Seattle Noir (Akashic Noir)

“Featuring short, edgy fiction on the Emerald City’s seamy underbelly . . . seedy characters, private detectives and the like from all over urban Seattle.” —Kitsap Daily News

Early Seattle was a hardscrabble seaport filled with merchant sailors, longshoremen, lumberjacks, rowdy saloons, and a rough-and-tumble police force not immune to corruption and graft. Now it’s home to big businesses and a flourishing art, theatre, and club scene. Seattle’s evolution to high-finance and high-tech has simply provided even greater opportunity and reward to those who might be ethically, morally, or economically challenged (crooks, in other words).

Seattle Noir features stories by G.M. Ford, Skye Moody, R. Barri Flowers, Thomas P. Hopp, Patricia Harrington, Bharti Kirchner, Kathleen Alcalá, Simon Wood, Brian Thornton, Lou Kemp, Curt Colbert, Robert Lopresti, Paul S. Piper, and Stephan Magcosta. You’ll find tales of a wealthy couple whose marriage is filled with not-so-quiet desperation; a credit card scam that goes over-limit; femmes fatales and hommes fatales; a group of mystery writers whose fiction causes friction; a Native American shaman caught in a web of secrets and tribal allegiances; sex, lies, and slippery slopes . . .

“Stories that reflect Seattle’s ethnic diversity as well as tales from its rough past to its glory days of Boeing, Starbucks and Microsoft.” —Publishers Weekly

“A new collection of stories all set in Seattle, with characters that break the mold. In many of the Seattle Noir stories, it’s the heroes, not the subsidiary characters, that are African-American, Native-American, Hispanic-American.” —The Seattle Times

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Is Seattle too “nice” for noir? It is home to the original Skid Road, the Green River Killer, and the second most popular suicide bridge in the nation and yet perhaps too laid-back and politically correct to embrace the genre’s viciousness and depravity. Of the many varied shades of local color on display in this mixed but worthwhile collection, only a few have the inky chiaroscuro found in Akashic noir entries from Brooklyn or Detroit, among them Stephan Magcosta’s nightmarish tale of a bad encounter between an Iraqi war widow and a cabdriver and Lou Kemp’s twisted, gothic Sherlockian pastiche. Other standouts include Simon Wood’s taut tale of a bar brawler recruited into a life-changing club, Robert Lopresti’s demented dialogue between homeless murder witnesses, Curt Colbert’s clipped Jake Rossiter detective yarn (crossing O. Henry with Hammett), and Skye Moody’s memorable funhouse tale of embittered showbiz dwarfs and hothouse flowers that could be Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust as told by Tom Robbins. Fourteen original stories that may well be of interest beyond the Northwest. –David Wright

About the Author

Curt Colbert is the author of the Jake Rossiter & Miss Jenkins mysteries, a series of hardboiled, private detective novels set in 1940s Seattle. The first book, Rat City, was nominated for a Shamus Award in 2001. A Seattle native, Colbert is currently finishing the fourth book in the series, Nowhere Town, as well as working on a present-day novel.