Moscow Noir

Starred review from April 5, 2010
As literary agents Smirnova and Goumen note in their introduction to this excellent entry in Akashic's noir series, “A noir tradition does not yet really exist in Russia.” Still, they have managed to find 14 authors whose dark take on humanity would be familiar to the likes of Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson. Story after story offers haunting images: a husband interrupts his bludgeoning murder of his wife to sing their daughter back to sleep (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's “In the New Development”); a cop eats an apple that fell from the shaven head of a drunken deputy chief detective just shot to death, who'd been playing William Tell (Alexander Anuchkin's “Field of a Thousand Corpses”). In Anna Starobinets's “The Mercy Bus,” a taut tale with a wicked bite, a con man poses as one of Moscow's walking wounded to make his getaway from a charity ball he engineered in order to rip off its patrons. This volume's strength bodes well for a second anthology from these able editors showcasing Russian talents.

June 15, 2010

The "Noir" series now covers 32 world cities, and the Moscow anthology is sure to raise the body count to extreme heights as sex, crime, and gore afflict all the usual suspects. For this newest anthology, the editors, who share top billing at their own literary agency, have signed 14 well-published Russian authors, including headliner Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales). Each story, translated into the colloquial argot of the genre by accomplished wordmeisters, packs a wallop of the blackest noir, sometimes with an unexpectedly cheerful ending--a victim finds her tormentor splayed on the ground below her highrise balcony while his briefcase is safely inside her apartment and full of cash. Moscow's grim metro stations and train depots provide suitable concrete backdrops, though the city's 850-year-old history provides plenty of nooks with more interesting ambience as well.

Verdict While not at all in the traditional mode of whodunit, these stories resonate like true crime accounts from the point of view of the perps and those who prey on them. The anthology will find its horrified readers in most large public libraries.--Barbara Conaty, Falls Church VA

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.