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Overview
Named a Favorite Book of 2015 by Scott MacKay at Rhode Island Public Radio
"Even Providence's signature public art has a dark side in Providence Noir (Akashic), which includes a story called 'WaterFire's Smell Tonight' by Pablo Rodriguez. Each tale in this anthology edited by Ann Hood is set in a different part of the city. Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout's story takes place at Trinity Repertory Company. Thomas Cobb, whose novel Crazy Heart was made into a movie with Jeff Bridges, tees up at Triggs Memorial Golf Course, and Dumb and Dumber co-writer and co-director Peter Farrelly, a graduate of Providence College, sets his story in the Elmhurst neighborhood, near his old college stomping grounds."
—Boston Globe
"Providence, of course, has a history of crime, the mob, corruption and other goodies. In this collection of 15 stories...we are given a darkly hued tour of the city in all its nooks and crannies by such excellent writers as Hood herself, John Searles, Bruce DeSilva, Peter Farrelly, Elizabeth Strout, Hester Kaplan and others, each with their own style, tone and sly approach that will keep you reading, waiting for the sudden murder, the end of troubled relationships, the discovery of bones....[A] wonderful collection."
—Providence Journal
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Featuring brand-new stories by: John Searles, Elizabeth Strout, Taylor M. Polites, Hester Kaplan, Robert Leuci, Amity Gaige, Peter Farrelly, Pablo Rodriguez, Bruce DeSilva, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Luanne Rice, Dawn Raffel, Thomas Cobb, LaShonda Katrice Barnett, and Ann Hood.
Anyone who has spent time in Providence, Rhode Island, knows that lurking in the shadows are many sinister noir elements and characters. The city is ripe for this volume, and Akashic is proud to have recruited the amazing Ann Hood as editor. The impressive contributor list conveys the caliber of Providence Noir, which joins Cape Cod Noir, Boston Noir, and Boston Noir 2: The Classics in sketching a dark and alternative portrait of these New England locales.
From the introduction by Ann Hood:
"Providence was founded in 1636 by a rogue named Roger Williams. Williams escaped here when Massachusetts was ready to deport him back to England. In the almost four hundred years since, we've become infamous for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors, including serving as home base for the Patriarca crime family for decades. My very own Uncle Eddie—I can hear Mama Rose screaming at me: 'He wasn't a blood relative! He was related through marriage!'—was gunned down in the Silver Lake section of town in 1964, just a year after he drove me in his white Cadillac convertible in a parade as the newly crowned Little Miss Natick. The writer Geoffrey Wolff told me that once he went to a barber in Princeton, New Jersey and the barber asked him where he was from. 'Providence,' Wolff told him. The barber put down his scissors, raised his hands in the air, and said, 'Providence? Don't shoot!'
"I've asked fourteen of my favorite writers to contribute short stories to Providence Noir. We have stories to make you shiver, stories to make you think, stories that will show you my beautiful, noirish city in a way it’s never been highlighted before."
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617753527 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Akashic Books |
| Publication date: | 06/02/2015 |
| Series: | Akashic Noir Series |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Providence Noir
By Ann Hood
Akashic Books
Copyright © 2015 Akashic BooksAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61775-352-7
INTRODUCTION
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Like so many things, it started with Sunday Afternoon at the Movies. It started with Barbara Stanwyck appearing at the top of a staircase wrapped in a towel and Fred MacMurray (Steve Douglas of My Three Sons!) making wisecracks and double entendres. It started with Double Indemnity. My grandmother Mama Rose in her faded pink chair, muttering in broken English. Me on the floor in front of the Zenith, munching scorched Jiffy Pop, transfixed.
"How could I know," MacMurray as Walter Neff asks, "that murder sometimes smells like honeysuckle?" This is poetry, I thought. This is sex and mystery and murder. This, I later learned, is noir.
