San Francisco Noir

This anthology of “genuinely haunting noir fiction” set in the Golden City features new stories by Jim Nisbet, Alejandro Murguía, Michelle Tea and others (Publishers Weekly).
 
Oscar Wilde once quipped that anyone who disappears is said to be seen in in San Francisco. With its famous fog, winding streets, and hazardously steep hills, it is certainly an ideal place for getting lost. It’s also an ideal setting for noir fiction. From Fisherman’s Warf and The Golden Gate Bridge to The Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown, and Russian Hill, fifteen authors explore the sordid side of the City by the Bay in this sterling collection.
 
San Francisco Noir features brand-new stories by Barry Gifford, Robert Mailer Anderson, Michelle Tea, Peter Plate, Kate Braverman, Domenic Stansberry, David Corbett, Eddie Muller, Alejandro Murguía, Sin Soracco, Alvin Lu, John Longhi, Will Christopher Baer, Jim Nisbet, and David Henry Sterry.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The protagonists of noir fiction have their own agendas, but for readers much of the pleasure is unraveling the mystery and deciphering the clues that constitute a city, and if there is a love story in noir writing it’s the passion of writers, readers, and protagonists for the gritty geographical details. As the bodies drop in the strong stories here, steep, fog-wrapped, fratricidal San Francisco comes alive: here are old neighborhoods, bars, bookstores, the famous and then forgotten landlord arson at 16th and Valencia, buried streams, streetcars, parks, a lost city and the new city haunting almost every page of this gorgeous anthology of San Francisco noir.”
― Rebecca Solnit

“San Francisco has long been a city of back alleys and black figures; this is its romantic map.”
― Michael Ray, Editor, Zoetrope All-Story

“I was wondering about the city’s shadowside that the guides didn’t show. These top writers are of the ‘As bad as it gets’ brand, and then worse. If you like puke, fear & loathing caused by stray bullets, happenstance getting the hero who is an anti-hero really, a male corpse rotting in the bathtub while the woman poops in the garden, the Reverend Christmas shot in the ear by the PO-lice, then this is your good read for a murky, maybe even gritty, weekend.”
― Janwillem van de Wetering

“It’s San Francisco-centric in this atmospheric collection of noir; hard-boiled and twisted. Dark, smooth fiction digging deep into different neighborhoods and ethnicities. The sound is pitch-perfect, too, from the understated staccato of old lost souls to the jiving rap of younger ones.”
― Cara Black

“Take an intermission from your Hitchcock marathon, and turn instead to the 15 stories between the covers of San Francisco Noir for the SF-based suspense you crave. Luring you deep into the criminal heritage of your own backyard, each piece of the collection transcends the traditional elements of noir and helps redefine the moody genre.”
― 7×7 Magazine

From the Publisher

San Francisco Chronicle, Sun., Oct. 2, 2005 “This is one book that should come with a scrip for Valium. If you do not feel jumpy or paranoid after reading San Francisco Noir, an entertaining anthology of overheated short stories by local writers — you did not read it. As Peter Maravelis, the editor, observes in his introduction, ‘These hard-biting stories explore San Francisco’s shadowy nether regions in their sinister splendor,’ although ‘splendor’ might not be the first word that will occur to you for these 15 new tales set in 15 parts of town. ‘Beauty and treachery walk hand in hand. Welcome to a peninsula of broken dreams, shattered lives, and deadly liaisons.’ Here the city becomes the central character, the strongest on the page. Mark Twain has his Hannibal, James Joyce his Dublin, Elmore Leonard his Detroit. But so far nobody seems to have possessed and imaginatively processed in quite the same way this mythic dislocation that is a tiny geological shift away from catastrophe. Maravelis, perhaps fittingly, then, does not represent the city so much as present it in its absolute bleakness, from the Tenderloin to Pacific Heights, Polk Gulch to Fisherman’s Wharf, the Castro to Chinatown . . . Kate Braverman’s ‘The Neutral Zone,’ about the electric connection between two bipolar kindred souls adrift in an over-amped landscape, is frenetically powerful. ‘Larry’s Place,’ by Michelle Tea, is a spooky tour de force. ‘Deception of the Thrush,’ by Will Christopher Baer, is a sick, sexy story about a Catholic high school girl named Jude who knowingly seduces the precisely wrong man — or perhaps that is, in her twisted universe, the precisely right man. The strongest of the lot could be the closing story, David Henry Sterry’s ‘Confessions of a Sex Maniac,’ the title of which does not really tell it all . . . In this San Francisco, there is Felipe’s Massage Parlor: ‘There was no Felipe. No one was there for a massage.’ Chinese Willy is Mexican. There are semi-virtuous losers but mostly just loser losers. The thugs are ‘muscle-heads.’ The addicts are addicted to everything, from heroin to AA meetings to shoplifting. When somebody falls in love, or whatever, usually more suddenly than a heart attack and without plausibility, hello, crime scene. But we should have expected that. Nobody has a right to complain that none of the characters is sympathetic, that none of the narrators ultimately surprises us with a hint of redemption. The surprise would be that, in this sort of city, anything remotely resembling redemption would be conceivable in any of our neighborhoods . . . [T]he book is a kick. To the head or to the groin. Readers of noir fiction would not want it any other way.”

Library Journal, Sept. 15, 2005 “Dust off those black-and-white TVs. The success of Akashic Books’ Brooklyn Noir anthology has spawned a series of successors . . . [All are] geographically focused and contain original stories by emerging writers . . . David Corbett’s ‘It Can Happen’ delivers a tightly plotted story of family inheritance that would fit neatly into the pages of Black Mask. Reflecting changing conditions, multicultural authors are well represented here, and female writers leave their mark. Kate Braverman’s wittily observed tale of the love/hate relationship between two Sex and the City types is topped only by Michelle Tea’s story of a prostitute who just can’t say enough about her Bernal Heights hideaway. Eddie Muller shows off his noir bona fides in a pitch-perfect story of a long day that ends on a lucky note.”

7×7 Magazine, September 2005 “Take an intermission from your Hitchcock marathon, and turn instead to the 15 stories between the covers of San Francisco Noir for the SF-based suspense you crave. Luring you deep into the criminal heritage of your own backyard, each piece in the collection transcends the traditional elements of noir and helps redefine the moody genre. Set in shadowy locations throughout the city, the inclusions range from Michelle Tea’s Bernal Heights spine-tingler, ‘Larry’s Place,’ to Barry Gifford’s Bayview tale, ‘After Hours at La Chinita,’ to Robert Mailer Anderson’s Richmond District thriller, ‘Briley Boy’ . . . Haunting and often surprisingly poignant, these accounts of death, love and all things pulp fiction will lead you into unexpected corners of a city known to steal people’s hearts — as well as into the unexplored realms of the human condition.”