Berkeley Noir

by Jim Nisbet, Jerry Thompson (Editor), Owen Hill (Editor), Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Barry Gifford

Overview

Sixteen storytellers shed light on the darkness that lurks in the California city in this fun collection of crime tales.

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.

With stories by: Barry Gifford, Jim Nisbet, Lexi Pandell, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Mara Faye Lethem, Thomas Burchfield, Shanthi Sekaran, Nick Mamatas, Kimn Neilson, Jason S. Ridler, Susan Dunlap, J.M. Curet, Summer Brenner, Michael David Lukas, Aya de León, and Owen Hill.

Praise for Berkeley Noir

“Each story evokes the dark side of a Berkeley neighborhood and pays tribute both to the city's history as a haven for outcasts and as a literary metropolis. If you race through it, consider picking up San Francisco Noir and Oakland Noir.” —Diablo Magazine, a Top Ticket choice

“In “Lucky Day,” Thomas Burchfield reveals the evil that can come when a well-meaning aide breaks his boss’s cardinal rule never to allow patrons into the library early. A worried mom from Holloway wangles her son a prized place in the Berkeley school district in Aya de León’s “Frederick Douglass Elementary.” . . . . J.M. Curet’s “Wifebeater Tank Top,” the tale with the firmest criminal pedigree, is the most violent, but its poetic language and come-from-nowhere ending make it the best.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The 16 stories set in Berkeley, Calif., in this above average Akashic noir anthology offer little actual noir but a heaping helping of crime, with almost every entry featuring at least a murder or kidnapping . . . . Readers will be glad that many of these tales are fun in a way that traditional noir isn’t.” —Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617758133
Publisher:	Akashic Books
Publication date:	05/26/2021
Series:	Akashic Noir Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	799,136
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

JERRY THOMPSON is a bookseller, poet, playwright, and musician. His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA and the James White Review. He is the coauthor of Images of America: Black Artists in Oakland. His fiction and prose have appeared in various anthologies including Voices Rising, edited by G. Winston James, and Freedom in this Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men's Writing, edited by E. Lynn Harris. He is the coeditor of Oakland Noir.

OWEN HILL is the author of two crime novels, The Chandler Apartments and The Incredible Double, and he coedited The Annotated Big Sleep with Pamela Jackson and Anthony Dean Rizzuto. Until recently he lived in the Chandler Building on the corner of Telegraph and Dwight in Berkeley.

Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is a prolific author of mystery novels. Born in the suburbs of New York, Dunlap majored in English at Bucknell College and earned a masters in teaching from the University of North Carolina. She was a social worker before an Agatha Christie novel inspired her to try her hand writing mysteries. Five attempts and five years later, she published Karma (1981), which began a ten book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.  Since then, Dunlap has published more than twenty novels and numerous short stories. Her other ongoing characters include the meter-reading detective Vejay Haskell, medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaugnessy, and Zen student turned detective Darcy Loft. In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga, worked as a paralegal, and helped found the women’s mystery organization Sisters In Crime. She lives in San Francisco.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: From the People's Republic
"Hill House" by Lexi Pandell (Berkeley Hills)
"The Tangy Brine of Dark Night" by Lucy Jane Bledsoe (Berkeley Marina)
"Twin Flames" by Mara Faye Lethem (Southside)
"'Lucky Day'" by Thomas Burchfield (Berkeley Public Library)
"Barroom Butterfly" by Barry Gifford (Central Berkeley)

Part II: Directly Across from the Golden Gate
"Eat Your Pheasant, Drink Your Wine" by Shanthi Sekaran (Kensington)
"Every Man and Every Woman Is a Star" by Nick Mamatas (Ho Chi Minh Park)
"Still Life, Reviving" by Kimn Neilson (Ocean View)
"Shallow and Deep" by Jason S. Ridler (Downtown Berkeley)
"Boy Toy" by Jim Nisbet (Yacht Harbor)