I was a kid who saved her allowance to buy Nancy Drew books, one a week. I read them in order, from The Secret of the Old Clock to The Mystery of the 99 Steps, lining them up on a shelf in my room. Their bright yellow bindings perfectly matched the yellow and white gingham bedspread and curtains. Everything about Nancy, Bess, and George was bright: their smiles, Nancy's blue Roadster and her boyfriend Ned Nickerson. Even though the covers were meant to look spooky, Nancy always appeared with cherry-red lips and a blond flip hairdo, cast in a beam of light.
Noir was everything Nancy Drew wasn't. From the moment Walter Neff arrived sweaty and wounded at his insurance office, I knew I had stepped into someplace new, someplace dark. I didn't know then that Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, and all the other movies I watched on those long-ago Sunday afternoons with Mama Rose, had sprung from books. That, I learned later. And once I did, I devoured them. As an international flight attendant for TWA, I stuffed James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler paperbacks into my fat crew bag, reading them on the jump seat at thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic as the passengers slept. This was the world of dames and hard-boiled men, of shadowy cities, of booze and cigarettes.
"Noir is about sex and money and sometimes about revenge," Otto Penzler, the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, told the New Yorker in 2010. In noir, he said, there are no heroes and no happy endings.
As often happens with literature, it finds you when you need it most. Those Sunday-afternoon movies helped move me from childhood to adolescence, away from Nancy Drew's sunny life; they offered a glimpse of what was out there in the big world beyond my little town of West Warwick in the littlest state. The novels landed in my uniformed lap as my world began to unravel.
My brother Skip, my only sibling, died suddenly in 1982. His body was found facedown in a few inches of water in his bathtub in Pittsburgh. The screen in the window had a bullet hole in it. Safe deposit box keys were missing. There were drugs and footprints, a scorned fiancée, and an ex-wife. There had been arguments with both of them, and threats made. There was one witness: Skip's Irish setter, Rogan. After a six-month investigation, the police determined his death was accidental, even though they could never connect the dots of the bullet hole or the missing keys or any of the other suspicious events and characters.
Refusing to accept the police report's findings, my mother began going to psychics to solve the crime. Each one told her the same thing: he had been murdered by a dark-haired man in an army-green T-shirt. But who was this mysterious man? She stayed up nights trying to figure it out, to make sense of a thing that was senseless.
Me? I read noir fiction, fiction full of villains, not heroes. Fatalistic and desperate, the characters appealed to me and my broken, confused heart. Months passed, 1982 became 1983, and then one day I looked up and it was the twenty-first century. Whatever happened the night my brother died remains a mystery. But my love of noir continued to grow as I discovered Patricia Highsmith and new noir writers like Dennis Lehane.
So when Johnny Temple, Akashic Books' publisher, invited me to edit an anthology of original short stories called Providence Noir as part of the Akashic Noir Series, I couldn't say yes fast enough. Not only did my love and admiration of noir fiction make his invitation so appealing, but the opportunity to highlight my hometown of Providence, Rhode Island—a noir setting if ever there was one—added to my delight and eagerness.
Providence was founded in 1636 by a rogue named Roger Williams. He escaped here when Massachusetts was ready to deport him back to England. In the almost four hundred years since, we've become infamous for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors, including serving as home base for the Patriarca crime family for decades. My very own Uncle Eddie—I can hear Mama Rose screaming at me: "He wasn't a blood relative, he was related through marriage!"—was gunned down in the Silver Lake section of town in 1964, just a year after he drove me in his white Cadillac convertible in a parade as the newly crowned Little Miss Natick. The writer Geoffrey Wolff told me that once he went to a barber in Princeton, New Jersey, and the barber asked him where he was from. "Providence," Wolff told him. The barber put down his scissors, raised his hands in the air, and said, "Providence? Don't shoot!"
I've asked fourteen of my favorite writers to contribute short stories to Providence Noir. We have stories to make you shiver, stories to make you think, stories that will show you my beautiful, noirish city in a way it's never been highlighted before.
