Venice Noir (Akashic Noir)

by Maxim Jakubowski (Editor), Peter James (Contribution by), Emily St. John Mandel (Contribution by), Barbara Baraldi (Contribution by), Mike Hodges (Contribution by)

Overview

“Drifter” by Emily Mandel was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2013, edited by Otto Penzler and Lisa Scottoline

Original stories by: Peter James, Emily St. John Mandel, Barbara Baraldi, Mike Hodges, Mary Hoffman, Maria Tronca, Matteo Righetto, Tony Cartano, Francesco Ferracin, Isabella Santacroce, Michelle Lovric, Francesca Mazzucato, Maxim Jakubowski, and Michael Gregorio.

"Forget the magnificence of Venice's art, architecture, and music, and delve into this tour of the City of Water's murky depths…visions of a Venice not seen in tourist brochures."
--Publishers Weekly

"Editor Jakubowski does an excellent job of selecting a variety of stories that represent all strata of Venetian life, from tourists visiting for Carnevale to criminals running illegal operations in the bay…A must-read for lovers of Venice…the presence of a new and intriguing voices, many of them Italian, will pique the interest of international-mystery readers."
--Booklist

"Sex, food and real estate inspire 14 hot-blooded new takes on crime in the magical city of Venice...Rather than crimes of passion, this collection focuses on the passion of crime, painting its noir in robust tones rather than gritty gray."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Venice Noir, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, aims to shred through our preconceptions of this remarkable city. The 14 writers featured in this anthology of short stories take our travel brochure images of Venice and scatter them like confetti."
--NY Journal of Books

Maxim Jakubowski is a British editor and writer. Following a long career in book publishing, during which he was responsible for several major crime imprints, he opened London's mystery bookshop Murder One. He reviews crime fiction for the Guardian, runs London's Crime Scene Festival, and is an advisor to Italy's annual Courmayeur Noir in Festival. His latest crime novel is Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer, and he edits the annual Best British Mysteries series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617751189
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	05/29/2012
Series:	Akashic Noir Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	696 KB

About the Author

Maxim Jakubowski is a British writer and editor who has lived in Italy and returns there annually. He co-edited ROME NOIR, with Chiara Stangalino, and has also assembled London and Paris volumes for other publishers. His new novel Ekaterina and the Night is partly set in Venice and his non-fiction book of essays about the real cities of crime fiction Following the Detectives has been shortlisted for the MacAvity Award. He lives in London when not travelling the world.

Read an Excerpt

Venice Noir

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Akashic Books

Copyright © 2012 Akashic Books
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61775-073-1

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Introduction

Slowly Sinking

It's one of the most famous cities in the world.

Immortalized by writers throughout the years, frozen in amber by film and photography, the picturesque survivor of a wild history whose centuries encompass splendor, decay, pestilence, beauty, and never-ending wonders. A city built on water, whose geographical position once almost saw it rule the world and form a vital crossing point between West and East. A city of merchants, artists, glamour, abject poverty, philosophers, corrupt nobles, refugees, courtesans, and unforgettable lovers, buffeted by the tides of wars, a unique place whose architecture is a subtle palette reflecting the successive waves of settlers, invaders, religions, and short-term rulers.

Venice is ever present in the popular imagination, and there is no denying its incomparable visual beauty. The flow of the Grand Canal and its cortege of palazzi, the famous bridges, the thousand and one churches, Piazza San Marco and its pigeons (and annual floods), the glassblowers of Murano, the Doge's Palace, the calm waters of its lagoon, the 117 neighboring islands so full of dark history and legend, the gondolas, carnival time, the markets overflowing with food, fish, jewellery, and trinkets—all images that evoke the beauty and strangeness of Venice in everyone's mind, whether you have been there or not.

They call her La Serenissima, La Dominante, the Queen of the Adriatic, the City of Water, the Floating City, and the City of Canals.

Venice has always been a magnet for writers, and the pilgrimage there has become a necessary rite of passage. An endless list would include, in no particular order of importance or chronological order (somehow chronology is of no importance when it comes to Venice; it is a city to a certain extent frozen in time, poised on a knife edge between the past and the future, where decay is an integral part of the surrounding atmosphere): Thomas Mann, Lord Byron, Daphne du Maurier, D.H. Lawrence, Jan Morris, Patricia Highsmith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Henry James, Goethe, George Sand, Robert Browning, Goldoni, Ruskin, Evelyn Waugh, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, John Berendt, Donna Leon, Tiziano Scarpa, Marcel Proust, Michael Dibdin, Dickens, Joseph Brodsky, Hemingway, Philippe Sollers, Sarah Dunant, Ezra Pound, and possibly the best-known Venetian author of them all, Giacomo Casanova, the great seductor and the epitome of Venice's edgy blend of sensuality and morbidity. And don't get me started on all the filmmakers who've attempted to catch the true essence of Venice on celluloid, while dodging the clichés and the tourist throngs ...

Whether they have lived there at some time or not, all these authors have written about Venice and its fascinating atmosphere, its smells and colors, its people and visitors, in a myriad of different ways. So why yet another book about Venice? As Erica Jong puts it, "Was it Henry James or Mary McCarthy who said, 'There is nothing new to say about Venice'?"

