrated. No art form that I know of rages against the machine more violently than noir. Hip-hop, arguably, but noir refuses to indulge in hip-hop delusions of grandeur or self-aggrandizement. Noir rages without much hope, certainly without romanticism or wish fulfillment.

But Boston gives noir the strain of humor you never expect, which comes at you from directions you could never predict. The guys who placed that stolen cow in the middle of Broadway would fit perfectly in the pages you're about to read. The journey ranges from a pitch-black discourse on sin in John Dufresne's "The Cross-Eyed Bear" to a haplessly absurd kidnapper in Jim Fusilli's "The Place Where He Belongs," from the deliciously strange relationship between a black divorcée and a white escaped convict in Patricia Powell's "Dark Waters" to Don Lee's chilling meditation on questions of identity and self in "The Oriental Hair Poets," to a carload of knucklehead armed robbers tooling around North Quincy in Russ Aborn's "Turn Speed." And those are just half of the wonderful stories in this collection.

One of the recurrent themes of noir has always been the search for home. Not home in the physical sense-though that does happen-but in the irrational, emotional sense. The heroes and heroines of noir are usually chasing something they couldn't hold even if they caught up to it. Some part of them understands the futility of this chase even as another part clings to the need for it. This is probably why, if only to alleviate the pain of waiting, they chase something else in the meantime-a lover, a bank job, the murder of an inconvenient spouse. Yet the home being searched for in these pages might be Boston, and the journey to find it-however fruitless that goal may turn out to be-is as rich and varied, as hilarious and sad, and ultimately as engaging as the city itself.

Dennis Lehane Boston, MA July 2009

(Continues...)


Excerpted from Boston Noir Copyright © 2009 by Akashic Books. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 23 Customer Reviews

  • Posted April 28, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Boston's vanishing history

    A collection of eleven short stories set in Boston's neighborhoods display a good grasp not only of noir style storytelling, but also of Boston's fast vanishing uniqueness. The local toughs aka knuckleheads; our colloquialisms 'wicked pissah' and the neighborhood family feel all almost lost to progress thru gentrification.

    Edited by native resident Dennis Lehane, who also contributes a story, the stories seem reminiscent of an earlier time, capturing local Boston in all her glory. My favorites include Lehane's 'Animal Rescue'; Patricia Powell's 'Dark Waters'; Dana Cameron's 'Femme Sole'; Brendan Dubois' ' The Dark Island'; John Dufresne's Cross Eyed Bear' and Russ Aborn's 'Turn Speed'. Which will yours be? Read and be pleasurably entertained!

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted September 27, 2010

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    Perfect for curling up on a rainy day with a nice cup of tea

    Especially love the first story. Very different from Lynne Heitman's four novels about the airline industry's shenanigans. It's raining outside and getting colder. Hope I can make this book last.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

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