Part III: Company Town
"The Law of Local Karma" by Susan Dunlap (Gourmet Ghetto)
"Wifebeater Tank Top" by J.M. Curet (West Berkeley)
"Identity Theft" by Summer Brenner (North Berkeley)
"Dear Fellow Graduates" by Michael David Lukas (Indian Rock)
"Frederick Douglass Elementary" by Aya de León (West Berkeley Flats)
"Righteous Kill" by Owen Hill (Gilman District)

Editorial Reviews

03/02/2020

The 16 stories set in Berkeley, Calif., in this above average Akashic noir anthology offer little actual noir but a heaping helping of crime, with almost every entry featuring at least a murder or kidnapping. Highlights include Barry Gifford’s brief but effective “Barroom Butterfly,” a riff on true crime magazines, and Lexi Pandell’s unsettling “Hill House,” in which a journalism grad student house-sits for a famous UC Berkeley professor. In Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s tense “The Tangy Brine of the Dark Night,” a young woman paddles a kayak onto San Francisco Bay to give her dead grandmother a furtive watery burial. Jim Nisbet in “Boy Toy” takes to the bay in a sailboat, but drowns his narrative in more nautical jargon than Moby-Dick. One of the most entertaining selections, Michael David Lukas’s “Dear Fellow Graduates,” takes the form of a high school student’s graduation address that focuses on a teacher’s kidnapping. Readers will be glad that many of these tales are fun in a way that traditional noir isn’t. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"A fun and fully immersive read from cover to cover, Berkeley Noir is a mystery lover’s delight."

Midwest Book Review

"At first consideration one might wonder if Berkeley has enough of a seedy underbelly to produce credible settings and stories for such an anthology? The writing proves it does."

The Berkeley Daily Planet

"This volume proves yet again that noir is discoverable anywhere there are human beings—in this case, a quirky university town on the east side of San Francisco Bay . . . Another fine entry in a series for the ages."

New York Journal of Books

"A fun and fully immersive read from cover to cover, Berkeley Noir is a mystery lover's delight."
—Midwest Book Review

"A fine work from a talented pool of writers."
—San Francisco Book Review

"Berkeley, California: home of a world-class university with a parking lot for Nobel laureates, politically active and correct, volatile, and, yes, a bit seedy, too, if you know where to look. The stories in Akashic's latest noir anthology expose the underbelly of this lovely city...All get their just rewards eventually, and readers will be entertained as they find out how it happens."
—Booklist

"Readers will be glad that many of these tales are fun in a way that traditional noir isn't."
—Publishers Weekly

"Sixteen new stories reveal the darker side of friendly, funky Berkeley."
—Kirkus Reviews

"[A] quietly compelling short story collection."
—Exclusive Magazine

From the Publisher

2020-02-09
Sixteen new stories reveal the darker side of friendly, funky Berkeley.

What kind of crime could possibly fester in a town named for an 18th-century British philosopher? Well, there’s academic crime. A prep school tutor helps produce photo-edited porn in Jason S. Ridler’s “Shallow and Deep.” A professor buys a child bride in Summer Brenner’s “Identity Theft.” A high school senior witnesses the abduction of his AP British Literature teacher in Michael David Lukas’ “Dear Fellow Graduates.” Slightly darker is the counterculture crime: Editor Hill in “Righteous Kill” and Shanthi Sekaran in “Eat Your Pheasant, Drink Your Wine” both show what happens when the economically oppressed rise up against their oppressors. In “Lucky Day,” Thomas Burchfield reveals the evil that can come when a well-meaning aide breaks his boss’s cardinal rule never to allow patrons into the library early. A worried mom from Holloway wangles her son a prized place in the Berkeley school district in Aya de León’s “Frederick Douglass Elementary.” And in Nick Mamatas’ “Every Man and Woman Is a Star,” a yoga instructor plays cat and mouse with a deadly adversary. Lucy Jane Bledsoe offers a trip out onto the bay that smacks of desperation in “The Tangy Brine of Dark Night,” but Jim Nisbet’s voyage in “Boy Toy,” although turbulent, is ultimately just a pleasure jaunt. J.M. Curet’s “Wifebeater Tank Top,” the tale with the firmest criminal pedigree, is the most violent, but its poetic language and come-from-nowhere ending make it the best.

The crime without the grime.

Kirkus Reviews