Unlike any other place, the new Venice is also the old Venice, and change in this most curious of cities is something almost imperceptible and invisible to the naked eye. Walking just a few minutes away from the Rialto Bridge, for instance, and losing yourself in backstreets, where the canals and small connecting bridges leave just enough space to pass along the buildings without falling into the water, it's as if you are stepping into a past century altogether, with no indication whatsoever of modernity. You wade through a labyrinth of stone, water, and wrought-iron bridges, and after dark feel part of another world where electricity isn't yet invented, a most unsettling feeling nothing can prepare you for.

In a city overcome by tourists, that would not be able to make a living without them, the ambiguous relationship between visitors and residents becomes a source of tension and studied hesitancy. Venice today is indeed a city in decline, slowly sinking with no real plans yet settled upon to avert the inevitable further decay, where the population is shrinking year after year, its youth abandoning its shores for lack of opportunities outside of service industries or actual criminality. At its center are the architectural splendors, on its margins the industrial port and factory zones and all their attendant murkiness. A complex but perfect background for the seductions of "noir," and despite the contrast between a rich historical past and the evolving present, as was the case in the volume dedicated to Rome in this same Noir Series, which I edited with Chiara Stangalino, a fresh canvas for writers to conjugate new waltzes in darkness, balancing the old, the new, and the in-between, the undeniable beauty of the surrounding landscape and the rotten core on the inside that of course never features on all the picture postcards of Venice most of us blissfully ignore to our peril.

I've always felt that Venice belongs to the world, attracting us from all over in its spiderweb of beauty, crumbling stones, and water, so this time around I didn't just invite Italian writers to let their imaginations loose on the city, and summoned the mischievous and noir imaginations of writers hailing from the UK, the USA, Canada, France, and Australia too. The portrait they draw in Venice Noir is compelling, as hapless visitors and troubled locals wander the canals, bridges, and waters of La Serenissima, with a heartful of darkness and wonder, evoking all the secrets, sounds, sights, and smells of the city. And there's not even a gondola in every story! Which goes to show that in any noir city, you should expect the unexpected.

Maxim Jakubowski February 2012

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Venice Noir Copyright © 2012 by Akashic Books . Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books. 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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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Amongst the Venetians
 
“Cloudy Water” by Matteo Righetto (Cannaregio)

“The Comedy Is Over” by Francesco Ferracin (Calcavia)

“Commissario Clelia Vinci” by Barbara Baraldi (Mestre)

“Little Sister” by Francesca Mazzucato (Ghetto Vecchio)

Part II: Shadows of the Past

“Lido Winter” by Maxim Jakubowski (Lido)

“Pantegana” by Michelle Lovric (Santa Stefano)

“Desdemona Undicesima” by Isabella Santacroce (Piazza San Marco)

Part III: Tourists&Other Troubled Folk

“Venice Aphrodisiac” by Peter James (Canal Grande)

“Drifter” by Emily St. John Mandel (Ponte dei Sospiri)

“Rendezvous” by Tony Cartano (Calle Larga XXII Marzo)

“Signor Gauke’s Tongue” by Mike Hodges (Palazzo Ducale)

Part IV: An Imperfect Present

“Tourists for Supper” by Maria Tronca (Santa Maria Formosa)

“Laguna Blues” by Michael Gregorio (Porto Marghera)

“A Closed Book” by Mary Hoffman (Rialto Bridge)

Editorial Reviews

"Venice Noir, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, aims to shred through our preconceptions of this remarkable city. The 14 writers featured in this anthology of short stories take our travel brochure images of Venice and scatter them like confetti."

New York Journal of Books

"Editor Jakubowski does an excellent job of selecting a variety of stories that represent all strata of Venetian life, from tourists visiting for Carnevale to criminals running illegal operations in the bay . . . A must-read for lovers of Venice . . . the presence of a new and intriguing voices, many of them Italian, will pique the interest of international-mystery readers."

Booklist

Sex, food and real estate inspire 14 hot-blooded new takes on crime in the magical city of Venice. Of the three, real estate is the most divisive. Most Venetians can no longer afford to live in their own city. Like the heroine of Barbara Baraldi's "Commissario Clelia Vinci," they flock to mainland towns like Mestre, where they struggle with the mundane: How to balance work and family? How to share custody with a faithless ex? They contend with dampness and bad plumbing, like the old woman in Michelle Lovric's "Pantegana." Or they live in tiny houses near the old ghetto, filled with the odor of other people's cooking, like the heroine of Francesca Mazzucato's "Little Sister," who finds it harder and harder to leave her cramped home. It's the tourists who enjoy the beauty of the canals and the palazzos. In "Venice Aphrodisiac," Peter James shows how one illicit rendezvous can become a lifelong obsession with the city. Sexual energy spirals out of control in Isabella Santacroce's "Desdemona Undicesima." And a tourist finds Venice the endpoint of his romantic dreams in editor Jakubowski's "Lido Winter." Venetians have their own take on the visitors who flock to their city, like Signora Adele, who finds her own special solution in Maria Tronca's "Tourists for Supper." But Adele isn't the only Venetian with a hearty appetite, as a policeman learns in Michael Gregorio's "Laguna Blues." Rather than crimes of passion, this collection focuses on the passion of crime, painting its noir in robust tones rather than gritty gray.

Kirkus Reviews