Elizabeth Strout, whose book Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009, takes us to Providence's esteemed theater company, Trinity Rep. Providence native, novelist, and short story writer Hester Kaplan, winner of the 1999 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, sets her story at our local mental hospital, Butler. Alabama native Taylor Polites writes about his own neighborhood, the Armory District, so named for the hulking 1903 armory that makes up one of its borders. Novelist Amity Gaige graduated from Brown University and returns to College Hill for her story. John Searles, who is not only a best-selling novelist but also the book critic for NBC's Today show, drops his story on Arnold Street. LaShonda Barnett sets "Waltz Me Once Again" in the Mount Hope section and features Providence's vibrant Cape Verdean population.
Olneyville is the setting for Robert Leuci's eponymous story. Leuci is a former New York City police detective known for exposing corruption in the department; the book and movie Prince of the City are partially based on his career. Former Providence resident, essayist, and author Marie Myung-Ok Lee places her story in and around Brown University where she used to teach. I go back in time, to the downtown Providence I knew when I was a kid and people arranged to meet under the Shepard clock. Since 1994, sculptor Barnaby Evans has been igniting Providence's rivers with one hundred bonfires. That's where Pablo Rodriguez, a popular radio host on Latin Public Radio and an OB-GYN, tells his murderous tale.
New York Times best-selling novelist Luanne Rice has previously used Newport, Rhode Island as a setting. But here she writes about Fox Point and its Portuguese heritage. Edgar Award–winning crime novelist Bruce DeSilva has set three novels in Providence, and his short story takes place in the Federal Hill area. Dawn Raffel is a novelist, memoirist, and short story writer, as well as a graduate of Brown University. Her story takes place in the city's train station. Thomas Cobb's 1987 novel Crazy Heart was adapted into the Oscar Award–winning film of the same name. His story is set on the Triggs Memorial Golf Course. And the anthology closes with a story set in the Elmhurst section, written by director, screenwriter, producer, and novelist Peter Farrelly.
What a lineup of writers to illuminate Providence's noir side! The city's landmarks, streets, parks, and neighborhoods come alive in their storytelling.
Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote one of my favorite noir short stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart," lived here ever so briefly. Back in 1848, he became enamored with a Providence woman, poet Sarah Helen Whitman. Poe said that he fell in love with her at first sight when they met in her rose garden behind her house on Benefit Street. A condition of their courtship was that Poe stop drinking. When someone handed Whitman a note telling her that Poe had broken that promise, she immediately ended the romance. Poe left Providence, and died a year later. He had written "The Tell-Tale Heart" five years earlier, but its opening lines seem appropriate for introducing the stories I've gathered for Providence Noir: "Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story."
Hearken, indeed.
Ann Hood
Providence, RI
February 2015
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Providence Noir by Ann Hood. Copyright © 2015 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.
Table of Contents
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part I: Down City
“Gold Leaf” by Luanne Rice (Fox Point)
“The Pig” by John Searles (Arnold Street)
“Under the Shepard Clock” by Ann Hood (Downtown)
“The Vengeance Taker” by Robert Leuci (Olneyville)
“Waltz Me Once Again” by LaShonda Katrice Barnett (Mount Hope)
Part II: What Cheer
“Once, at Trinity Rep” by Elizabeth Strout (Trinity Repertory Company)
“The Autobiographical House” by Amity Gaige (College Hill)
“Femur” by Hester Kaplan (Butler Hospital)
“Missing Sri” by Marie Myung-Ok Lee (Brown University)
“$1,000 Nassau” by Thomas Cobb (Triggs Memorial Golf Course)
Part III: God’s Merciful Providence
“All in the Family” by Bruce DeSilva (Federal Hill)
“Armory Park” by Taylor M. Polites (Armory District)
“Training” by Dawn Raffel (Providence Station)
“WaterFire’s Smell Tonight” by Pablo Rodriguez (WaterFire)
“The Saturday Night Before Easter Sunday” by Peter Farrelly (Elmhurst)