Palm Springs Noir (Akashic Noir)

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By Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Publisher Description

Palm Springs now joins Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley in California’s Noir Series arena.

“Contrary to popular belief, noir doesn’t require a bleak city street for its setting. Nor water, for that matter. Noir thrives on secrets, lies and lust, all flowing plentifully through the jewel in the Coachella Valley’s fragile crown . . . For all the playfulness of the genre and the location, the wisecracks and the kidney-shaped pools, there is an unmanageable darkness waiting to seep in, like so much blood in the pool water.” —Los Angeles Times

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.

Brand-new stories by: T. Jefferson Parker, Janet Fitch, Eric Beetner, Kelly Shire, Tod Goldberg, Michael Craft, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Rob Roberge, J.D. Horn, Eduardo Santiago, Rob Bowman, Chris J. Bahnsen, Ken Layne, and Alex Espinoza.

From the introduction by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett:

"The best noir writers make us feel the heat of the sun, the touch of a lover. Setting can be gritty but can also be sublime, no longer relegated to urban locales and seedy hotel rooms but also mansions and swimming pools. Hence, Palm Springs, which may seem like an odd setting for a collection of dark short stories—it’s so sunny and bright here. The quality of light is unlike anywhere else, and with an average of three hundred sunny days a year, what could go wrong? . . .

The stories in this collection come on like the wicked dust storms common to the area. More than half are by writers who live here full-time; all have homes in Southern California. They know this place in ways visitors and outsiders never will. These are not stories you’ll read in the glossy coffee-table books that feature Palm Springs’s good life. There is indeed a lush life to be found here, but for the characters in these stories, it’s often just out of reach."

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5 Reviews

3.5

Elle Esse

Created over 1 year ago

ElleEsse

Created over 1 year ago

hafogelberg

Created almost 3 years ago

2treads

Created over 3 years ago

“– Love is love. Friction is friction. – Shane This collection sticks to what Noir is expected to be and has been, and while that can take away the more exploratory materials that challenge Noir, these stories are good. They focus on the characters and their circumstances, their need to satisfy themselves at any cost, and the desperate acts of revenge, personal scams, and double crosses. The characters and their actions are one with the arid landscape in which they exist on the edge of prosperity and fame, and the authors deftly use this setting to frame their stories of greed, love, and betrayal.”

Sam Sattler

Created over 3 years ago

“Palm Springs Noir is one of the latest crime fiction collections in the Akashic Books series that now numbers close to 120 such books. The stories, with a couple of exceptions, in each book are all set in one city or region of the world, and this time around all the action takes place in Palm Springs itself or in places like Joshua Tree National Park, the Coachella Valley Preserve, or Desert Hot Springs which are all nearby. And, as usual, the stories will not disappoint fans of the genre. The term “noir” can sometimes be difficult to explain to readers who are unfamiliar with the genre, but editor Barbara DeMarco-Barrett offers one of the better definitions of noir in her introduction to the collection that I’ve seen - and she does it in layman’s terms. According to DeMarco-Barrett, “In noir, the main characters might want their lives to improve and may have high aspirations and goals, but they keep making bad choices, and things go from bad to worse…characters follow the highway to doom and destruction. They are haunted by the past, and the line between black and white, right and wrong, dissolves like sugar in water. The hero rationalizes why it’s okay to do whatever dark thing they are about to do.” The genre was particularly prominent in the books and movies of the 1940s and 1950s, but it survived its lean years of popularity and seems to have made a nice comeback in recent years. Palm Springs, in its heyday, was the favorite hangout of movie stars and celebrities, especially of Frank Sinatra and his “rat pack” friends. That’s why, as I was beginning the stories in the book’s third section, I had to smile a little when it finally hit me that the titles of the four parts all sounded familiar for a good reason: they are all also titles of songs recorded by Sinatra. The section titles always foretell or hint at the contents of the stories in the section, and these clever song title choices work particularly well. Beginning with the first section, they are “Strangers in the Night,” “Little White Lies,” “Everything Happens to Me,” and “Ill Wind.” For me, three of the book’s fourteen stories especially stand-out, but with the exception of perhaps two others, they are all fun to read. One of my favorites is Barbara Fitch’s “Sunrise,” a revenge-story that doesn’t work out quite as one woman hoped it would despite her determination to rid the world of the evil man who ruined her life years earlier. A similar story, and another favorite, is editor DeMarco-Barrett’s “The Water Holds You Still” in which a woman learns that her brother has been looting the home and bank accounts of their mother who suffers from dementia in order to pay for all the drugs and booze he consumes. As in “Sunrise,” she ends up enlisting a less-than-reliable partner to help her solve the problem. And then, there’s “Octagon Girl” by Chris J. Bahnsen. It is no accident that this is one of the most disturbing stories in the collection because it deals so frankly with the domestic abuse of a woman and her eleven-year-old son by the woman’s latest boyfriend - a man who has probably never in his life seen a steroid he didn’t like. I realize this will be a difficult read for some, but it does turn out to be one of the most satisfying stories in Palm Springs Noir for good reason. Bottom Line: Palm Springs Noir is, I’m pretty sure, the sixteenth Akashic Books noir series collection that I’ve read, and I swear they just keep getting better and better. I hope this series goes on forever.”

About Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

BARBARA DeMARCO-BARRETT spends time in the desert whenever she can. She hosts Writers on Writing on KUCI-FM, and her book Pen on Fire was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Her short story “Crazy for You” was published in USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series. She has also published in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Inlandia, Shotgun Honey, Crossing Borders, and The Literary Hatchet. She is the editor of Palm Springs Noir.