St. Petersburg Noir

Starred review from July 30, 2012
Literary agents Goumen and Smirnova, the co-editors of 2010’s Moscow Noir, offer 14 uniformly strong stories in their outstanding noir anthology devoted to Russia’s second city, St. Petersburg. With its rich if often tragic history, deep literary traditions, inspiring landscape, famous architecture, and an aging population stuffed into overcrowded “kommunalkas” (communal apartments) amid a post-Soviet decline and soaring crime rate, the city provides an ideal backdrop for crime fiction. Selections range from the gallows humor of Andre Kivinov’s “Training Day” to the gloomy realism of Lena Eltang’s “Drunk Harbor,” from the glum nihilism of Anna Solovey’s “Swift Current” to the determined heroism of Anton Chizh’s “The Nutcracker.” While few if any of the contributors will be familiar to American readers, the diversity of these skillfully crafted tales testifies to the vigor of contemporary Russian writing.

August 1, 2012

Begun in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir, Akashic's "Noir" series now ranges worldwide--all the way to St. Petersburg, Russia. As the editors' Moscow Noir revealed, the Russian soul is well suited to a style defined by dark, hard-edged moodiness in underground settings. With St. Petersburg, the tsar's "Window on Europe," we get European-style existential angst as well--not to mention the scary sociopolitical realities of the new Russia. Divded into three sections--"Gangsters, Soldiers, & Patriots," "A Watery Grave," and "Chasing Ghosts"--the 14 pieces here are mostly not traditional whodunits but chill-inducing slices of life, some blackly funny and some just black. In Andrei Kivinov's "Training Day," for instance, two morgue attendants go their slightly drunken Keystone Cops way, picking up dead bodies throughout the city until a recently delivered stiff suddenly sits up. Vadim Levental's mysterious "Wake Up, You're a Dead Man Now" positively breathes conspiracy, Natalia Kurchatova and Ksenia Venglinskaya's "Peau de Chagrin" shows the city's real underbelly as a lowlife reconnects with a lost daughter, and, in Alexander Kudriavtsev's "The Witching Hour," a sleazy go-getter gets one hell of a comeuppance when he picks up woman at a club. VERDICT For all sophisticated crime fiction readers.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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