Miami Noir

September 25, 2006
Sixteen new, diverse and highly entertaining mystery stories pack Akashic's latest city-by-city tour of modern noir, spotlighting the "Miami School," which has sprung to dynamic life in the wake of the legendary Charles Willeford and his signature novel Miami Blues
. This anthology prowls through South Beach and across Alligator Alley, hitting every demographic, from long-term Cuban émigrés to Haitian boat people and the garden variety psychopathic redneck. In James W. Hall's "Ride Along," a college professor with an interest in crime writing goes slumming with a thug called Jumpy—"6'4", skinny as a greyhound, pasty-skinned, all knuckles and Adam's apple"—with unexpected results. Vicki Hendricks does a neat deconstruction of classic noir with "Boozanne, Lemme Be," wherein the 4'10" protagonist—"too short for normal chicks, too tall for a dwarf"—lives undetected under a house until he connects with the titular Boozanne and dives still further into ruin. This volume is as solid as the coral rock lying beneath the Miami streets.